From the Globe & Mail
Curious George
Pretzel-choking dimwit or triumphant warrior -- how do we know which one is the real George Walker Bush? On the first anniversary of his inauguration, Washington bureau chief JOHN IBBITSON sizes up the perplexing U.S. President's amazing rookie year in office. Then he dusts off his crystal ball to see what lies ahead
By JOHN IBBITSON
Saturday, January 19, 2002 – Page F1
One year ago tomorrow, George W. Bush took office as the 43rd President of the United States. He seemed so small.
But for the vagaries of Florida voting machines, he might not have been President at all. His agenda appeared petty and mean: withdrawing from international agreements, drilling for oil on environmentally sensitive land; cutting taxes in a country that is already one of the least taxed in the world. Six months later, his own advisers reportedly were worried that the presidency lacked vision.
Today, he bestrides the world like a colossus. Consider: There are U.S. troops in Afghanistan, in Pakistan and en route to the Philippines. They soon could be in Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia and Malaysia. This week, a reporter asked what the United States would do if Saddam Hussein did not let arms-inspection teams into Iraq.
"He'll find out," the President replied flatly, dangerously.
This massive intervention in the affairs of other states is all part of a new and ongoing war against terrorism. In the name of this war, the Bush administration has taken apart and put back together the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other key agencies, their focus now on identifying and preventing terrorism. It has changed the core mandate of the military, from fighting conventional or nuclear war to intervening in far-flung states where U.S. interests are threatened.
Bush has conjured $40-billion and counting to bolster safeguards against terrorist attack and provide economic assistance to its victims. He has suspended habeas corpus for non-citizens accused of terrorist crimes. He is withdrawing the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the better to expedite a missile shield against terrorist or rogue-state nuclear attack.
And he seems, somehow, to have reached past the media to embody the anger, the determination and the hopes of the American people. In the memorial service after the Sept. 11 attacks; at ground zero, surrounded by firefighters; in his Sept. 20 speech to Congress, in recent town-hall meetings packed with adoring and carefully chosen crowds, he displayed an endearing ease, an informality, a corny but effective sense of mission.
"They have awakened a mighty giant," he repeats at almost every opportunity. The nation loves it. His approval ratings are still well over 80 per cent. This is an ascendant presidency.
The laws of human nature dictate that people do not suddenly change. At most, a crisis can reveal a man's true nature. So the question is, Who is George Bush? Is he a small man catapulted into an illusion of greatness by great events? Or was the capacity for greatness latent within him, awaiting history?
How you answer such questions probably says more about you than it does about him.
One of the more pointed loci of opposition to the Bush presidency is bushandcheneysuck.com, a Web site that features games ("Bitch Slap the Supreme Court"), T-shirts (one portrays Bush and Osama bin Laden as "Evil Doers") and famous Bushisms:
"They misunderestimated me."
"The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country."
"They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it's some kind of federal program."
The site personifies the liberal response to the president they call "Dubya." Bush is a younger version of Ronald Reagan: simplistic, dangerous and none too bright. (Fine, but how many of the critics have a history degree from Yale?)
For them, Bush became President, despite losing in the popular vote to Al Gore, only because the U.S. Supreme Court irresponsibly, if not criminally, stopped the Florida recount.
They see this past year as a succession of disasters. The Bush administration pushed through a staggering $1.4-trillion tax cut that will gut federal programs and drive the budget into deficit. It withdrew from the Kyoto accord on global warming, signalling a contempt for the environment and multilateral agreements. The President allowed anti-abortionists to sabotage scientific progress by limiting stem-cell use in medical research.
Worst, by far the worst, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the President responded with terrorism of his own by bombing innocent civilians in Afghanistan and curtailing civil liberties at home.
Sept. 11 "gave Bush both a political and a business opportunity to extend U.S. power over ever more of the world," veteran liberal columnist Clarence Kailin wrote. "The major fallout of the present war being conducted in the name of fighting terrorism and for national security is that the country is on the way to destroying our civil rights and legal protections, moving us ever closer to a police state."
His defenders are no less extreme, celebrating Bush as a leader equal to, well, Ronald Reagan.
"He could end up being a great president," says Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. For him, that $1.4-trillion is money the Democrats can never spend.
But it is what Bush could be that truly excites Norquist. He could be the President who brings free trade to the entire Western Hemisphere. Bush could be the President who privatizes Social Security by allowing taxpayers to divert their government pension contributions into their own retirement savings plans. "You do those two things, and you've changed the world," Norquist says.
How can you find the truth between such polar opposites? Perhaps it lies outside them entirely. Perhaps its lies in remembering that George Bush hasn't changed. He possesses all the strengths and weaknesses after Sept. 11 that he possessed before.
He is a President with a strong preference for delegation. To talk about the Bush presidency is really to talk about the tough, experienced ring of senior advisers who guide it. Vice-President Dick Cheney (known in Washington as the "prime minister" of the Bush government), Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney-General John Ashcroft, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
All of them would be portrayed as good guys in a Tom Clancy novel. Most served together under George Bush Sr. in the war in the Persian Gulf. Some of them served during Vietnam.
Long before Sept. 11, they believed in reorienting foreign policy away from human rights and multilateral engagement toward tough self-interest. America would do what was good for America. Whether that was good for the world was not their concern.
The unofficial opposition within this club is Secretary of State Colin Powell. After Sept. 11, he won the internal debate over whether to strike swiftly and unilaterally against Afghanistan, or to delay long enough to muster international support. This year, he can be expected to argue against attacking Saddam Hussein, which he believes will destabilize Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt and play into Iran's hands.
Bush will make the final decision. But the working out of the recommendation, and its implementation, will be the task of his subordinates. In that sense, Bush's presidency will hinge on how well he chose his inner circle.
"This is a guy who likes things orderly," says Patrick J. Haney, a specialist in the presidency at Miami University. "He trusts people. Loyalty is important and loyalty goes both ways. People doing their jobs is loyalty too."
Bush has a well-established reputation for avoiding micromanagement -- any management, for that matter. By Sept. 1, the Washington Post calculated he had spent 42 per cent of his time in office either at Camp David, his Texas ranch or his father's place in Maine.
The facial cuts he suffered last weekend after choking on a pretzel and fainting reminded us yet again that, war or no war, the man takes time to relax. After all, he was lounging around watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon, with only his dogs for company.
He makes gaffes because he likes to speak off the cuff, an alarming trait for the most powerful man in the world. When a reporter asked whether he wanted Osama bin Laden dead, he replied, "I want justice." Then his Texas twang noticeably broadening, he went on: "And there's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: dead or alive.' " The expression contained somewhat more pith than might be appropriate from a president.
He did the same thing earlier this month. Responding to complaints from Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who leads the Democratic opposition, that Bush tax cuts were to blame for an emerging federal deficit, the President declared, employing his unique syntax: "Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes."
Political commentator Peggy Noonan, who once wrote speeches for Reagan, says the line was extemporaneous. A presidential speech, she remarked in the Washington Post, invariably contains all sorts of good lines that get weeded out by cautious advisers. Bush, she said, has a tendency of restoring such things. "When he wings it, he is telling you what he thinks. His off-the-cuff remarks are his considered views. . . . His vow wasn't on the cards. But it was in the cards."
Actually, Democrats don't want to raise taxes; some of them, including Senator Edward Kennedy this week, are simply calling on the White House to defer planned tax cuts, to prevent a budget deficit. It hardly matters. Tax cuts were the most important item in the domestic agenda in 2001; they will be the most important item in 2002. The Democrats are calculating that the GOP is vulnerable to the accusation that it is returning the federal government to the era of budget deficits that America endured, mostly under Republican administrations, in the seventies and eighties.
Bush is happy, delighted, to join the fight. The Democrats want to raise your taxes, he will say (ignoring the distinction of taxes raised versus tax-cuts deferred), but we won't let them. With luck, he will be able to ride the issue right into next November's mid-term elections.
The Democrats under Daschle are fixating on the deficit because they are desperate. Support for the President's prosecution of the war remains virtually unanimous. His education policy -- universal testing, report cards for schools, allowing parents to withdraw their kids from failing schools and receive public funding for alternatives -- had such broad support that the legislation sailed through Congress with bipartisan support.
Democratic strategists hoped that the collapse of Enron Corp., America's seventh-largest corporation, would rebound against the White House. The company was one of the biggest contributors to Bush's election campaign, and its chairman, Kenneth Lay, is a personal friend. And yet when Enron was in its death throes and senior executives implored White House officials to intervene with the banks, their pleas went unheeded.
And so the Democrats have changed tack, accusing the Bush administration of practising "Enronomics." According to Democratic Party strategist Jennifer Palmieri, "They cook the books, use rosy economic scenarios that don't come to pass, they engage in unsustainable spending in the form of tax cuts, and they don't worry enough about the human side of the ledger."
But this is a Hail Mary strategy. To begin with, the very word Enronomics is hard to pronounce. And polls show that most voters trust the Republicans over the Democrats to manage the economy.
Regardless, little will get done in Washington over the coming year. The House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate are up for grabs in the November mid-terms. The Republicans hope to ride the war and the tax cuts to victory, strengthening their hold on the House and recapturing the Senate, which the Democrats now hold by a single vote.
If they do, then 2003 will be the real crucible year of this administration, at least on the domestic side. Bush will push for fast-track authority to negotiate a hemispheric free-trade agreement, for privatizing Social Security and for legislation that will, among other things, permit drilling in environmentally sensitive lands in Alaska.
In the meantime, he will try, probably unsuccessfully, to force Senate votes on these and other issues, as well as the stalled economic-stimulus package that would accelerate corporate tax cuts to fight the recession.
Finally, and most important, the administration will decide which course to pursue in the war on terrorism. Limited engagements in friendly countries seeking help against indigenous terrorists? Or a major push against Iraq, perhaps Somalia and even, heaven forfend, North Korea?
For Richard Pious, chairman of American studies at Columbia University, this is the question that will decide the presidency. Bush, he argues, is a classic Republican: eager to constrain government in times of peace and plenty, but also ready to employ the "state power," the sweeping authority that a U.S. president can exercise in an emergency. He "fits into the category of presidents who were all of a sudden confronted with huge events and, as they responded to it, the office enlarged to meet it, and they found things within themselves, and they enlarged their own personalities and characters."
At least the successful ones did. The failures were crushed by the accumulating complications of seemingly manageable challenges. For Pious, the Bush legacy will hinge on how the President handles the war, the mistakes he makes or avoids as things start to get complicated. Is he a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, a Truman? Or a Hoover, a Johnson, his father?
His father. We know the President is haunted by the failure of George Bush Sr., who won his own war, then lost the election because he abandoned the right wing of his own party in a failed attempted to reverse a severe recession.
The son would redeem the father. There will be no accommodation with Democrats on the domestic front. Bush will never allow foreign entanglements to distract him from his mission to preside over a lower-taxed, less-governed, privatized America. The means he will leave to his advisers. On the ends he will never compromise.
No one would deny that he has strength of will. That strength is rooted in a genuinely held Methodism. Fifteen years ago, when he was 40, it helped him to give up drinking. Last year, at 55, it shaped his response to the terrorist attacks.
"I understand religion is a walk, it's a journey," he once said. "And I fully recognize that I'm a sinner, just like you. That's why Christ died. He died for my sins and for your sins."
Christians of such deep belief despise moral equivocation. There is only right and wrong, as laid out in the Bible, which he reads daily. This moral certainly protects Bush from the nuances of one-hand, other-hand, which can stymie action. It prevents him, as well, from plumbing a deeper wisdom beneath the surface simplicity of right and wrong. It is why so many consider him thick, despite his good education and business background.
"I don't know whether it's true that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer," says Patrick Haney. "There is certainly a variety of evidence that he is not underachieving, and would appear to be overachieving."
For Haney, the risks that Bush will estrange traditional allies and bankrupt the treasury remain deeply worrying possibilities.
George W. Bush would avenge the terrorist attacks on the United States and wipe the scourge from the Earth. He would lead the American people into a century of even freer trade and even less government. He seeks the legacy of a great president.
If he fails, he will drag his nation -- and its allies -- into a chronic and unwinnable war that leaves the Middle East aflame and America isolated, its economy crippled by deficit and debt.
Now, however, even his harshest critics would agree that George W. Bush may be exactly the same man he was a year ago, but he is a much larger President.
Memories of year one
A month-by-month chronicle in snapshots and words that demonstrate why oratory isn't exactly the President's strong suit. (More "Bushisms" can be found at dubbia.com)
JANUARY, 2001
"I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well." (Washington, D.C., Jan. 29)
FEBRUARY
"I confirmed to the Prime Minister that we appreciate our friendship." (After meeting Jean Chrétien, Feb. 5)
"Those of us who spent time in the agricultural sector . . . we understand how unfair the death penalty is."
(Omaha, Neb., Feb. 28)
MARCH
"I think there is some method-
ology in my travels."
(Washington, March 5)
"I'd like to describe the speaker of the House -- as a trustworthy man. He's the kind of fellow who says when he gives you his word he means it. Sometimes that doesn't happen all the time in the political process." (Chicago, March 6)
APRIL
"It's very important for folks to understand that, when there's more trade, there's more commerce." (Quebec City, April 21)
"Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."
(Declining to answer questions at Quebec City, April 21)
MAY
"There's no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead." (Washington, May 11)
"If a person doesn't have the capacity that we all want that person to have, I suspect hope is in the far distant future, if at all." (Washington, May 22)
JUNE
"We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease." (Gothenburg, Sweden, June 14)
"I'm so thankful, and so gracious -- I'm gracious that my brother Jeb is concerned about the hemisphere as well." (Miami, June 4)
JULY
"I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe -- I believe what I believe is right." (Rome, July 22)
AUGUST
"My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the -- in the Middle East . . . to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen." (Crawford, Tex., Aug. 13)
SEPTEMBER
"They misunderestimated the fact that we love a neighbour in need. They misunderestimated the compassion of our country. I think they misunderestimated the will and determination of the Commander-in-Chief too." (Washington, Sept. 26).
OCTOBER
"Mr. Bush said, 'So what state is Wales in?' I said, 'Erm, it's a separate country next to England, and he went, 'Oh, okay.' I didn't know what to say." (Welsh songstress Charlotte Church, Oct. 30)
NOVEMBER
"You know, if you find a person that you've never seen before getting in a crop duster that doesn't belong to them, report it . . ." (Asked what suspicious activities should be reported, Nov. 11)
DECEMBER
"In all those tasks, it is worth recalling the words from a beautiful Christmas hymn -- in the third verse of O Holy Night we sing, 'His law is love, and His gospel is peace. Change [chains] ye shall break . . .
(Washington, Dec. 6)
JANUARY, 2002
"Mother, I should have listened to you. Always chew your pretzels before you swallow."
(Monday, after fainting and falling off a White House sofa) |
