May 20 (Bloomberg) -- Earlier this month, Republican pollster Neil Newhouse released a 57-page analysis noting President Barack Obama’s high approval ratings and concluding, “We’re better off posting up against Democrats in Congress.”
In charging that the Central Intelligence Agency misled her about its methods of interrogating terrorism suspects, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gave the Republicans an opening to follow that advice.
The party is escalating its attacks on the California Democrat: Its House fundraising arm yesterday sent out a memo asking, “Is Pelosi becoming a liability?” House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio called on Pelosi to provide evidence or apologize. The Republican National Committee attacked her in a YouTube video. And the House Republican Conference’s Web site asked, “What did Speaker Pelosi know?”
“Speaker Pelosi wasn’t all that popular to begin with,” Newhouse said. “And now that she’s dug herself a hole on the CIA/interrogation issue and seen her disapproval rise to 50 percent, we’d be nuts if we didn’t keep the pressure on.”
Republican consultant Eddie Mahe said he’d advise party leaders to “sit back and hold your fire” on Obama, whose approval ratings top 60 percent. Instead, he said, “Go after Pelosi, a beautiful target.”
The dispute threatens to distract the Democrats as the party seeks to push through a sweeping legislative agenda that ranges from expanding health insurance and curbing greenhouse- gas emissions to re-regulating financial markets.
Sparking Uproar
Pelosi, 69, sparked the dispute last week when she said the CIA gave “inaccurate” information about a simulated drowning tactic known as waterboarding during a September 2002 briefing when she was on the House Intelligence Committee.
CIA Director Leon Panetta said the agency “truthfully” briefed her, and a CIA chart listed her as being told in the 2002 about “extraordinary interrogation techniques” used to question suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.
The Obama administration has said it has confidence in Pelosi, and House Democrats rushed to her defense. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland yesterday said the speaker “has an extraordinarily good memory” and recalls things he has forgotten. “I don’t doubt her ability to remember what she was told and when she was told it,” he said.
Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Pelosi, said, “It’s clearly a diversionary tactic by the Republicans to try to distract attention from the fact that the Bush administration ordered a policy of torture.”
Truth Commission
Daly said the Republicans continue to oppose a commission, which Pelosi supports, to investigate the interrogations policy.
Pelosi may be able to buttress her argument that she was never told by the CIA that waterboarding was used by citing published comments from one Republican critic: former CIA Director Porter Goss.
Goss, who attended CIA briefings with Pelosi in the fall of 2002 when he was in Congress, wrote in the Washington Post last month that lawmakers should have understood that the techniques “were to actually be employed.” He doesn’t say the lawmakers were told they had been used.
Pelosi said at an April 23 press conference that she and other lawmakers weren’t told that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods were being used, only that they “could be used.”
Still, for Republicans, who lost control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, the issue has given them a chance to reframe a debate over whether the Bush administration tortured suspects into whether Pelosi knew about the tactics and didn’t object.
Pelosi Against CIA
“The best problems your opponents have are ones you didn’t create,” Republican consultant Alex Vogel said. “This is not a fight between her and the Republicans. It is between her and the CIA.”
Pelosi’s approval ratings were at 39 percent in a May 14-17 CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll. Obama’s stood at 62 percent.
“She makes an inviting target,” said Republican consultant John Feehery, a former spokesman for then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican.
Pelosi, the first woman elected U.S. House speaker, has repeatedly garnered more than 70 percent of the vote in getting re-elected in her San Francisco district. Her Democratic colleagues may be more vulnerable, Feehery said.
Going After Majority
“The voters can go after her through her congressional majority,” he said.
Democratic consultant Glenn Totten said the Republicans are targeting Pelosi to try to prevent Obama from getting his agenda through.
“This is very much an attempt to divert attention from the real business of the country,” Totten said.
There are risks involved with such a strategy, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey.
“Stories are already emerging that dispute the CIA accounts,” Zelizer said. “The controversy only fuels discussion of techniques in the war on terrorism that many Americans did not support, and public attention remains focused on which party will salvage this economy.”
If the Democrats can change the conversation back to the economy, he said, then Republicans will find this was “another week lost for the party in its effort to remake its image.”
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