Wonderful piece on Bush's weak poll showing..........Partisan Divisions Bedevil Bush
Advisers Seek Ways to Redefine Presidency as Popularity Slips
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 1, 2001; Page A01
President Bush has failed to ease the partisan divisions in the country during his first months in office, frustrating administration efforts to enlarge his fragile political base and prompting advisers to look for ways to redefine his presidency, according to polls, administration officials and party strategists.
Despite passage of the biggest tax cut in two decades and substantial progress on an education reform bill, Bush's approval ratings have declined over the past 60 days, and the electorate remains as sharply divided as it was at the end of last year's election.
The drop in public opinion, coupled with the fact that Democrats now control the Senate, has emboldened the president's Democratic opponents in Congress. And in recent days, many Republicans in the House have abandoned the administration on key votes involving energy and the environment, as lawmakers weigh their own political fortunes against loyalty to a president who is bucking public opinion on some critical issues.
Publicly, the president's advisers say the situation represents no cause for concern. Privately, they are said to be studying the polls carefully and looking for ways to sharpen Bush's image as a "compassionate conservative" in an effort to lure more independents to his coalition. White House officials anticipate a bipartisan signing ceremony this summer on the education bill nearing final approval in Congress, and they recently stepped up efforts to win support for his proposal to promote religious-oriented social service groups.
The administration also has begun planning for a fall offensive that one official said will be aimed at "carving out a different kind of orthodoxy for the party." The effort, led by senior adviser Karl Rove, is still in the formative stages, but administration officials hope to assemble a list of proposals that will showcase the president as more than an advocate of big tax cuts and a friend of corporate interests.
One official said Rove is working with White House policy advisers to pick issues to highlight. Possible candidates include cultural or values issues, particularly those related to parents, adoption initiatives, new mentoring programs and possibly additional education proposals.
In the longer term, Bush remains committed to an ambitious agenda that includes national missile defense and overhauling Medicare and Social Security. But his failure to break through the partisan polarization within the electorate and secure stronger support among political independents could weaken his hand in those battles.
Bush pulled off a political makeover last year after his bruising primary challenge from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), aggressively moving to the center before the Republican National Convention. But Democrats and some independent analysts said that, given the first impressions he has made in office, the president faces a far more difficult challenge now than when he was a candidate in changing his image.
"The White House has been extremely deft at fixing short-term problems but refuses to confront their over-arching problem, which is that the president campaigned as a centrist and is governing as a conservative," said Bruce Reed, president of the Democratic Leadership Council and domestic policy chief in the Clinton administration. "They won't broaden their appeal until they do."
Bush's approval rating has declined over the past two months, according to polls released in recent weeks, with the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll putting his approval at 50 percent, the lowest mark for a president in five years in that poll. Surveys by The Washington Post and ABC News; CBS News and the New York Times; and the Pew Research Center also have recorded declines in his approval rating during that period.
The polls also indicate that Bush's energy and environmental policies have put him on the wrong side of public opinion. Those surveyed say that Bush favors oil companies at the expense of the environment and that they want greater emphasis on environmental protection and energy conservation than they believe Bush favors. Several polls also found that Americans do not believe Bush understands their problems.
Bush advisers play down the recent round of polls. Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III, chairman of the Republican National Committee, staged a conference call with reporters on the day the latest NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll was released. "The president is popular; he remains popular. His policies are doing very, very well," Gilmore said.
Matthew Dowd, the RNC's director of polling, said that when viewed over a longer period of time, Bush's approval rating has remained relatively steady. He also argued that the sharply polarized electorate -- which he said predates Bush's presidency -- means that the president will rarely have approval ratings above 60 percent and that about one-third of the country will say they disapprove of how he is doing his job. "We're never going to be out of that box," he said.
Bush, like former president Bill Clinton, has proven to be a president who generates fierce support within his own party and strong opposition in the other party. But he campaigned on a pledge to "change the tone" in Washington after the partisan rancor of the Clinton years. Polls show Bush receives some credit from the public on that front, but it has not spilled over into other assessments of his presidency.
"We're five months into his presidency, and he hasn't won anybody over who wasn't with him at the beginning," Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said. "He had every opportunity in the world."
A Republican strategist agreed: "His situation is the same as Clinton's. There's a segment of the population that won't like him no matter what he does. We had hopes in the first 100 days that we might get some crossover, but that's not going to happen anymore."
Bush's image as a traditional conservative has been shaped by both success and failure. Administration officials count the tax bill as a major accomplishment. "If we hadn't gotten the tax bill, we'd be in really bad shape," an official said. But officials acknowledge that the time and effort that went into passing the bill forced Bush to talk much more about a conventionally Republican issue than about education, the issue he used most successfully in his campaign to demonstrate his independence from GOP doctrine.
Other Republicans are more critical of the administration's failure to highlight education more systematically. "In the campaign when he got too far to the right, he talked about education and went right back to the center. I would argue we're not trying very hard" now, a GOP strategist said.
At the same time, Bush has suffered from the administration's mistakes in the areas of energy and the environment. Some involve policy choices the administration has made in its energy package, and some come from failures to explain decisions about environmental regulations early in his term, administration officials said.
"The compassionate conservative agenda doesn't receive a lot of attention," said Dan Bartlett, deputy counselor to the president, citing Bush's proposal to fund religious-based social service organizations. "They have not received as much attention as the tax cut did or the regulatory entanglement. . . . And we probably didn't do as good a job in characterizing who this president was early on, particularly on the environment."
But some Republican strategists argued that far more is needed to undo some of the early damage. One strategist said the administration must make some decisions on energy and the environment that go directly against the interests of the oil industry. "The only way you really deal with it is you've got to look like you've offended somebody," this strategist said.
What troubles some Bush advisers is that the president's standing with the public may hinder his efforts to enact an ambitious agenda on defense and entitlement programs. One official argued that with the passage of the tax cut, near-passage of the education bill and the prospect for other legislative successes, Bush can still point to a record of accomplishment in his first year in office.
But one White House official said that would fall far short of Bush's goal: "His ambition was greater than that. It was to reposition the Republican Party as the party of hope and inclusion and progress for the poor."
Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who, along with Republican Robert Teeter, conducts the polling for NBC and the Wall Street Journal, said there is no simple explanation for Bush's standing, which he described as "mediocre and probably pretty disturbing" to Republicans and the White House.
Hart also questioned whether Bush is a commanding enough leader to pull off the kind of redefinition some Bush advisers are talking about. Arguing that Bush spends too much time poking fun at himself and is less visible than some recent past presidents, Hart said: "The bottom line in all this is that he's become a president where there's less than meets the eye rather than more than meets the eye."
Teeter offered a more positive view of Bush's current situation. "It's not that he's in great shape or in trouble," he said. But Teeter said the implications of public opinion are that stitching together a governing coalition in the current environment will not be easy. "We don't appear to have a unified governing coalition, and that makes it hard to govern," he said. "That's why he's down. If I were them, I wouldn't panic over that."
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