It's hot in Texas these days, but judging by the guy who ran over Cindy Sheehan's crosses outside the Crawford White House or the guy who fired off his shotgun nearby, the thing to worry about is not the heat -- it's the stupidity.
The president needs Sheehan like he needs another pretzel in his throat. If she comes back soon, the trouble she could cause him may be incalculable. There is simply no satisfactory response, either human or political, to a woman demanding to know exactly why her son had to die to advance the idea of freedom -- particularly when the original mission called for the scary and tangible task of saving the world by ridding it of a tyrant and his weapons of mass destruction. We have the tyrant, the weapons remain elusive, and Iraq is a mess.
And no amount of political capital can compete with the moral gravitas of a grieving mother. The mothers of dead soldiers have no credibility issues. They command attention and demand respect. And if this lone crusade manages to attract just one more mother of a dead American soldier, it'll turn into a movement impervious to any kind of political assault. The White House will continue to have trouble disparaging and discrediting Sheehan, because she is immune from political attack. And despite her growing political clout, all the efforts so far to turn her into a political caricature and paint her as a partisan with an ax to grind have failed. That is because having buried a son who gave his life for his country is both a cudgel and a shield.
She cannot be dismissed and she cannot be threatened. What are they going to do to her now? Having lived her worst nightmare, what more does she have to fear?
And that is why President Bush needs Sheehan to stay away -- not so much because she represents a distraction to the administration's efforts in Iraq but because she can so easily become the focal point of the opposition to an increasingly unpopular war that started with poor support anyway.
With Americans growing increasingly uneasy about the war in Iraq, a level of discomfort measured by Bush's collapsing approval numbers, Sheehan's protest is making it easy for Americans to decide how they feel about the war -- by deciding how they feel about her. And the war is not winning.
After Labor Day, when the government is fully back in business and the president is back in Washington, the wartime president who has mortgaged his place in history on the war in Iraq, will find himself in the ironic position of needing to change the subject to other, less difficult issues, like Social Security and immigration reform. A big, nasty battle over his Supreme Court nominee would not hurt too much, either. But he has to especially hope that Cindy Sheehan does not follow him from Crawford to Washington, where there will be even more cameras and reporters to whom she could tell her story.
The right-wing bloggers and commentators have reflexively gone after Sheehan, but it is an asymmetrical fight, to pinch a Pentagon phrase. Sheehan has a simple, overwhelming question, and her Crawford encampment takes the whole debate about the war in Iraq and condenses it into a single query at the president's doorstep.
And all by herself, Sheehan could do for the Democrats what they could not do for themselves over the last two and half years: credibly challenge Bush, not just on the conduct of the war but on the raison d'être in Iraq in the first place.
Sheehan is now doing televisions ads and has been embraced by the many liberal and anti-war groups that have been trying to get Bush to pay a political price for the war from the day he began talking about it three years ago. This would seem to make her an easy political target, but it seems that even her friends cannot hurt her.
“All this BS just clouds my message,” she told Michael Fletcher of the The Washington Post. “My message is that of a broken-hearted mom sitting down in front of George Bush's ranch, wanting to know why my son died.” Recent polls by both Newsweek and The Associated Press put the president's approval rating at 42 percent, with much of the dissatisfaction flowing from people's reaction to the war in Iraq. Sheehan is clearly not the only person who has a question or two for Bush.
There is still no Iraqi constitution, and this week there are more American mothers who must bury sons. In their grief, the president will tell them that their children died for a noble cause, and that freedom is on the march. And Cindy Sheehan will be sitting with a megaphone that is getting bigger every day, asking, “What noble cause?”
If you were George W. Bush, you'd have to be asking yourself a question: “Who needs this?”
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
