Maureen Dowd: "Running Against Themselves"

MoDo gives us the straight dope from the biggest (and presumably straight) Dope-in-Chief (a snippet here but go over there for the rest of "We're back in the saddle a-gain):

Things have become so dire for the Republicans that now even Bush is distancing himself from Bush.

The president is cutting and running from the president.In a momentous event at the White House on Monday, Tony Snow made a major announcement about an important new strategy for Iraq. The president will no longer stay the course on the rallying cry “stay the course.”

A presidency built on message discipline (Message: “Stay the course”) is trying to salvage itself with some last-minute un-messaging (Message: “No more stay the course”).Of course, the administration has never really said what “the course” is, so it was never really apparent what “staying” it meant, anyhow.

It was a wacky moment for Tony Snow, who renounced the slogan while sticking to the policy. “It left the wrong impression about what was going on,” the press secretary said, “and it allowed critics to say, ‘Well, here’s an administration that’s just embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the situation is,’ when, in fact, it’s just the opposite.”

The important thing was that the cliché sounded good to Republicans, strong and virile, for a while. But pollsters for the White House seemed to be the last to learn that even many of the party faithful had soured on the phrase, deeming it inflexible and stupid. Has Karl Rove, who urged G.O.P. candidates to keep the Democrats on the defensive on national security, lost his magic?

In a White House with a Fox News all-spin sensibility, officials don’t think they need to change the strategy as much as they need to change their slogan.

The overworked Bush phrase suggested “burying your head in the sand,” Steve Hinkson, political director at Luntz Research Companies, a G.O.P. public opinion firm, told The Washington Post’s Peter Baker. “The problem is that as the number of people who agree with remaining resolute dwindles, that sort of language doesn’t strike a chord as much as it once did.”

Unwilling to admit mistakes or face the urgent need to go past semantic changes in a protectorate that has fallen into a vicious civil war, in which Americans are merely referees and targets, the White House is falling back on marketing. Just as Andy Card rolled out the war as a marketing event, the Bush team now thinks that all it needs to do is come up with a catchy and chesty new advertising pitch.

Bay Buchanan assured Wolf Blitzer that the president still intended to stay the course and seek victory, he just wouldn’t use that phrase, because it gave people the impression that W. was unwilling to change tactics.

After all, Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh last week that the inept Iraqi government was doing “remarkably well.”

But given the Republican meltdown, it’s obvious that Democrats are having better luck mocking the Republicans for staying the course than Republicans are having mocking the Democrats for cutting and running. But Democrats have no ingenious ideas about how to extricate ourselves from this nasty war either.

Yet W. once more accused the Democrats of wanting to cut and run in Iraq at a campaign stop in Sarasota, Fla., yesterday.

Many frantic Republican lawmakers are also running against themselves, either reneging on their support for the war they started, or railing against Washington, the town they absolutely control, claiming that the capital has forgotten their values, or making ads denouncing the Democrats’ “homosexual agenda,” even though Republicans are now the party of gay scandal.

...To W., the words he says to Americans don’t matter as much as the words Dick Cheney says to him. He just has to hope that daddy’s friend, James Baker, the smooth fixer who is co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group and who has already suggested moving past the meaningless partisan jargon of “cut and run” and “stay the course,” comes up with a plan to rescue Junior from a fine mess one more time.

For the rest, here's the best.