Obama's toughest Guantanamo sell: Senate Democrats

WASHINGTON - President Obama's hardest sell in his renewed push to close the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may be members of his own party - moderate Senate Democrats facing tough re-election bids next year in the strongly Republican South.

Obama has stepped up the pressure to shutter the naval facility, driven in part by his revised counterterrorism strategy and the four-month-old stain of the government's force-feeding Guantanamo prisoners on hunger strikes to prevent them from starving to death. Civil liberties groups and liberals have slammed Obama for failing to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise to close the installation and find another home for the 166 terror suspects being held there indefinitely.

Republicans and some Democrats in Congress have repeatedly resisted the president's attempts to close the facility.

White House counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco lobbied House members in advance of several votes last month to no avail. The House delivered strong votes to keep Guantanamo open and to prevent Obama from transferring detainees to Yemen. Separately, the president's recent appointment of a special envoy on Guantanamo, Cliff Sloan, has met with a collective shrug on Capitol Hill.

In the coming weeks, the Senate will again vote on the future of Guantanamo. All signs point to a bipartisan statement to keep the facility open despite a recent vow to end detention at the installation by two national security leaders - Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) and John McCain (R., Ariz.).

"When you go out, you talk to average Americans about it, they want to keep them there, they want to keep the terrorists there," said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.), a fierce proponent of keeping Guantanamo open. "They don't necessarily want to hold them here."

Ayotte, who plans to push legislation on a sweeping defense policy bill later this summer, is likely to attract support from Republicans as well as several Democrats looking ahead to tight Senate races next year in Arkansas, Louisiana, and North Carolina. Votes on the detention center will give these Democrats a high-profile chance to split with a president who is extremely unpopular in parts of the South.

McCain and Feinstein traveled to Guantanamo last month with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. They returned from the trip saying it was in the national interest to end detention at the facility.

Yet even McCain concedes that the failure of the Obama administration to spell out an alternative hampers any push to close the facility.

"Really, honestly, they've never given us a plan," said McCain, who cited the cost of $1.6 million per inmate as one argument for shutting the detention center.

Ayotte said she's a fiscal conservative, "but I believe that this facility is important for the safety of the nation and also to have a secure place to interrogate terrorists or terror suspects."