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'Excellent at politics and spin, not very
good at governance'
Time
Joe Klein
October 9, 2005
As the Harriet Miers burlesque unraveled last week, adding to a cacophony of
presidential woes, I happened to check the calendar: it was only the first week
of October 2005. George W. Bush's second term was less than nine months old. He
has about 1,200 days left in office, a span greater than the entire length of
John F. Kennedy's presidency. Time sure flies when you're having fun.
What an awful year for the President and the country. There was the failure
of Social Security reform, a good idea that was misplaced as the
Administration's top priority. There was the shameless political grandstanding
in the Terri Schiavo case. There was Katrina. There is the stench of corruption
rising from the Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff scandals and the appointment of so
many hacks and cronies to positions of power. There is the possibility that
Karl Rove and other top Administration officials will soon be indicted in the
Valerie Plame leak case. There was, and is, the failure to deal head-on with
the Iraq war and make the necessary adjustments—more troops, more
pressure on the corrupt and Iranophilic government of Ibrahim
al-Jaafari—that might secure a better outcome. The higher gasoline prices
portend a very expensive home-heating winter. About the only thing that went
well for Bush was the nomination of the indisputably excellent John Roberts to
the Supreme Court.
Well, only 1,200 days to go—which means, of course, that Bush has
plenty of time to resurrect himself; in fact, he will probably survive several
boom-and-bust cycles before Jan. 20, 2009, rolls around. The ways of
presidential resurrection are many. We've seen sagging Presidents revive their
fortunes in a trice. In 1995 Bill Clinton had to insist that he was "still
relevant" in a city that had fallen in love with Newt Gingrich's Republican
revolution. But a few days later, he was a hero again after his eloquent
handling of the Oklahoma City tragedy. George W. Bush's own presidency was
limping along until it was transformed on Sept. 11, 2001. But you can't order
up an act of God—and even another terrorist attack on American soil might
only serve to reinforce the doubts about Bush's leadership that Iraq and
Katrina have raised.
A more likely way to regain footing would be a Grand New Policy Proposal.
All of us high- minded pundits would just be thrilled if the President decided
to launch an energy-independence Manhattan Project to help extricate the nation
from the thrall of the oil sheiks. Bush has been touting Jimmy Carter- like
conservation pinpricks in recent weeks; the air conditioning in the White House
has been turned down. But it would be very un-Bush to call for the
50(cent)-per-gal. gasoline tax that even some conservatives are supporting. In
fact, it's far more likely that the next Grand New Policy Proposal will be
another tax cut gussied up as tax "reform," perhaps even the abolition of the
progressive income tax, replaced by a sales or flat tax. But that sort of thing
would probably meet the same fate as Social Security reform. Congress has
turned balky. The public may be skeptical of huge tax blowouts so long as more
pressing problems—like Iraq, the federal deficit, the economic iffiness
caused by high gasoline prices-- are untended.
A Republican Senator proposed a third route privately last week.
"This Administration has been excellent at politics and spin," he told me.
"It hasn't been very good at governance. Perhaps it's time for Bush to do what
Ronald Reagan did to shore up his White House in the final years—bring in
a team of terrific managers, people with credibility from Day One." Faced with
the Iran-contra scandal, Reagan brought in Howard Baker and then Ken Duberstein
as chiefs of staff, Frank Carlucci and then Colin Powell as National Security
Advisers (Powell told Reagan, in no uncertain terms, that Lieut. Colonel Oliver
North, who was running an illegal war from the White House basement, had to
go). President Bush confronts nothing so threatening to his Administration as
Iran-contra. But it's probably time to renovate the West Wing staff under new
leadership. And there aren't three people in the Pentagon who can understand
why Donald Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense after presiding over one of
the great debacles in American military history: the failure to prepare for the
Iraqi insurgency.
It was interesting to watch Bush return again and again to New Orleans after
Katrina—each visit more desperate and incredible than the last, each
serving only to reinforce the public notion that he was trying to talk his way
out of a situation that he had failed to manage properly. Bush's bold ideas and
soaring rhetoric have come to seem a dodge, a way to avoid the serious scut
work involved in actually running the country. "Maybe he should give his dad a
call," the Republican Senator said, referring to Bush the Elder's meticulous
foreign policy, "and find out how to do it."
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