Nov. 16, 2005 - President George Bush stepped out of his limo amid the spectacular fall colors of Japanese maple trees. A short walk ahead, along the gravel drive, stood an idyllic golden pavilion set on a small lake—Kyoto’s Kinkakuji temple. In the morning sun of his first full day in Japan, it seemed like the perfect escape from the dismal politics of Washington. “Sun rising,” said his host, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. “Sun, Japan,” he explained, as he posed with Bush for the cameras.
But the land of the rising sun provided no fresh start for the U.S. president. Behind the photographers, counselor Dan Bartlett was telling reporters how the Senate’s Tuesday vote favoring a Republican plan to press the government for more information on Iraq was no rebuke to the administration. It was, he insisted, a slap in the face to Democrats, who could not get approval for a proposal requiring projected dates for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops. The White House used to lament the fact that politics didn’t stop at the water’s edge. Now politics is just part of the president’s hand luggage on foreign travel. Bartlett said the Senate vote was in fact supportive of the current approach to Congress on Iraq. “It requires us, as we have already been doing, to provide consultation and reports to be provided to the Congress on a regular basis, which is an affirmation of what we were doing, as well,” he said. “We were very pleased to see the repudiation of what Senator [Bill] Frist called a cut-and-run strategy provided by the Democrats.”
If the GOP wanted to repudiate the Democrats, it could have simply voted down the opposition and moved on. Instead, it wrote its own version and won overwhelming support for it, including from Democrats. In the White House’s terms, that meant Democrats voted to repudiate their own policy.
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