Signs of trouble: soldiers, Santorum, and Scarborough

Here's an announcement that is sure to underscore the public's general pessimism about the Iraq conflict, further complicate President Bush's efforts to regain his former popularity as a war leader, and discomfit congressional Republicans who are trying to win re-election in November:

The U.S. military, already severely strained by the war, is being forced to take drastic steps to put enough soldiers back in the field. The Marines have now decided to call up former active-duty members -- people now classified as reservists, who thought that their overseas service was over -- and ship them back to the war, because apparently there aren't enough volunteers anymore who want to risk their lives for Bush's "freedom agenda."

It is hardly the exclusive province of "Defeatocrats" (as the Bush political team now calls Democrats) to argue these days that the military is being stretched too thin by the administration's stay-the-course policies.

As referenced here, military expert Frederick Kagan at the conservative American Enterprise Institute says that the Marines' decision "is one of an avalanche of symptoms that the ground forces are overstretched by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan." Recently, meanwhile, a Pentagon study conducted by Army Lt. Col. Andrew F. Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concluded that the U.S. military is stretched into a "thin green line." In the spring of 2005, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a similar warning in congressional testimony, and, during the previous December, Lt. Gen. James Helmly, head of the Army Reserve, wrote a letter to colleagues expressing "deepening concern" about the readiness of his 200,000 solidiers, who were, in his words, "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force."

The political danger for Bush and the GOP is that these pressures on the military could further sour the mood of military families and friends -- in other words, people who normally would be inclined to support a wartime president and his party.

The biggest GOP fear this year is that its base will not motivated; it won't help the party if voters in military communities are frustrated. Meanwhile, the general public mood is already downbeat; in a new poll released last week, the Pew Research Center found record-high pessimisim about the war. Fifty-five percent now say the war isn't going well (that stat was 44 percent last January), and, by a margin of 52 to 41 percent, most Americans want to set a timetable for troop withdrawal. The Marines' decision certainly won't nudge those numbers in Bush's favor.

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Rick Santorum and Bob Casey Jr., combatants in the nation's marquee '06 Senate race (unless we count Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont), have agreed to debate at least four times, starting on Labor Day. Swell. There goes my holiday barbecue. But seriously, those events should at least help Pennsylvania voters figure out whether they really want to fire Santorum in November.

Democrat Casey for many months has hewed to a strategy of saying as little as possible, and saying it soporifically, with the apparent intent of keeping the spotlight on Santorum -- in the hopes that Santorum's devotion to Bush would be sufficient ammo. The debates will change that dynamic. Casey will have to show up on the same stage with an opponent who is far more verbally nimble than he is, and he will be pressed to thrust and parry in ways that thus far he has been able to avoid. This visual contrast might not work to Casey's benefit; the potential result could be a tighter race.

On the other hand, I generally wonder whether debates matter all that much. Santorum still has to battle against a mood that bodes ill for Republicans, and even the conservative Washington Times reports that his own base is restive and unenthused, and not just because of the GOP's high-spending ways on Capitol Hill. At home, Santorum's '04 support for Arlen Specter, at a time when that moderate senator was being challenged in a primary by a conservative upstart, still ticks off a lot of conservatives. The Washington Times quoted Charlie Clift, a longtime Santorum supporter in suburban Philadelphia:

"'I still feel the knife in my back from (2004),'" Mr. Clift said. 'We worked very hard for Pat Toomey. All [Mr. Santorum] had to do was keep his mouth shut, and we'd all be fat, dumb and happy supporting him right now. I won't lift a finger to help him....I'm not pulling the Santorum lever this time. I'll write my own name in before I'll vote for him.'"

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And speaking of restive conservatives, let's check in with former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC show host who infuriated the White House last week by running a segment entitled, "Is Bush an Idiot?" And he wasn't kidding, as evidenced by this new Salon interview that was posted today. The key excerpt:

"A lot of Republican loyalists are unhappy. But again, the only thing I did was ask publicly what a lot of conservatives have been saying privately since Katrina and the Harriet Miers nomination....staying in power is (deemed to be) more important than staying true to the values that put you in power in the first place. Again, there are more and more conservatives behind the scenes that are voicing concerns, but most of them are afraid to say anything publicly, because they know if they do they'll be branded as traitors to the cause."

The question is, will these concerns be reflected in the voting (or non-voting) on election day? Control of Congress may well hinge on that.