(Cross-posted from the official Menendez for Senate blog)
How obvious can they be? Mere days after a poll was released on the New Jersey Senate race indicating that Iraq was pulling down his poll numbers, Republican Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr has called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Even more laughable, he did it mere hours after Senator Menendez suggested that he should, sitting down with David Chen of the New York Times for an interview "just shy of midnight on Friday". (Hard for him to make the case for his own leadership abilities when he's doing what his opponent tells him to.)
This will be, I suspect, the rallying cry for Republicans trying to run away from the Iraq War, but too spineless to actually stand up to President Bush.
Blame Rumsfeld. As the article points out, Kean Jr joins Rhode Island's Stephen Laffey, another Republican Senate hopeful, in calling on Rumsfeld to step down.
But the inherent problems of open-ended American involvement in Iraq will not be solved by another Bush ally taking over as Defense Secretary. Replacing Rumsfeld is a first step, not a solution in and of itself.
In a way, this is similar to what we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Republicans who didn't want to blame Bush were able to point the finger at FEMA Director Michael Brown. While Brown had clearly failed in his job during that crisis, the ultimate responsibility was on President Bush, who appointed Brown to a position he was patently unfit to hold.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with Republican "criticism" of how Iraq is being handled. Republicans like Tom Kean Jr are handling the situation with kid gloves, afraid to truly upset the Bush administration applecart.
Mr. Kean stopped short of criticizing President Bush, other than saying he had not been "well served" by Mr. Rumsfeld. He says he does not support a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops, because he thinks that could lead to a humanitarian crisis and destabilize the region.
Any discussion of Iraq policy in which the President's own culpability is taken off the table is not a discussion worth having. Gutlessly refusing to demand any accountability for the failures in Iraq isn't "criticism." Stay the course, but fire Rumsfeld, at the end of the day is still just stay the course.
Meanwhile, Senator Menendez, who voted against the war while he was in the House, has continued to be one of the fiercest critics of the Bush administration on Iraq. Kean Jr might speak in measured tones to the New York Times, saying that Rumsfeld should resign because of his "refusal to consider 'competing points of view,'" but his rhetoric in other forums has been far more similar to that of Donald Rumsfeld. In the Hall Virtual Debate, Kean Jr said that Senator Menendez's support for redeployment from Iraq, "emboldens those who wish to do us harm and provides them with a fixed date by which they can plan and plot further terrorist actions" and "would put America, the region and indeed the entire world at risk."
So much for those "competing points of view" Kean Jr's supposed to be so open to.