Voters signal a loss of patience with president's war plan

WASHINGTON -- The Democratic victory last night did not mark the end of the war in Iraq, but it seemed to mark the end of America's patience with the war.

President Bush, whose "stay the course" mantra became a rallying cry for Democratic challengers, now will come under intense pressure to choose a new course.

He will have to contend with more than just the demands of a Democratic-led House. Congressional Republicans, who once marched in lock step with their commander in chief, are also likely to break with the White House, having now tasted electoral defeat.

"The Iraq war has opened up some big divisions in the Republican Party and that's the next thing to play out," said Boston University political scientist Julian Zelizer , author of a book on congressional politics. "There'll be a lot of Republicans looking toward 2008."

Michael Gerson , the former White House aide who wrote some of Bush's most memorable speeches defining the war on terror, predicted that Bush will not abandon the war in Iraq but must redefine it in a way that satisfies a public desire for change.

"I think that there's going to have to be a significant relaunch of the Iraq effort to win public support for the last two years of the presidency, to pursue the strategies that the president feels are necessary to pursue," Gerson said during a meeting on Monday with a small group of journalists.

The first opportunity to review Iraq policy will come with the recommendations later this year by the Iraq study group led by former secretary of state James Baker, which has been exploring ways to redeploy troops and shorten the war.

The panel has reportedly been concentrating on ways to achieve enough stability in Iraq to begin bringing troops home.

"I do think the administration is genuinely open to the Baker commission," said Gerson. "I think they're looking to that as a way to not fundamentally change, but to redefine their approach in a way that will build bipartisan support."

Ironically, Bush himself is largely responsible for making the midterm elections a referendum on his policies.

Dissatisfaction with the war was already on the minds of many voters, and from the start of the 2006 election cycle, there were clear indications that people were losing confidence in Bush's leadership.

Many Republican strategists sought to focus the election instead on local concerns, asking voters to back their familiar and often respected senators and congressmen, while raising doubts about unknown Democratic challengers.

In September, as the fifth anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks approached, the White House made the decision to put the president at the forefront of the campaign. Bush and his chief political adviser Karl Rove apparently believed the president could convince Americans that Iraq was now the central front in the war on terrorism.

"The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq, so America will not leave until victory is achieved," Bush declared on Sept. 2, in an unusually forceful radio address.

The address set the tone for the Republican campaign to come, but it also made some assertions that came back to haunt the GOP.

Bush trumpeted a new initiative to secure Baghdad, stating that "the initial results are encouraging." But the initiative ultimately failed to take hold.

Bush also declared that "only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence." And yet, in the weeks that followed, numerous observers described a country close to civil war.

Now the voters have given Bush their verdict -- and it's not what he wanted.

"The war was always the elephant in the room," said Zelizer. "But the president exacerbated it with his strident 'stay the course' message."