DON'T REFIGHT THE BATTLES YOU ALREADY WON:

There seems to be two George W's (Bob Tyrrell, April 15, 2004, Jewish World Review)

There has from the beginning been a troubling ebb and flow to the administration of George W. Bush. Periods of energy and policy dominance come and then they evanesce. For a while, all is quiet. We saw this ebb and flow in the administration's progress towards tax reduction. We see it now in the execution of the war on terror.

Over the last few weeks, there has been ebb, encouraging the president's domestic critics to go into full howl. From their redoubts on the 9-11 Commission, they have been carrying on as exemplary Monday morning quarterbacks, transforming a serious function of government (the bipartisan review of policy) into a soapbox for demagoguery — and truly amateurish dramatics. All the while, the president has been in a state of ebb.

How are we to explain this curious fluctuation of presidential energy? I have no idea. I will speculate, however, that the fluctuation traces directly back to the president. From all I have been able to ascertain, the liberals' portrayal of him as being passive is nonsense. Contrary to the murmurings of Paul O'Neill, this president calls the shots on a wide range of matters, from the daily deportment of his staff to matters of high policy.

Yet there do seem to be two George W's. One tells his staff to knock off for weekends and for "family time." He himself retires early and shows open disdain for the 24-7 politicking of official Washington. The other is commander in chief and on call 24-7. Is there a whiff of schizophrenia to this president?

Has there ever been another American politician who so confused people by his very transparency? George Bush has explained ad nauseum that the lesson he learned from his father and from Bill Clinton is that political capital is a president's most precious commodity and must be expended only at key points, jealously hoarded the rest of the time. As regards Iraq he spent his capital to secure congressional approval for the war and loaned Tony Blair a bit to try and get the UN to go along, but, having won the right to fight, the issue was essentially settled. What would be the point of going out and pleading for support of a policy that you already control? If the policy works it is self-justifying and this one is working. Make an occassional appearance just to let folks know that you're still on top of the matter and get out at the end of June--the rest is in the hands of the Shi'ites of Iraq who must decide what kind of society they choose to live in.

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The main game (Peter Hartcher, 2003/09/26, Australian Financial Review)

Even after almost three years and two wars, the degree of popular preoccupation with George Bush's mental abilities is extra-ordinary. The way the Bush Administration wields its formidable power is, of course, vastly more important than the wits of the individual who happens to be its front man. Yet the stupidity thing is so pervasive in popular discussion, particularly outside the US, that we really need to deal with it to even begin to approach the real significance of the W presidency. [...]

A trenchant critic, Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the progressive journal The American Prospect, writes that "the first time I saw him at close range, he was working a room of Democratic senators. That's when I realised how much his critics had underestimated the man as a politician. Bush was off-script and off-the-record, and he did just fine at the banter. The wisecracks were spontaneous and smart." For another thing, to treat Bush as some sort of dummy is to do him a political favour. As he said this year: "I am the master of low expectations." He is acutely aware of the perception of him as a fool, and he takes full advantage. In a 2001 commencement address at his alma mater, Yale University, he made no effort to avoid the subject of his mediocre academic history at the Ivy League institution – a C average in his undergraduate degree in history. Bush joshed: "And to the C students, I say, you, too, can be president of the United States." Bush took his history degree at Yale and his MBA at Harvard, but he and his advisers know that these are not the credentials that will appeal to his key constituencies. Ordinary Americans, writes Thomas de Zengotita, anthropologist and commentator at New York University, "resented the snobs who jeered at his natural awkwardness and innocent errors … When Bush the Bold confounds them all with simple words and simpler deeds, well, his people are themselves vindicated. They were right all along, right to be ignorant, right to be parochial – right, by God, just to be American."

Psephology confirms the electoral wisdom of this appeal: "Without question, the best predictor of Republican performance in presidential elections is those voters who have high school degrees, but have not attended college," conclude Gary Andres, Republican lobbyist, and Michael McKenna, pollster, in a new study. "What many have intuitively believed has some basis in the data: namely, that Republicans succeed nationally when they speak to blue- and pink-collar workers; folks in the Rust Belt; Wallace Democrats; Reagan Republicans; bubbas, etc."

To be preoccupied with Bush's alleged feeble-mindedness is to be distracted by the details, to neglect serious scrutiny of his government and, in some ways, to play his game. It's another of those in-vogue public impressions that are not only misleading, but actually damaging – like the one that was in fashion in the 2000 election campaign: that Bush and Gore were so alike in their policy offerings that the election didn't matter, that it was a case of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

We now know that the election mattered a great deal; more so than most people have yet grasped. How so? Because the defining characteristic of the Bush Administration is that it uses its power not to implement its policies, but uses its policies to entrench its power. Not content to implement policy in the existing framework of the two-party system at home and the existing international order abroad, the Bush team seeks to bend the framework, restructure the order.

The actions of the Bush White House show that it seeks, above all, to structurally strengthen the Republican Party at the structural expense of its Democrat opponents. That is, the Bush Administration is working to permanently entrench the Republican Party in power. And in a close parallel, Bush's foreign policy is working to impose a new vision of permanent US global domination.

In some ways, the trajectory of the Bush presidency is simple and familiar. But closer analysis of its course reveals not a succession of blunders and missed opportunities but a single-minded and deliberate intent. Bush began as a president of dubious legitimacy. He lost the popular election to Gore by half a million votes, but won the electoral college in intensely controversial circumstances, a result sealed by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. As Bill Clinton has jibed, Bush won the election fair and square – by five votes to four. The W presidency began with four Americans out of 10 believing that their leader had taken power fraudulently.

Nine months into his term, his approval ratings had normalised to a level about average for that stage of a presidency; somewhere between 50 and 55 per cent. The evidence since suggests that this is the natural or default level of approval for the Bush administration. Whenever the US is not engaged in an acute national security crisis, – September 11 or the invasion of Iraq – this is the level to which Bush's approval rating returns, falling from crisis-induced peaks to a sort of equilibrium point for his presidency to date. Crucially, if this can be sustained, it is probably enough to get him re-elected – no president with support at 50 per cent or more has ever lost re-election.

In the first few hours after the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the President did seem to fumble. Who could forget the moment when Bush, seated on a small chair reading to a school kid in Florida, was interrupted by his chief of staff, Andy Card, who whispered "America is under attack", only to look nonplussed for a moment and then continue reading.

In those critical minutes it seemed that the real steel in the administration was revealed briefly to public view. It was the Vice-President, the hardened old hawk Dick Cheney, who immediately evacuated the White House and assumed control in the bunker beneath. It was Cheney who ordered Bush to get into Air Force One and stay aloft until told otherwise. It was Cheney who set the national emergency plans into motion. And it was Cheney who ordered the Air Force to shoot down any more civilian jets that failed to respond to instructions. Yet by nightfall Bush had returned to the White House and been reinstated as national leader.

"We were pulling for him," recalled a Clinton political strategist, Paul Begala. "We've all given Bush a pass because we want to believe he's up to the job. It scares us to think he's not." And it seemed that this national emergency had transformed the President – from bozo to Bismarck in a single stunning day. It made Bush the most popular US president since the invention of the opinion poll, with approval around 90 per cent. The playboy son of the plutocracy who had dodged the Vietnam War by enrolling in the Texas Air National Guard – and couldn't even manage to serve there with any sort of constancy – was suddenly the heroic Commander-in-Chief of a nation that saw itself at war.

It seemed so grave a moment, and Bush so plainly its beneficiary, that he would want to perpetuate it for the rest of his term. Indeed, he did cast the war as an open-ended affair, a war so broad it had no edge, and so long it would have no end. "This is a different war from any our nation has ever faced," declared Bush. "And this is a war that must be fought not only overseas, but also here at home ... Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen."

Then, in his address to a joint session of Congress nine days after the attacks, came the Bush Doctrine: "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." The front-page September 12 headline in France's Le Monde summed up the international reaction: "We are all Americans now." It seemed to be a great unifying moment for Americans at home, and for civilised peoples everywhere. With approval at home, and an enormous coalition of 70 countries offering support around the world, including 21 offering combat troops, Bush launched the campaign against the Taliban of Afghanistan, and was able to truthfully avow: "We are supported by the collective will of the world."

Washington Post political columnist, E.J. Dionne Jr., captured the moment a month after the attacks: "Gone almost immediately was the unilateralist tinge that coloured so much of his approach to international issues … In just a few weeks, Bush has transformed a partisan administration into a kind of coalition presidency."

It was a great opportunity for Bush. He held the nation, and global public opinion, in the palm of his hand. Which politician would knowingly surrender such an advantage But this is where the simple narrative of the Bush presidency ends. He then did something inexplicable by conventional logic. Within a few months, Bush had deliberately ripped up the new bipartisan unity ticket at home. And he chose to strain beyond breaking point the ties of global goodwill that he had acquired. [...]

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were not reasons to attack Iraq – they were opportunities. So if countering terrorism is the subordinate interest, what is the dominant one? A critic of the President's, Neal Gabler, an author and a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the study of media and culture based in the University of Southern California, says that it is to operate "government expressly designed for self-perpetuation, government designed to undermine the political process … to disable the Democratic Party from contesting elections."

How so? By pursuing policies that strike at the structures of Democratic Party money and power. For example, the Bush Administration is pushing a policy called tort reform, legislation designed to strictly limit the size of jury awards in America's courts. "The political reason this has become a fervent [Republican] cause is that trial lawyers contribute heavily to the Democratic Party," says Gabler. "Choke off their income and you choke off a major source of Democratic money."

Similarly, the vast program of tax cuts that Bush has won are designed, Gabler argues, partly as a way of attacking the Democrats' funding base: by straitjacketing the potential spending promises of any Democratic candidate for the presidency. Jonathan Rauch, a leading political writer in Washington, fleshes out the list a little in a noted recent piece in National Journal: "Tax cuts dry up future Democratic spending initiatives; competitive sourcing weakens public employees' unions; education reform weakens teachers' unions; litigation reform weakens the trial lawyers; trade liberalisation, another Bush priority, weakens private-sector unions." Are these men, Gabler and Rauch, perhaps being a touch paranoid about the Republicans' motives? Not at all. One of the leading Republican strategists in Washington, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and sometimes called the field marshal of the Bush plan, confirms that the Bush policy agenda is indeed designed to cut into the Democrats' support structure: "The Democratic Party – trial lawyers, labour union leaders, the two wings of the dependency movement (people on welfare, people who manage welfare), the coercive utopians (people who tell us our cars should be teeny), government employees – all the parts of that coalition shrink, and our coalition grows, every time you make one of these reforms."

This is the agenda that Bush has chosen to pursue. He has chosen partisan warfare and the destruction of the political opposition's power base over national unity. As for his decision to jettison the global coalition in favour of a unilateral invasion of Iraq, Bush has chosen this course because it works for him on two levels: as an adjunct to his domestic political agenda, and because it forms part of his Administration's vision of perpetuating US power. [...]

The full scope of the Bush agenda may also flow in part from the personal convictions of the president himself. In his 1999 pitch for office, a book titled A Charge to Keep (Perennial, 2001), Bush wrote that he learned from his father's experience as president that political capital was not a collectible to hoard but a currency to be used. His father had not spent the political capital he had earned in winning the first Gulf War, and W was determined not to make the same mistake.

What to expect from the next president: Bush depends on loyalty, relationships to make his different style of governing work (TIM NICKENS, November 5, 2000, St. Petersburg Times)

Texas state Sen. Ken Armbrister couldn't believe it.

Three weeks after the 1994 election, the Democrat answered the telephone and heard a man identify himself as George W. Bush.

"I thought, "Which one of my crazy friends is this, putting a joke on me?' " Armbrister recalled.

But it was the new Republican governor of Texas, asking the legislator for an appointment. And when they met, Armbrister said, "at the end of the conversation, he said, "I am not a guy for labels. I hope I can call on you for help.' "

On the road to Tuesday's election, Bush emphasizes his willingness to reach out to members of both parties even while promising Republicans in Congress, "Help is on the way."

That is just one example of the apparent contradictions in Bush's approach to governing -- and there is no guarantee that the personal charm that worked for the son of the former president in Austin would work in Washington.

He relies on personal relationships, yet it is hard to imagine a president forging such close ties with members of such a partisan Congress.

He lists Ronald Reagan as his favorite president other than his father and welcomes comparisons of his tax cuts to Reagan's. But while Bush and Reagan share a lack of interest in the details of public policy and exude a certain personal warmth, Bush does not share the Great Communicator's oratorical skills.

Bush also likes to portray himself as a bolder leader than Vice President Al Gore. He says at rallies that he is willing to stick with his massive tax cuts even in the face of criticism from "pundits," and that he tackled a controversial overhaul of Social Security despite warnings from consultants that it would be politically risky.

Yet Bush's Texas record is filled with successes on issues that already had bold support, such as education and welfare reform. His most ambitious legislative effort, a dramatic overhaul of the tax structure in 1997, failed because lawmakers from his party failed to support him.

But rather than go down to defeat in defending a principle, Bush cut a deal with legislators that led to another enormous, straightforward tax cut.

Bush is expected to stick with the same approach in Washington that he has used in Austin:

Focus on a few big issues, including some that are in the pipeline.

Establish broad goals but leave the specifics to others.

Compromise to achieve victory and avoid confrontations that could produce losses.

In his first legislative session, Bush focused on four major issues that he brought from his 1994 campaign: education, juvenile justice, welfare and tort reform.

Those issues were being addressed in some form by the Legislature, and Bush worked with members of both parties in 1995 to pass major legislation in all those areas, along with a record tax cut.

"George W. Bush is not Bill Clinton," Republican Texas state Sen. Teel Bivins said at a forum sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts examining how Bush might govern. "He is not a detail-oriented, policy-wonk kind of a guy . . . and (what the media views) as disinterest in issues, I see as incredible political discipline. George W. Bush looks at the state of Texas, figures out what he thinks are the foremost important issues facing the state, and that's all he talked about in the campaign, and what were the four major bills that passed his first session? Those four issues. He's said, oftentimes, he doesn't want to waste political capital on issues that he doesn't believe are the top priority."

In his presidential campaign, Bush has similarly focused on a handful of issues and hammered away at them regardless of the criticism.

"One of the things I've done in Texas is I've been able to put together a good team of people," Bush said in the second debate. "I've been able to set clear goals. The goals are to be an education system that leaves no child behind, Medicare for our seniors, a Social Security system that's safe and secure, foreign policy that's in our nation's interests, and a strong military."

He has strayed from those goals and his tax cuts only once. In early September, Bush proposed his prescription drug plan for seniors just as Gore was turning up the heat on the issue.

Whether Bush would meet with as much success in Washington as he has in Texas is open to debate. There are many more issues and personalities to juggle in the nation's capital.

How Will Bush Manage his Triumph?: Control of Capitol Hill gives the White House a free hand to pursue its agenda. But governing with a majority carries a price (JOHN DICKERSON, Nov. 06, 2002, TIME)

When George Bush came into office despite losing the popular vote, he took on the stride of a man who had won an impressive mandate. What will he do now that he has one? There may be too much over-reading of the 2002 election results, but there's no doubt it was a very good night for the 43rd President. He overcame 40 years of mid-term electoral tradition by increasing his party's share of the House seats and made history by re-taking the Senate. He helped rescue his brother's wobbly gubernatorial campaign and, in doing so, buried a lot of the ghosts of the Florida 2000 presidential recount. Oh, and he also left his opposition in chaos and disorder without looking like a political hack—keeping clean and crisp the wartime posture that has sustained his high approval ratings.

The President talks often and at length about his ability to spend his political capital wisely. It is one of the few areas where he will openly criticize his father, who had held too tightly on to his 90 percent approval rating following the Gulf War. During this campaign, Bush wrote a lot of political checks on his approval rating in the form of record fundraising and political travel, and the investment appears to have paid off.

If President Bush had a good night, his political adviser Karl Rove had an even better one. His hand-picked candidates in Missouri, South Dakota, Minnesota, Tennessee and New Hampshire all won. There was some bruising of Rove's image after his candidate Richard Riordan lost the California Republican primary, but that's small beans now. Rove was able to even pick up little victories as well. The new senator and governor of South Carolina were both strong McCain backers in 2000 who boasted during the hard fought presidential primary there two years ago that they were the future of that state's political class. They are, thanks to George Bush's helping hand. Rove's goal of transforming the Republican party into a majority governing party for the new century got a big boost last night. As one Republican adviser joked last night, "He will be insufferable."

Now that the president has increased his hoard, the question becomes how skillfully Bush will manage his new stack of political assets: Will he over-read the results of the election in the manner of Bill Clinton in 1992 and Newt Gingrich in 1996? Or will he realize that the Democrats helped author their own demise and that being a good anti-terror president may not translate into support for his ideas on tax cuts or prescription drugs?

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 16, 2004 10:58 AM