GOP Saves Bush...Again

John Podhoretz writes today about the president's political miscalculations, and how the GOP has saved him once again:

DUBYA'S LUCKY LOSS ON PORTS
GEORGE Bush's enemies are excited. The Dubai ports deal is dead. The president had said he would veto any attempt by Congress to block it - but a House committee vote Wednesday with the insanely lopsided margin of 62-2 hollowed out his threat and left its husk to rot.

(The Dubai company sure doesn't see much hope: It announced yesterday that it will sell off its U.S. port work.)

Surely, his enemies say, this is curtains for Bush. Republicans are fleeing from him, he can't keep his troops in line - and he can't work his will. He's become a lame duck, they say.

Wrong. Just as with his last serious political miscalculation, Bush has actually been saved by the very forces in his own governing coalition that are opposing him.

When the president foolishly nominated the clearly unqualified Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, conservative intellectuals and pundits were so relentlessly negative that they forced him to withdraw Miers' name and appoint Samuel Alito in her place. That move simultaneously helped reenergize and calm a key part of the Bush coalition.

Republicans in Congress did Bush an even bigger favor. The president may have been right on the economic and foreign-policy merits of allowing the government-owned Dubai Ports World to manage stevedore operations inside the United States. But he was clearly wrong when it came not only to the politics of the deal, but also to its symbolic significance in the midst of the War on Terror.

The politics part is simple: No Republican running for re-election in 2006 was going to hand a challenger a stick the size of the Space Needle to bash him over the head with. And there could have been no easier or juicier Space Needle than "My esteemed opponent voted to give an Arab country that has supported terrorism control of our ports."

Podhoretz is right that GOP members up for election in '06 are not going to allow the White House to get away with politically stupid moves, and given the way the conservative blogosphere reacted on both the ports and Miers issues, the grass roots folks aren't going to sit idly by and support bad ideas either.

I think the White House has shown signs of political tone deafness in the least, and arrogance in the worst in how it has attempt to ram these poorly thought out ideas through. In today's rapid information age, that just won't work.