Private poll, GOP leader commissioned, shows the GOP would lose control of both the House and Senate if midterm elections were held today and supports mounting evidence that the party must distance itself from President Bush if it wants to hold on to Congressional control in 2006.

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A private poll recently commissioned by Republican leaders shows the GOP would lose control of both the House and Senate if midterm elections were held today and supports mounting evidence that the party must distance itself from President Bush if it wants to hold on to Congressional control in 2006.

GOP strategists who have seen the poll warn House and Senate leaders that Bush’s numbers will continue to fall and there may be no way the party can avoid catastrophe as long as the President remains in office.

“I’ve never seen anger like this in the American populace,” says political scientist George Harleigh, who served in the Nixon administration. “There’s an old rule in politics that says no slide is irreversible. The President’s declining numbers suggest he will go down in history as the exception to that rule.”

Increasingly, GOP candidates for office – both incumbent and challengers – tell the White House and the national campaign committee they want nothing to do with Bush and will refuse to appear with him at any events.

Republican Senator Rick Santorum cancelled plans to appear with Bush in Pennsylvania on Veterans Day, a wise move as backlash continues to mount over the President’s use of the day to bash opponents of his failed war in Iraq. Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona told the White House this week he wants no help from the President and will not use Bush in any campaign ads in his re-election effort next year.

GOP campaign consultants increasingly advise their candidates to avoid any appearance of an alliance with Bush and some are going so far as to suggest avoiding use of “Republican” or “GOP” in election ads and literature.

“Focus groups show voter approval drops significantly when the President’s name is mentioned,” says a senior Republican strategist. “Any embrace of the President’s policies is a death knell.”

Harleigh, who weathered the Watergate controversy in the Nixon White House and the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, says Bush’s problems run deeper than Nixon’s.

“It’s not just that the American people distrust the President. Republicans no longer trust him. Members of his own party now cut and run from his policies,” Harleigh says.

The Senate Finance Committee last week killed a tax bill pushed by Bush when Rep. Sen. Olympia Snowe came out against a capital gains tax break that favored the wealthy. House leaders postponed a vote on the bill after too many members of their party revolted.

“You see more and more Republicans willing to challenge their party and their President,” says Harleigh. “It’s unprecedented in modern political times.”

But the crack in the Republican façade has been building.

"The fissures have been there all along," says Jack Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. “A lot more red ink, much worse poll numbers…it all adds up.”

Some GOP strategists cling to the hope that political fortunes can quickly reverse and the party can rebound but such optimism is rare among the doom and gloom that dominates meeting of party leaders at the National Republican Committee and National Republican Congressional Committee.

“We’re in trouble. There’s no doubt about that,” says on GOP pollster. “Based on what I’m seeing in the national mood the only way out of that trouble is to get as far away as possible from President Bush and his policies.”

© Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue

By DOUG THOMPSON Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue

Submitter: Rob Kall

Submitters Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

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Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

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