Bleak House
How bad are things at the White House when the best spin on the news is that it could have been worse--only one senior adviser got indicted? Or that some are breathing a sigh of relief that the president finally got the message and withdrew the nomination of Harriet Miers? "When every single conversation begins, 'At least the election is a year away,' you know things are really bad," one senior House Republican told me. "This is as tough a time as we've ever had."
Ya think? Start with the self-inflicted congressional ethics woes, then move on over to the White House mess--Hurricane Katrina, the indictment and resignation of "Scooter" Libby, the failed Miers nomination. No doubt the president will announce a new--and eminently conservative and confirmable--Supreme Court nominee real soon, but will it be enough to get back on track? Not by a long shot. And what about the rest of the agenda? Social Security reform? Dead. Immigration reform? Dead among Republicans. Tax cuts? Dead among Democrats--although it gives them a nice opening to talk about national priorities. As in: Wouldn't the money be better spent rebuilding New Orleans, for example, or maybe Baghdad?
Which brings us back to Scooter Libby and the war. No matter how the White House tries to play this, one thing is crystal clear: Libby was a key architect of the administration's Iraq policy and a key believer that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. As Cheney's go-to guy, it was Libby who made it his job to discredit former diplomat Joe Wilson after he charged that the administration had "twisted" intelligence to make it seem as if Iraq possessed banned weapons. Libby was not only clumsy but, according to the special prosecutor, he lied under oath about his conversations with reporters and with people within the White House.
Libby's fate aside, here's the problem for the White House: The indictment brings the Iraq war front and center again. If the Libby case goes to trial, internal administration deliberations about the war--and weapons of mass destruction--will become Topic A. It's kind of hard to spin a trial, and the testimony won't be fun: Will it appear, for instance, that the White House was desperate to prove that its justification for war was correct? Will the tensions over prewar intelligence between the CIA and the White House be laid out for all to see? And will the vice president himself be asked to testify about all this? It's not going to be a great story line, especially to an American public increasingly disenchanted with a war that last week marked its 2,000-dead milestone. It's no surprise that a recent Harris Poll shows that only 24 percent of Americans are confident that the United States will be successful in Iraq.
"Friends." Sure, it's better news for the president that Karl Rove escaped legal jeopardy--for now. A new grand jury will look into Rove's testimony, and there are no promises that he will survive this ordeal without an indictment. But for now, at least, those in the West Wing--who were wondering just what they would do without Rove--are relieved. But is he the man to honcho the plan to save a reeling White House? He's still got a lot on his mind.
It's almost as if the lame-duck George W. Bush is back where he began in 2001--governing by a slim margin, presiding over a divided country. Only it's worse. His conservative allies have deserted him over the Miers nomination, and his "friends" on Capitol Hill are scarce. In fact, congressional Republicans are downright Darwinian: No one much cares about President Bush per se, but they are worried about continuing to control the House and Senate. As many as 80 House seats could be in play, and some incumbent senators--like Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania--are in tight races. What's more, it's tough to recruit candidates when your party looks as if it's down a deep hole. "If the president stays at 38 percent popularity," says one House Republican, "we're going to get our teeth kicked in."
For his part, President Bush put up a good front. "We remain wholly focused on the many issues and opportunities facing this country," he said. ". . . We got a job to protect the American people, and that's what we'll continue working hard to do. . . . And pretty soon, I'll be naming somebody to the Supreme Court." Anything, to change the subject.
This story appears in the November 7, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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