House Republicans Cite a Rising Tide of Voter Antiwar Views
By JOHN HARWOOD and JONATHAN WEISMAN
Fewer than a dozen House Republicans have publicly said they would back President Obama on a military strike.
Where Lawmakers Stand on Military Action in Syria
Bryan Terry/The OklahomanSteve Byas asked Representative Tom Cole a question on Tuesday during a town hall meeting at Rose State College in Midwest City, Okla.By JOHN HARWOOD and JONATHAN WEISMAN
Published: September 6, 2013
MIDWEST CITY, Okla. — Representative Tom Cole started hearing it in the morning when he went to grab coffee.Tracking the Syrian Crisis
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The Caucus: 10 Questions for Tom Cole (September 6, 2013)
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Skepticism and Wariness in Talk of Syria Attack (September 6, 2013)
“I was just at Starbucks, and a woman there recognized me,” the six-term Republican House member told a Chamber of Commerce gathering here. “She said, ‘Everybody here’s a no on Syria.' “Mr. Cole would seem a potential candidate to support President Obama on Syria. A pragmatic Congressional veteran, he has been open to compromise with the White House in the past and is not afraid to break with House conservatives. But after portraying himself as leaning against the strike, Mr. Cole on Thursday afternoon came down firmly in the opposition when his office issued a statement announcing that he will vote no.Given the intensity of opposition in his district, he said it would take a “road to Damascus experience” to change his mind now.“I literally cannot walk across the parking lot without being stopped to talk about this issue,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything quite like this.”He is hardly alone. Fewer than a dozen House Republicans, a total that includes the top two leaders, have publicly said they would back the president on a military strike, making the White House climb to a House majority exceedingly steep given significant Democratic resistance as well. Not only is the administration not winning over Republicans, it lost at least one it had. Representative Michael G. Grimm, Republican of New York, said Thursday that he was reversing his support. “The moment to show our strength has passed,” he said.Mr. Cole’s constituent experience is not isolated. Representative Mick Mulvaney, a Republican swept into power in 2010 in military-focused South Carolina on a platform of small government, said that in his three-plus years in Congress, no issue had elicited as passionate a response as Syria. And, he added, “to say it’s 99 percent against would be overstating the support.”Of the 1,000 or so calls and e-mails he has received, three supported some kind of response. And two-thirds of the correspondents have never reached out to him before.Representative Candice S. Miller, Republican of Michigan, said she was at a peach festival parade last weekend in her district, an event that does not typically draw the type of constituent who is overly political. But as she made her way down the parade route, one person after another urged her to vote no on any authorization of force in Syria.“It was not a political event at all,” Ms. Miller said. “But there were a lot of people, older veterans especially in their hats, all saying, ‘No on Syria!' “In the face of such overwhelming constituent opposition, Congressional Republican leaders are treading extremely lightly. Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House majority leader, has come out strongly for military intervention in Syria, but in a one-on-one conversation with Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, he did not press the point, Mr. Chaffetz said.In Mr. Cole’s case, speaker after speaker at an evening town-hall-style meeting questioned Mr. Obama’s assertion that he has constitutional authority to strike on his own — and insisted that Congress not give him authority.“Where does he get this — a Cracker Jack box?” asked Steve Byas, who teaches government at Hillsdale Free Will Baptist College in Moore, Okla. Criticizing Mr. Obama’s “red line,” Mr. Byas added, “Just because the president made a statement he should not have made should not bind the Congress to go ahead and approve this.”The applause Mr. Byas received from the crowd of 150 people mirrored the flow of telephone calls Mr. Cole’s office aides have fielded. “Not one” in favor of striking Syria, he said.The majority of people Mr. Cole represents in this southwest Oklahoma district rarely support Mr. Obama on much of anything; two-thirds of voters here backed the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, in November. At the town meeting, which stretched beyond three hours in a Rose State College lecture hall, various constituents derided Mr. Obama as a socialist, demanded that Republicans shut down the government to block his health care plan, and called for his impeachment. Many House Republicans have echoed those sentiments, seemingly making it difficult for them to back the president on his Syria plan despite their embrace of American military power.The massive Tinker Air Force Base, employing 8,000 soldiers and another 15,000 civilians here, gives the area a natural affinity for the military. But that does not translate into reflexive support for the mission the commander in chief wants to order.Partly that reflects the military’s traditional hesitance about hazy and circumscribed mission objectives. Before Mr. Obama decided to strike in response to use of chemical weapons in Syria, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, warned Congress in a letter this summer that “deeper involvement is hard to avoid” even with a limited intervention.But wariness here is also a measure of years of strain on American forces, from long conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and, lately, the budget squeeze at home.Over lunch at Tinker, Lt. Gen. Bruce Litchfield told Mr. Cole that the six furlough days caused by “sequester” budget cuts had cost the base $77 million and degraded readiness. At the town meeting, a civilian employee at the base complained that the workers who lost six days’ pay have not had a raise for four years.“The American people are getting a little war weary,” said Tom Hinkle, 58, an Army veteran who noted that some troops have faced four or five deployments. “Who’s guarding our backs?”Amanda Miller, 30, an unemployed mental health worker, warned, “This could get ugly very quickly.” Cheryl Cooper, an Air Force retiree, suggested that Congress calculate how much the administration has spent preparing for a Syria strike and “take it off the Obamacare.”Mr. Cole, chief of staff at the Republican National Committee before winning his House seat, has occasionally raised the ire of more aggressive Tea Party-style conservatives. One activist in the back of his town hall handed out fliers casting him as disloyal to the Republican cause.The lawmaker genially deflected talk of socialism and impeachment, and disappointed some of those on hand by telling them Republicans lack the power to repeal the health care law. He praised the Obama administration’s responsiveness after a tornado ravaged his hometown, Moore, in May.He also praised Mr. Obama for seeking Congressional authorization of the Syria mission. But he rejected every argument the administration has made for it.“It’s a civil war, it’s a proxy war between regional powers, and it’s a religious war,” Mr. Cole said in an interview. “Is there any direct security threat to the United States here? No. There’s really not.”He predicted the Democratic-controlled Senate would back the president. Mr. Obama has “a good chance” of prevailing in the House with the support of Republican and Democratic leaders, Mr. Cole said, but it is no sure thing.“If I break with my district, I better have an awfully compelling reason,” Mr. Cole said. “I’m going to listen to that kind of expert opinion. But I’m sure going to listen to opinion at the Starbucks.”
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Photos Tell Tale of Tense Deliberations
By MARK LANDLER
In the images of meetings in Washington, the body language of President
Obama’s aides reveals their conflicting opinions on Syria.
Listening Post
In
the images of tense meetings in Washington, the faces and body language
of the president’s men offer a guide to their conflicting opinions on
Syria.
WASHINGTON — Sometimes, the internal dynamics of White House debates on
military action are cloaked in mystery, emerging years afterward in the
memoirs of participants. Other times, the details surface quickly, if
someone leaks a version of events. And in some cases, the pictures tell
the tale.
Such is the case with the Obama administration’s anguished deliberations
over how to respond to the Syrian civil war, the deadly chemical
weapons attack outside Damascus last month and the president’s own
wrestling with whether to seek Congressional approval for a military
strike.
Photographers have captured many dramatic moments of the last week, when
President Obama abruptly halted his march to military action, announced
he would seek the blessing of Congress for a strike, and then
dispatched the members of his war council to Capitol Hill to make his
case to skeptical lawmakers.
In the images of tense meetings in the Oval Office and the Situation
Room, or under the lights in House and Senate hearing rooms, the faces
and body language of the president’s men (they are mostly men) are often
a guide to their conflicting opinions on the best way forward.
It’s easy to over-interpret photos, of course. Hillary Rodham Clinton,
the former secretary of state, said later that she might have been
suppressing a cough when a White House photographer caught her putting
her hand over her mouth in a famous photo of Mr. Obama’s national
security team watching as the commando raid on Osama bin Laden’s
hide-out in Pakistan unfolded.
But in this case, the images are corroborated by the accounts of several
of the participants. The White House, by posting the work of its
official photographer, Pete Souza, on Flickr hours after events rather
than years later in a memoir or coffee-table book, is providing what
amounts to a real-time visual account of a historic debate.
Secretary of State John Kerry, center, was flanked
by General Martin E. Dempsey and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel as they
testified on Tuesday at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on
Syria.Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press
During two days of hearings on Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry was
the undisputed big dog, eclipsing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who
flanked Mr. Kerry at the witness table like a pair of bookends.
Whether jabbing the air to emphasize a piece of intelligence or
brusquely cutting off a Republican congressman who questioned his
judgment given his past antiwar views, Mr. Kerry was every inch the
former prosecutor making the case against President Bashar al-Assad.
Mr. Hagel, who has been more reluctant than Mr. Kerry to act militarily
in Syria, answered questions when asked, but seemed occasionally unsure
of his facts, such as when he said in answer to a question from a House
member that Russia supplied Syria’s chemical weapons. The Pentagon later
walked that back, saying that Mr. Hagel had been referring to Russia’s
role as a longtime supplier of conventional weapons.
Mr. Hagel’s shaky performance was reminiscent of his Senate confirmation
hearings, when his uncertain answers prompted questions about his
potential effectiveness as a spokesman for Mr. Obama’s military policy.
As for General Dempsey, who has made clear his skepticism about military
action in lengthy letters to Congress, he appeared to want to disappear
behind his medals and ribbons. Looking down, offering monosyllabic
answers, and dispensing with an opening statement, the general left
little doubt that he was simply carrying out orders.
Left: President Obama spoke about possible action
by the United States against Syria over a chemical weapons attack on
Friday. Right: Hours earlier, Secretary of State John Kerry made the
case for a strike from the State Department accusing the regime of
killing at least 1,429 people, including 426 children, with chemical
weapons.Left, Christopher Gregory/The New York Times; right, Alex Wong/Getty Images
General Dempsey, it turns out, was not the only senior official
harboring reservations. Mr. Obama, his aides say, was ambivalent about
carrying out a military strike with a shaky legal case and without the
imprimatur of the United Nations Security Council. Those doubts
intensified later in the week when the British Parliament voted against
military action.
On Friday, Aug. 30, a day after that vote, Mr. Kerry stepped to the
lectern at the State Department to deliver his most thunderous case yet
for acting against Mr. Assad. Hours later, the president, flanked by
leaders from the Baltic republics, offered a more muted case for action.
On the evening of Aug. 30, President Obama gathered his advisers in the Oval Office to discuss options for Syria. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
That evening, Mr. Obama asked his chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, to
take a stroll with him on the South Lawn of the White House. He broke
the news to Mr. McDonough that he was thinking of asking Congress to
sign off on a strike against Syria.
At 7 p.m., the president summoned his closest political and national
security aides to the Oval Office, where, as one put it, he told them,
“I have a pretty big idea I want to test with you guys.” Their reaction
was one of shock and deep concern, as a photo by Mr. Souza suggests, and
two of the senior aides present later confirmed.
To Mr. Obama’s left, was Rob Nabors, his deputy chief of staff and
former legislative liaison, whose job is to shepherd Mr. Obama’s agenda
through Congress. To his right was Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national
security adviser who has long advocated a robust response to Syria.
Standing behind the sofa, watching over the debate, was Mr. McDonough.
President Obama met with his national security
advisers in the White House's Situation Room to discuss strategy in
Syria on Saturday.Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
The next morning, Mr. Obama assembled his National Security Council in
the Situation Room. The same group had met there several times to plot
the drive toward military action. But on this Saturday, the president
was laying out a pause in the campaign.
To his right was Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who would stand
behind him in the Rose Garden a few hours later, and Mr. Kerry, who
would have to battle the perception that the White House had left him
out on a limb. To his left were the his national security adviser, Susan
E. Rice, and Mr. Hagel, whose celadon-green sport jacket and fuchsia
shirt were a jarring counterpoint to the white shirts and sober ties of
Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry.
For Mr. Obama, who has sometimes been criticized for his inability to
mask his emotions, it was a remarkable role reversal. By week’s end, he
appeared resolute in his course, while his aides seemed to be the ones
struggling to hide their feelings.
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