Newswise — The conflict in Lebanon is hampering the Bush administration's ability to set and execute a legislative agenda that could help the GOP's election prospects, says Robert Eisinger, associate professor and chair of political science at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore.
Eisinger, the author of "The Evolution of Presidential Polling" (Cambridge University Press, 2003), says, "The recent military conflagration in the Middle East has profound implications for President Bush's domestic agenda, the Republican party, and the mid-term elections. The Bush administration is currently receiving negative feedback from fellow Republicans. President Bush and his senior colleagues must be careful to assuage concerns by Senate Republicans that their views are being ignored."
Eisinger's areas of expertise concern American politics including U.S. government, public opinion, and political parties. "The Bush administration finds itself recognizing just how difficult second terms are in executing a legislative agenda," Eisinger says. "The war in Iraq, combined with recent conflagrations in the Middle East, has made it especially difficult to pass domestic priorities such as entitlement and immigration reform. Neither the Iraq nor the Middle East war is likely to end soon, and when that's compounded by the intricacies of the 2006 mid-term elections, the hope for passing any legislative agenda—Bush-centric or bi-partisan—is diminishing."
However, Eisinger says the Middle East situation could produce political gains for the president and his party should events unfold the right way. "If President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice can forge a meaningful peace settlement, even if temporary, among various factions and parties in the Middle East, one can expect that to yield short-term political dividends for the administration here in the U.S."
Eisinger joined the faculty at Lewis & Clark in 1995. He earned a bachelor of arts degree from Haverford College and a doctorate degree from the University of Chicago. He is the author of several articles that have been published in Presidential Studies Quarterly, International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Public Perspective and Society. His current research includes work on media bias, military-media relations in the 2003 Iraq war, citizens' reactions to scandal, and cross-national differences in newspaper photographs of politicians.
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