A Bit of a Bounce
President Bush had a good week. Can he build on it?
Suddenly, things are looking brighter for President Bush. The killing of insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi in Iraq last week gave the administration a much-needed lift. The Republican victory in a high-profile special congressional election in California provided another bit of good news. And aides hope Bush's Camp David summit this week to plan the next phase of the Iraqi occupation will generate more positive momentum.
More broadly, Bush is building on his upward bounce by showing a new receptivity to fresh ideas and a willingness to change the way he does business. Critics say it's long overdue, but the president and his inner circle have begun a concerted effort to "change the conversation," according to one senior official, and take the focus off his job-approval ratings, which have lingered in the low to mid-30s. Last week, he gave well-received speeches on immigration in Texas and Nebraska, and, demonstrating a once vaunted common touch, stopped at a Laredo restaurant where he bought nachos and chatted with Border Patrol officers. White House counselor Dan Bartlett issued a memo to the media, entitled "The Full Story," that said developments of late warrant "a second look."
But most Americans haven't been impressed in recent months. "It's felt by many Americans that the president is on autopilot, unwilling to listen to people who disagree with him and unwilling to change the way he does things," says a former Bush adviser. "That's really not true, but it's the perception." To change that, Bush is quietly infusing his administration with new blood. Among his recruits are Treasury Secretary-designate Hank Paulson, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, whose selection was widely praised by the financial community; domestic policy adviser Karl Zinsmeister, an intellectual conservative theorist formerly with the American Enterprise Institute; and press secretary Tony Snow, a former Fox News commentator who's proving adept at fencing with the press corps. Other designated thinkers in the ascendancy are Joel Kaplan, deputy chief of staff for policy and an acolyte of new Chief of Staff Josh Bolten; Sara Taylor, a key aide to counselor Karl Rove, who's charged with keeping Republican control of Congress this November, and Peter Wehner, director of strategic initiatives, who keeps in touch with ideas being developed by think tanks and academics.
Credibility. The nomination of Paulson, who is expected to win easy Senate confirmation, is considered particularly significant. The Wall Street investment banker is not the kind of traditional corporate CEO Bush is most at home with, but the president realized he needed someone with a larger-than-life reputation to give his economic policies more credibility. Overall, the newcomers' impact is uncertain; they haven't won Bush's approval for any big new ideas yet. But White House officials say it's a sea change for this president to be surrounding himself with more independent thinkers.
In another phase of their recovery campaign, Bush's strategists are, finally, providing behind-the-scenes glimpses of Bush's engagement in formulating policy. This is designed to counter the critics' image of the president as an intellectual lightweight. White House aides, for example, gave U.S. News a rare play-by-play of internal deliberations that led the president on May 31 to propose a new international initiative designed to persuade Iran to cease development of nuclear weapons. One of Bush's goals, White House National Security Adviser Steve Hadley told U.S. News, was to create a "test strategy" to determine the Iranian regime's willingness to negotiate. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Hadley presented Bush with a proposed statement that the United States would agree to both economic and security cooperation with Iran as part of the deal, Bush said they overstated how far he was willing to go. He insisted that the language be changed to play down any security cooperation and emphasize economic aid.
Yet "all this," says historian Robert Dallek, "is overshadowed by Iraq." Zarqawi's death might be a PR coup, but Dallek and other scholars argue that the U.S. occupation increasingly resembles U.S. involvement in Vietnam, an exhausting morass that haunted the country for a generation. Until there is real improvement in Iraq, they say, Bush's presidency probably will remain a troubled one.
This story appears in the June 19, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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