| kathleen 2005-10-29, 11:18 am |
| The New York Times
October 27, 2005
News Analysis
Bush's Challenge: Recovering From a Week of Nightmares
By TODD S. PURDUM
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - George W. Bush has been in the White House for
248 weeks, through a terrorist attack, two wars and a bruising
re-election. But it seems safe to say that he has never had a worse
political week than this one - and it is not over yet.
"I think all bets are off," said former Senator Warren B. Rudman,
Republican of New Hampshire. "Who knows what's next?"
The biggest question for Mr. Bush now is what he can make of the 39
months remaining in his presidency. For this horrible week has been
months - even years - in the making. The 2,000th American fatality in
Iraq was just the latest daunting milestone in a war that will soon be
three years old. The C.I.A. leak investigation that threatens to indict
a top White House aide or two on Friday grew out of the fierce debates
over the flawed intelligence that led to that war.
And Harriet E. Miers's withdrawal of her nomination to the Supreme
Court is the bitter fruit of Mr. Bush's own frailty in the wake of all
those storms - and Hurricane Katrina - and of his miscalculation about
how her appointment would be received.
His effort to avoid a fight by choosing a nominee with a scant public
record (whose conservative fidelity only he could vouch for) instead
prompted a ferocious backlash from the very conservative base he has
courted for years.
"There's all this talk about the Republican base and the conservative
base of the Republican Party, and the conservative base of the
president and how it's important to play to the base and please the
base and fawn over the base," said former Senator John C. Danforth, the
Missouri Republican who was Mr. Bush's ambassador to the United
Nations.
"And look what it gets President Bush: It just gets him a kick in the
rear," Mr. Danforth said. "That's what they've done to him, and they've
done it to him at a time when he's vulnerable, and they've done it at
the expense of a perfectly fine human being."
Some scholars and Republican elders say it is now time for Mr. Bush to
do what President Ronald Reagan did when the Iran-Contra scandal
threatened to derail his second term: Shake up the White House staff,
retool his domestic and foreign policy agenda, and move on. But most
say they see few signs that Mr. Bush intends to do so.
"Assume there are several indictments," said Richard Norton Smith, the
head of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill.,
and a biographer of several prominent Republicans. "Then," he added,
referring to the former Tennessee senator whom Mr. Reagan tapped as
chief of staff to clean house, "the question becomes, is there a Howard
Baker moment? And if there's a Howard Baker moment, who's Howard Baker?
There aren't as many 'wise men' around Washington as there were 20
years ago."
Ms. Miers's withdrawal is all the more remarkable because Mr. Bush so
seldom backs down. Again and again, he has racked up legislative
victories that once seemed improbable, or at least managed to save
face. His instinct, abetted by Vice President Dick Cheney, will once
again be to grind out advances where he can find them.
In that sense, the abandonment of Ms. Miers seemed deliberate, an
effort to shift the spotlight, however briefly, from the anticipated
actions of the special prosecutor investigating the leak of a C.I.A.
agent's identity and reposition the president for a new confirmation
battle with conservatives by his side.
But the president's second term legislative agenda is at a standstill
on matters large and small. His hopes for overhauling Social Security
are dead for this year; the goal of reshaping the estate tax stalled
with Hurricane Katrina, and his administration was even forced to
backtrack this week on its post-Katrina suspension of a law that
requires paying locally prevailing wages for constructions projects
financed by federal money.
The White House had argued that suspending the law, the Davis-Bacon
Act, could speed hurricane repairs. But critics, including some
Congressional Republicans, complained that the administration was
taking advantage of the disaster to upend a law important to unions.
Mr. Bush blamed Ms. Miers's withdrawal on Senate demands for
information about her views on important constitutional and legal
questions during her service as White House counsel and in other top
staff jobs. "It is clear that senators would not be satisfied until
they gained access to internal documents concerning advice provided
during her tenure at the White House, disclosures that would undermine
a president's ability to receive candid counsel," Mr. Bush said in a
statement.
That seemed more a rationale than a reason, but Mr. Bush's articulation
of it now effectively precludes his naming Attorney General Alberto R.
Gonzales, Ms. Miers's predecessor as White House counsel, to the
Supreme Court, as some aides have long suggested he might like to do.
"They're not reaching out; they're in a bunker mentality," said one
longtime Republican familiar with the thinking in the White House, who
spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of offending the president.
"The idea that they're going to blame the Senate process for her going
down says to me there's no introspection going on."
Second-term presidents are notoriously insulated from second-guessing,
and Mr. Bush has never been one to invite private criticism or confess
public error. His high premium on staff loyalty may well have led him
to misjudge how his nomination of Ms. Miers - by all accounts the
ultimate loyalist - would play.
"In the end, I always thought the thing that would bring her down was
that she was his lawyer," Mr. Smith, the historian, said. "That makes
people uncomfortable. It's just too inside."
President Lyndon B. Johnson's nomination of his longtime confidant, Abe
Fortas, to be chief justice collapsed in 1968 partly for the same
reason.
Richard D. Friedman, an expert on Supreme Court history at the
University of Michigan law school, said Ms. Miers's withdrawal
reflected the reality that modern confirmations had become "so
contentious that the president has an incentive to pick somebody whose
ideology he believes is compatible with his, but about whom little is
known," while the Senate "then feels duty-bound to find out what it can
about the nominee's ideology."
He added: "The nominee and the administration put up a wall, but in
this case, it crumbled," in part because of doubts in both parties
about Ms. Miers's stature.
The conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan wrote in Human Events
Online that, by withdrawing, Ms. Miers "may just have helped" Mr. Bush
"save his presidency." On the same Web site, the right-wing columnist
Ann Coulter allowed: "Bush has us back on the team, ready to cheer for
him unreservedly."
But former Senator John B. Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who is pressing
for the nomination of his home-state candidate, Judge Edith Brown
Clement of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit,
had a much different view of what Ms. Miers's withdrawal portends for
Mr. Bush's power to influence his own party, much less the opposition,
for the rest of his term.
"It means," Mr. Breaux said, "that the fear factor is gone."
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