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Bush Trust in Cheney, Rove Tested as Public
Confidence Declines
Bloomberg
Kristin Jensen and Richard Keil
November 21, 2005
Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans
rallied behind President George W. Bush, who had stood atop the rubble of the
Twin Towers in New York vowing to hunt down those responsible for the worst
terrorist act in U.S. history. Bush's approval rating soared as he took just 26
days to go to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Four years later, after winning re-election by 3 million votes, it's a
different world for the president. His popularity is at a record low as a
scandal shakes the White House, the deaths mount in Iraq and his response to
everything from hurricanes to surging gasoline prices is being challenged by
Republicans and Democrats alike.
The backlash stems in part from an insular style that has defined Bush's
five years in the White House -- an approach that can both lead to resolute
action and leave the president with few allies, historians and lawmakers say. A
band of trusted officials crafts far-reaching policies on issues ranging from
the invasion of Iraq to the overhaul of Social Security, and Bush goes with his
gut, driven by moral certitude, they say.
"Certainly we want a man of resolve," says Stanley Kutler, a historian who
in 1992 sued to obtain access to tapes from President Richard Nixon's
administration to write the book "Abuse of Power" (Free Press, 1997). "But
there is a time, too, where a man has to say, `No, wait a minute. Let me sit
down with you guys, and let's see where we go."'
Bush, 59, cares deeply about some issues such as tax cuts and the war on
terrorism, former administration officials say. He relies on advisers, mainly
Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, to lead the way
on the rest.
Far Less Analysis
There is far less analysis than during the presidencies of Gerald Ford,
Nixon or Bush's father, says Richard Clarke, the former White House
counterterrorism chief.
"In the first Bush administration -- George H.W. Bush -- and in the Ford
administration and Nixon administration, there were analytical papers written
on major decisions," says Clarke, 55, a former special adviser to Bush who
clashed with the administration. "That doesn't go on very much now. The inner
tribe comes to the conclusion of where they want to go, and then the staff work
that is done is justifying it."
Bush's response to the Sept. 11 attacks sent his approval rating climbing to
90 percent in a Gallup Organization poll later that month. He parlayed that
popularity into a series of legislative victories.
Helped by Rove, 54, the president co-opted traditional Democratic issues
such as education and health care, making good on campaign promises to pass a
law setting standards for schools and adding a prescription drug benefit to
Medicare.
$1.85 Trillion in Tax Cuts {correction: $1.85 trillion of debt):
He got Congress sto pass tax cuts totaling $1.85 trillion, won limits on
class-action lawsuits and signed into law a measure with sharp increases in
highway funds, much of which goes to industry. Business leaders credit the
president, who earned a master of business administration degree from Harvard
University, for an economy that increased at an average of 3.8 percent in the
third quarter of 2005, above the average quarterly rate in the past 20 years of
3.1 percent.
"The president is a good manager," House Majority Leader Roy Blunt says.
"He's the first MBA to ever be president, and I think that shows in his
management style."
Contrary to the charges of critics, Blunt says, Bush often consults
lawmakers. "He insists on a broad range of information," Blunt, 55, says.
Rove Distraction
The most immediate challenge for Bush's second term is the Oct. 28
indictment of Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis Libby, on obstruction of justice
charges. A cloud still hangs over Rove in that case as well, and the
distraction may hinder Bush's chances of pursuing ambitious goals for a second
term, including rewriting the tax code.
The president must also overcome the concerns of fiscal conservatives who
have long dominated the Republican Party. In 2002, he signed legislation
creating the Department of Homeland Security -- the biggest reorganization of
the federal government in a half-century -- despite his misgivings about the
vast expansion of the bureaucracy.
Bush hasn't vetoed a single bill in five years and has proposed such
potential budget-busting programs as the establishment of private investment
accounts in Social Security and the prescription drug benefit.
The government, which recorded budget surpluses from fiscal 1998 to fiscal
2001, reported a $413 billion deficit in the year ended on Sept. 30, 2004.
While the deficit has been shrinking during 2005 as tax revenue has surged,
Bush's tax cuts, the Medicare legislation and spending on the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars may lead to record deficits in coming years, economists
say.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Yet Bush's presidency may be defined by his boldest decisions -- invading
Afghanistan and Iraq.
The move to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003 initially enjoyed broad support
among Americans and in Congress as Bush, former Secretary of State Colin Powell
and then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice made the public case that
the Iraqi leader possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The decision to invade emerged, once again, from a small group of trusted
advisers, Clarke says. Bush's father had failed to depose Hussein during the
first Gulf War.
Cheney, who had worked for the elder Bush, and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld returned to the White House with a plan to take on Iraq again, long
before the terrorist attacks, Clarke says.
`Preconceived Plans'
"They were talking about Iraq on the evening of 9/11," Clarke says. "I
remember Rumsfeld saying, `Yeah, well, we can invade Afghanistan, but that's
not enough. There's not enough targets in Afghanistan.' They wanted to use 9/11
as an excuse to implement their preconceived plans to invade Iraq."
To his admirers, Bush is a man who cares about principles, not backroom
deals. During a visit to Russia in 2002, he told a group of students: "In order
to lead, you've got to know what you believe. You have to stand on principle.
You have to believe in certain values, and you must defend them at all
costs."
Bush describes the world in both moralistic and personal terms that are
sometimes extraordinary for a world leader: Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of
the Sept. 11 attacks, is an evil, stone-cold killer; Russian President Vladimir
Putin is someone Americans can trust.
"I looked the man in the eye," Bush said of Putin in June 2001. "I was able
to get a sense of his soul."
In April 2002, he called Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "a man of
peace," incensing Arab leaders.
`Compassionate Conservative'
When asked a week later after a meeting with then Crown Prince Abdullah
whether the Saudi monarch had objected, Bush said he and the Arab leader had
"established a strong personal bond," adding, "We spent a lot of time alone,
discussing our respective visions, talking about our families."
During the 2000 campaign, Bush cast himself as a "compassionate
conservative" and promised to improve schools and win the prescription drug
benefit for the elderly.
"Broadly defined, President Bush sees his major role as being one of moral
leadership," says Vin Weber, 53, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota
who advises the White House.
To his detractors, Bush lives in a world of black and white, failing to see
the shades of gray that they believe determine nuanced, and successful,
policy.
"He's a person who is convinced of his own rectitude," historian Kutler
says. "Forty-some years ago, we had a wonderful slogan that I think worked very
well, and that is, politics is the art of the possible, which meant that there
was give and take. There's none of that here."
Across the Aisle
In past administrations, presidents pursued friends across "the aisle," as
the dividing line between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and House is
known in Washington.
President Bill Clinton, the Democrat who served between Bush and his father,
appointed a Republican -- William Cohen -- as his defense secretary.
Bush's White House lacks such relationships, lawmakers say. David Obey, a
Democratic representative from Wisconsin, says the president's approach
contrasts with that of the elder Bush.
"His father leaned overboard to work with people," Obey, 67, says.
At a dinner in 2004, Cheney, 64, was asked which congressional Democrats had
the closest relationships with the administration. The vice president, who had
Democratic friends on Capitol Hill when he represented Wyoming in Congress from
1979 to 1989, first replied "Tom Foley," the former House Speaker who lost his
seat in 1994 -- six years before Bush took office.
`A Notorious Phoner'
"We pretty much just deal with the Democratic leadership," Cheney added.
Representative Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee who once worked as a strategist for Clinton, recalls how
Bush's predecessor loved to jawbone lawmakers of both parties in an effort to
reach agreement on legislation.
"He was a notorious phoner, would call people at all hours of the day and
night, and loved the give-and-take part of the process," Emanuel says of
Clinton. "And he developed friendships that way, even with Republicans."
Adds Emanuel, "I don't know of a single member of the Democratic caucus who
can talk about any kind of professional or personal relationship with President
Bush."
Those frayed ties with lawmakers showed this year, when Bush was pressing
his plan to carve private investment accounts out of the Social Security
system. The White House made few efforts to reach out to Democrats.
Privatization Plan
Then it discovered that Republicans were also deeply divided over the plan
to allow pensioners to invest in the stock and bond markets. Added to that, the
plan faced assaults from labor unions and AARP, the largest lobby for elderly
Americans, and it ran aground.
Earlier this year, after Bush failed to generate much public support during
a nationwide tour to tout his plan, Representative Charles Rangel of New York
says he told Bush at a meeting that he could reach a compromise on ensuring the
solvency of the system if he'd stop pressing for the accounts.
"He told me, `I am the president of the United States, and privatization
will be on the table as long as I am president,"' says Rangel, 75, the ranking
Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over
Social Security.
North Korea
Bush ran for the presidency in 2000, pledging to shun many of the policies
of the Clinton administration -- deriding the "nation building" his predecessor
had pursued in Bosnia and Haiti, walking away from the Kyoto Protocol on
climate change and playing down the importance of getting directly involved
with negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Bush White House
would handle North Korea in its own way, too.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005,
says his boss advocated direct negotiations with North Korea to curb the
regime's nuclear weapons program. The plan was to "pick up where President
Clinton and his administration left off" in negotiations, Powell told reporters
on March 6, 2001.
A day later, he came out of a meeting with Bush in the Oval Office and
backed away from his remarks. "There was some suggestion that imminent
negotiations are about to begin -- that is not the case," Powell said.
It was a victory for Cheney and Rumsfeld, who had little interest in
one-on-one meetings with the North Koreans. Cheney appealed to the
ranch-owning, cowboy side of Bush, Wilkerson says.
`Real Wishy-Washy'
Powell would sit in the Oval Office and tell Bush, "You've got to talk;
you've got to sit down and look across the table with one another," Wilkerson,
60, says. "Sometimes the president would get real wishy-washy on it. And then
the vice president would slip in, and the president would put his cowboy hat on
and his .45, and you'd have the same old thing."
Supporters say Bush, who declined to comment for this article, seeks more
opinions than people realize. "We probably meet with the president more often
than we meet with the Senate," says Deborah Pryce, a representative from Ohio
who's chairwoman of the House Republican Conference.
Republican leaders meet with Bush at least once a month to hatch strategy on
bills, Pryce, 54, says.
Majority Leader Blunt, who has breakfast twice a month with Rove, gives Bush
credit for helping him eke out a victory in the House on the Central American
Free Trade Agreement. During a White House meeting with Bush, Blunt told the
president that more Republicans might support the agreement if they believed
the measure would improve national security.
Closed-Door Meeting
The day before the vote, Bush made a rare appearance on Capitol Hill for a
closed-door meeting with all House Republicans, Blunt says. He made the case
that a growing Central American economy would help the U.S. by stemming illegal
immigration and reducing threats of terrorism. The legislation passed 217-215
on July 28.
"He gave every ounce of cooperation from the administration's standpoint
that he could possibly give," Blunt says.
Polls taken during the past five years have repeatedly shown that Americans
consider the plain-spoken Bush honest and a strong leader, though the scandal
surrounding the disclosure of the name of a Central Intelligence Agency
operative has eroded that view, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll
conducted Oct. 30-Nov. 2.
The president is decisive but not impulsive, says Representative Curt
Weldon, 58, a Republican from Pennsylvania and senior member of the House Armed
Services Committee.
`Master of Low Expectations'
"He knows what he wants," says Weldon, who estimates he's met with Bush 75
times. "He doesn't put his finger in the air to see what some poll says. He
doesn't know the details and mechanics, but he knows what he wants to do."
Bush himself is open about his propensity to shy away from deep thinking and
fancy pronouncements. "I'm the master of low expectations," he told reporters
aboard Air Force One on June 4, 2003, after brokering talks between then
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and Israel's Sharon. "I'm
not a very formal guy. I'm also not very analytical. I don't spend a lot of
time thinking about myself, about why I do things."
Bush also doesn't spend much time getting into the weeds of policy to absorb
essential information, his critics say.
After anthrax-laced letters killed five people in the U.S. in late 2001,
forcing the shutdown of several Senate offices and postal facilities,
Representative Obey joined other congressional leaders at the White House to
meet with Bush.
`National Security Risk'
The president arrived and said he had time for three or four questions
before departing for another meeting.
Obey, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, says he
asked about four federal installations he had been told were vulnerable to
attack. "To put it kindly, if he had been briefed, he gave no evidence
thereof," Obey says.
Obey recalls he turned to then House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt as he
was leaving the meeting and said, "That man is the biggest national security
risk in the United States."
Bush leaves the specifics largely to Cheney and Rove. Rove has been enmeshed
in the Bush family since the 1970s, when he began working with the elder Bush
as a College Republican, yet his primary ties are to George W. Bush.
When the younger Bush won his race for governor of Texas in 1994, Rove was a
chief strategist. Along the way, Rove played a major role in the shift of Texas
from a Democrat-controlled state to one run by Republicans.
Power of Cheney and Rove
Last November, Bush called him the "architect" of his re- election.
The power of Cheney and Rove in the White House means that few other stars
have emerged from the administration. Powell, 68, who was considered a
presidential contender after his successful tenure as chairman of the
military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, left the State Department early in Bush's
second term.
Bush replaced him with Rice, his right-hand woman through the first term as
national security adviser.
The lack of luminaries in the administration is especially apparent in
economic policy making -- all the more striking because of Bush's statements
that he strives to run his government as a chief executive officer would govern
a corporation.
The administration hasn't produced a single economic policy maker who
approaches the stature of Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury secretary from 1995
to 1999, or James Baker, who served in that role, among others, during
President Ronald Reagan's tenure from 1981 to 1989.
O'Neill Fired
Stephen Friedman, 67, who was co-chairman of Goldman, Sachs & Co. along
with Rubin in the early 1990s, served two years as Bush's National Economic
Council director, a role that's supposed to place him among the president's top
advisers. During his tenure, few of his colleagues could cite a single instance
in which Friedman put his stamp on a policy.
Bush fired Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa Inc., in
December 2002 as the economy stalled and after O'Neill had opposed tax cuts and
lost battles with the White House on the imposition of steel tariffs.
O'Neill, 69, who had regular meetings with his friend Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan, said in the book "The Price of Loyalty" (Simon &
Schuster, 2004), written by journalist Ron Suskind, that Bush was disengaged
and uninterested in economic policy.
Inner Circle
"If you asked me what's the best job, it may be working closely with Karl
Rove, which tells you where a lot of the stuff emanates from," says James
Glassman, a senior economist at J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. in New York and a
former Fed economist. "It's a different style from Clinton's, which was open
forum and open debate."
The inner circle of this White House is also largely built around Cheney.
The vice president, who served as George H.W. Bush's defense secretary, led the
search for a vice presidential candidate when the younger Bush ran for
president in 2000. Bush ended up settling on him.
Then Bush relied on Cheney's relationships in Washington when hiring
Rumsfeld, 73, and Paul Wolfowitz, 61, a former Defense Department official who
now runs the World Bank.
"Bush has delegated a lot more authority and control to Cheney than any
other president," says Joel Goldstein, a vice presidential scholar at the St.
Louis University School of Law. "He has authority across the board to act as a
chief operating officer."
Advocate for Secrecy
Cheney was one of the most vocal advocates for the invasion of Iraq. He
wrote Bush's national energy policy that emphasized production rather than
conservation, and he lobbied lawmakers for Bush's tax cuts.
At the same time, Cheney is one of the White House's chief advocates for
secrecy. He fought efforts to compel public testimony by Bush and himself
before the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, and he
kept outsiders largely in the dark about a task force he ran to devise the
energy policy.
Cheney's energy task force didn't hold a single public hearing as he
privately got recommendations from major energy companies such as Chevron Corp.
and Enron Corp.
Bush adopted the group's recommendations calling for tax breaks for energy
companies and the opening of more public land for oil drilling, particularly in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Environmental groups sued,
charging the task force with neglecting their concerns and pointing to the
episode as a case of partisan pandering.
Outside Attention
Cheney's approach stands in contrast to a similar task force created in 1989
by the elder Bush that was led by then Energy Secretary James Watkins. That
group held 18 public hearings.
Cheney's office has been drawing a lot of outside attention since the
resignation of Libby, who also served as the vice president's national security
adviser. A grand jury investigating who leaked the name of a covert CIA agent
charged Libby with making false statements, perjury and obstruction of
justice.
The agent, Valerie Plame, is married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who
publicly criticized Bush's rationale for the war in Iraq. Cheney told Libby
that Wilson's wife worked for the agency, according to the indictment. Libby
pleaded not guilty on Nov. 3.
Critics say Bush's closed style of management and tendency to rely on
relationships to make decisions colored his response to Hurricane Katrina,
which claimed more than a thousand lives and destroyed swaths of New Orleans
shortly after it came ashore on Aug. 29.
FEMA's Brown
They say the president failed to react quickly enough and had placed the
wrong person in one of the most important relief roles -- running the Federal
Emergency Management Agency.
Michael Brown, 50, Bush's appointment to run FEMA, was a friend of the
president's former campaign manager whose most recent job had been as a
commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association from 1991 to
2001.
Brown quit the agency on Sept. 12 amid a hail of criticism that he wasn't
qualified to lead. Bush took the heat for elevating Brown to the job.
"Katrina really hit it home that the MBA president failed to be a CEO in a
way we thought we had a right to expect," says Barbara Kellerman, a Harvard
University professor who specializes in presidential leadership. "If this were
the CEO of the company, he'd be booted out."
Ambitious Agenda
Bush's tendency to focus on an ambitious agenda sets him up for great
successes and failures, says Stephen Hess, a speechwriter under Republican
President Dwight Eisenhower. "He is a bigger-picture person," says Hess, who's
now a political analyst at Washington's Brookings Institution. "And that means
there is more possibility for big stumbling."
Bush shows few signs of changing his model for decision making, and he may
even be taking it a step further. After getting advice from a small group of
trusted advisers on whom to nominate for the Supreme Court, he decided to pick
one of them - - White House Counsel Harriet Miers.
The October decision stunned even many of his Republican allies in Congress
because few of them had been consulted beforehand and because she had little
background in constitutional law. Miers withdrew from consideration 24 days
later, and Bush then nominated Samuel Alito, a U.S. appeals court judge, for
the post.
To contact the reporters on this story:
Kristin Jensen in Washington at kjensen@bloomberg.net
Richard Keil in Washington at dkeil@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: November 21, 2005 00:23 ES
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