News Analysis: Bush remains upbeat, but loyalists squirm
News Analysis: Bush remains upbeat, but loyalists squirm
By Elisabeth Bumiller and David E. Sanger. Copyright by The New York Times
MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006
WASHINGTON Inside the White House, the staff is exhausted and the mood is defiant. Republicans are clamoring for a new chief of staff, the West Wing just cut its losses on a deal that would have given a Dubai company control of some terminal operations at six U.S. ports and President George W. Bush's approval rating is at record lows.
But senior staff members insist that Bush is in good spirits, that calls from his party to inject new blood to the White House make him ever more stubborn to keep the old and that he has become so inured to outside criticism that he increasingly tunes it out. There is no sense of crisis, they say, even over rebellious Republicans in Congress, because the White House has been in almost constant crisis since Sept. 11, 2001, and Bush has never had much regard for Congress anyway.
"You know, people say to me, my buddies in Texas, 'How do you handle all this stuff?'" Bush said at a gathering of newspaper editors Friday in Washington. "You know, it's just after a while you get used to it."
Staff members, many of whom have been with Bush since he started running for president in 1999, responded Friday in a now-familiar way: To mark the three-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, they announced that Bush would give a new round of speeches, starting Monday at George Washington University.
As always, there will be no change in policy. Bush will talk, they said, about new progress in defeating "improvised explosive devices" and argue that the televised pictures of rising casualties and sectarian fighting obscure progress under way.
But to answer criticism from both parties that Iraq can't be fixed with another good-news speech, Bush will also try to confront the realities of the war.
"Amid the daily news of car bombs and kidnappings and brutal killings, I can understand why many of our fellow citizens are now wondering if the entire mission is worth it," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address, foreshadowing one of the themes of his speech Monday.
As Bush struggles yet again to change public opinion on Iraq, Republicans say there is no escaping the truth that the White House has careened from crisis to crisis in the second term and that the president has yet to develop a coherent agenda. Every development, they say, from Vice President Dick Cheney's accidental shooting of a fellow hunter to the arrest on Thursday of Bush's former domestic policy adviser, Claude Allen, on theft charges, underscores a White House that is seeming to lose its once- vaunted discipline and control.
The ports deal was a case in point, they said. Even White House officials acknowledged that by the time a delegation of congressional Republicans told Bush in the Oval Office on Thursday morning that it was a lost cause, Bush put up no fight.
By midafternoon, after the Dubai company had dropped out of the deal, the president just seemed relieved that the storm was over. In a gathering at the White House, Bush faked a playful punch at Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, who led opposition to the deal, then pinched King's cheek.
But if the president was determined to project cheer about cutting his losses, the uproar over the ports has set off bleak assessments from both parties in Washington that the White House has lost its focus, energy and political touch.
"With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight they should have known it would create a storm," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, speaking of the ports deal that he himself supported.
It was only the latest crisis to hit Bush in a second term that has been dominated by problems in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, a CIA leak investigation, a secret eavesdropping program and the failure of the president to push forward the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, an overhaul of Social Security.
But the Dubai deal exposed as never before the limits of Republican loyalty to a weakened Bush, whose record low approval ratings 34 percent in a CBS poll conducted in February have pushed members of his own party to declare that the White House can no longer call all the shots. By the end of the week, the ports deal had brought to a boiling point years of anger on Capitol Hill about a White House seen as imperious and dismissive of real consultation with Congress.
"They have a transmitter but not a listening device," said one well-known Republican with close ties to the administration who gets calls from White House staff members. "They'll say, 'What are you hearing, what's going on?' You tell them things aren't good on the Hill, you've got problems here, you've got problems there, or 'I was in Detroit and boy did I get an earful.' And their answer is, 'Everybody's just reading the headlines, we've got to get our message out better.' There's denial going on, and it starts at the top."
The bottom line, Republicans say, is that the war continues to overshadow the domestic agenda that Bush put forth in January in a State of the Union address that was supposed to reinvigorate his presidency.
"Roughly one out of three people say that the country is on the wrong track, and the reason they give is the Iraq war," said Bill McInturff, a leading Republican pollster. "How will that situation be changed unless Iraq is resolved in the next few months? So the White House can do all the good things they're doing with renewable energy and health care and all their other initiatives, but that doesn't move that chunk of people with very hardened attitudes."
Carl Hulse, David D. Kirkpatrick and Adam Nagourney contributed reporting for this article.
By Elisabeth Bumiller and David E. Sanger. Copyright by The New York Times
MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006
WASHINGTON Inside the White House, the staff is exhausted and the mood is defiant. Republicans are clamoring for a new chief of staff, the West Wing just cut its losses on a deal that would have given a Dubai company control of some terminal operations at six U.S. ports and President George W. Bush's approval rating is at record lows.
But senior staff members insist that Bush is in good spirits, that calls from his party to inject new blood to the White House make him ever more stubborn to keep the old and that he has become so inured to outside criticism that he increasingly tunes it out. There is no sense of crisis, they say, even over rebellious Republicans in Congress, because the White House has been in almost constant crisis since Sept. 11, 2001, and Bush has never had much regard for Congress anyway.
"You know, people say to me, my buddies in Texas, 'How do you handle all this stuff?'" Bush said at a gathering of newspaper editors Friday in Washington. "You know, it's just after a while you get used to it."
Staff members, many of whom have been with Bush since he started running for president in 1999, responded Friday in a now-familiar way: To mark the three-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, they announced that Bush would give a new round of speeches, starting Monday at George Washington University.
As always, there will be no change in policy. Bush will talk, they said, about new progress in defeating "improvised explosive devices" and argue that the televised pictures of rising casualties and sectarian fighting obscure progress under way.
But to answer criticism from both parties that Iraq can't be fixed with another good-news speech, Bush will also try to confront the realities of the war.
"Amid the daily news of car bombs and kidnappings and brutal killings, I can understand why many of our fellow citizens are now wondering if the entire mission is worth it," Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address, foreshadowing one of the themes of his speech Monday.
As Bush struggles yet again to change public opinion on Iraq, Republicans say there is no escaping the truth that the White House has careened from crisis to crisis in the second term and that the president has yet to develop a coherent agenda. Every development, they say, from Vice President Dick Cheney's accidental shooting of a fellow hunter to the arrest on Thursday of Bush's former domestic policy adviser, Claude Allen, on theft charges, underscores a White House that is seeming to lose its once- vaunted discipline and control.
The ports deal was a case in point, they said. Even White House officials acknowledged that by the time a delegation of congressional Republicans told Bush in the Oval Office on Thursday morning that it was a lost cause, Bush put up no fight.
By midafternoon, after the Dubai company had dropped out of the deal, the president just seemed relieved that the storm was over. In a gathering at the White House, Bush faked a playful punch at Representative Peter King, Republican of New York, who led opposition to the deal, then pinched King's cheek.
But if the president was determined to project cheer about cutting his losses, the uproar over the ports has set off bleak assessments from both parties in Washington that the White House has lost its focus, energy and political touch.
"With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight they should have known it would create a storm," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, speaking of the ports deal that he himself supported.
It was only the latest crisis to hit Bush in a second term that has been dominated by problems in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, a CIA leak investigation, a secret eavesdropping program and the failure of the president to push forward the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, an overhaul of Social Security.
But the Dubai deal exposed as never before the limits of Republican loyalty to a weakened Bush, whose record low approval ratings 34 percent in a CBS poll conducted in February have pushed members of his own party to declare that the White House can no longer call all the shots. By the end of the week, the ports deal had brought to a boiling point years of anger on Capitol Hill about a White House seen as imperious and dismissive of real consultation with Congress.
"They have a transmitter but not a listening device," said one well-known Republican with close ties to the administration who gets calls from White House staff members. "They'll say, 'What are you hearing, what's going on?' You tell them things aren't good on the Hill, you've got problems here, you've got problems there, or 'I was in Detroit and boy did I get an earful.' And their answer is, 'Everybody's just reading the headlines, we've got to get our message out better.' There's denial going on, and it starts at the top."
The bottom line, Republicans say, is that the war continues to overshadow the domestic agenda that Bush put forth in January in a State of the Union address that was supposed to reinvigorate his presidency.
"Roughly one out of three people say that the country is on the wrong track, and the reason they give is the Iraq war," said Bill McInturff, a leading Republican pollster. "How will that situation be changed unless Iraq is resolved in the next few months? So the White House can do all the good things they're doing with renewable energy and health care and all their other initiatives, but that doesn't move that chunk of people with very hardened attitudes."
Carl Hulse, David D. Kirkpatrick and Adam Nagourney contributed reporting for this article.
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