Iraq war veteran Steve Brozak is running hard for Congress. And he's turning his campaign into a referendum on Bush's military folly.By Michelle Goldberg
Sept. 30, 2004 | Steve Brozak is running for Congress in New Jersey against George W. Bush. Sure, his opponent on the ticket is Republican incumbent Mike Ferguson. But as Brozak sees it, Ferguson is just a synecdoche for the Bush team, whose failings drove Brozak out of the Marines and the Republican Party and into the first political campaign of his life.
"The bottom line is I'm going to take him down," Brozak says of Ferguson. "I'm just going to keep hitting at him. This is a national race because I'm going to start hitting not just him but his boss. They lied to us, they misled us about what was at stake in the war with Iraq, and they're misleading us about what is going to happen going forward." A candidate who has actually served in the Middle East during the Iraq war, Brozak has seen the quagmire up close. A dark-haired, broad-shouldered man, he has a deep, authoritative voice and enunciates crisply -- it's easy to imagine him in uniform, barking orders. When he speaks of the Bush administration, though, it's with the stunned incredulousness of one who's seen all his assumptions about the world upended. Before the war, Brozak says, he wanted to believe his president. It barely occurred to him not to. Now, his voice gets heated when he talks about Iraq, which is the subject he talks about most. "There were no weapons of mass destruction," he says. "There was no planning, just this sense of arrogance and contempt by the civilians in this administration."
Running in an affluent, solidly Republican district -- one that Bush carried over Gore in 2000 -- Brozak is making this race a referendum on the president's handling of the war. Like many Democrats, he believes Iraq is so self-evidently catastrophic that it's only a matter of time before people across the political spectrum wake up and realize it. He attacks Ferguson as a "water boy" for Bush and mocks him for putting color-coded terror alerts on his Web site.
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