A Case Of Confidence: The president is gambling that his audacious style of governing will pay off

A recent visitor to the Oval Office was struck by how tired President Bush looked in person--the puffy eyes, the pallid complexion. It's a striking contrast to Bush's jaunty, youthful (and cosmetically enhanced) appearance on television. The visitor, a family friend, asked the president how he was doing. "It looks," Bush replied grimly, "like a tough fall."

That, it turns out, was quite an understatement. Autumn has brought a season of discontent, spurred by rising casualties, a growing guerrilla war, and spiraling financial costs in Iraq, resulting in an erosion of support for Bush across the board. Only 48 percent of registered voters now approve of his handling of Iraq--a drop of 28 percentage points since April, according to the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. The fall has also brought sharper attacks from his opponents and a torrent of troubling images from Iraq.

Last week's loss of two helicopters, and the deaths of 22 Americans aboard, provided the latest contradiction to the White House's rose-colored spin. Meanwhile, the cost of the Iraq venture was underscored by Bush's signing a $87.5 billion aid package (some of the money also goes to Afghanistan). This wave of negative news is generating a reassessment of Bush's presidency precisely a year before the 2004 election--and just as the campaign begins in earnest. At the heart of the new debate is a central fact of Bush's leadership: His philosophy of governing is as audacious as that of any president in the past half century. Following the formula of Ronald Reagan, Bush is governing in bold strokes of primary colors, not pastels. It is not a programmatic approach but--especially on national security issues--a way of thinking that is both fresh and risky. Bush's vision of the future is double edged, calling for strong conservatism at home and positing a far-reaching struggle abroad against forces he calls "the evildoers" of terrorism. What unsettles much of official Washington, however, is that this is essentially a gambler's philosophy. Bush has put down all his chips and is letting his presidency ride on the outcome, take it or leave it. "The whole thing is Wilsonian evangelism," says presidential scholar Robert Dallek, referring to Woodrow Wilson's vision of a new international order after World War I. Adds historian Doug Brinkley: "Bush is part of a small class of presidents whom we think of as commander in chief"--like Franklin Roosevelt in World War II, Harry Truman in the Korean War, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam. But there's a troubling footnote: Except for Roosevelt, all were extremely unpopular at the end of their presidencies.

From the start, Bush has been a "crisis president," forced to deal with a series of traumatic events and to make decisions more difficult than those faced by his recent predecessors. First, there was the disputed election of 2000, which nearly led to a constitutional crisis and ended with a 5-to-4 Supreme Court ruling that gave Bush the White House. From Inauguration Day forward, Bush was bedeviled by an economic downturn that he tried to reverse with record tax cuts. Their impact is still being debated. Bush has turned a budget surplus into an eye-popping $374 billion deficit, but last week's government numbers indicated that the tax cuts may, finally, be working. Unemployment fell to 6 percent, and the Labor Department reported that payrolls grew by a surprisingly high 126,000 in October--the third straight month of job growth.

Focus and discipline. If there is irony here, it may be that, for a president who made his bones dealing with foreign-born crises, the picture at home seems to be shaping up nicely just as the one overseas is getting really ugly. In response to the terrorist attacks two years ago, Bush has gone much further than nearly anyone expected. He declared a new doctrine of pre-emptive war and a willingness to intervene in other nations' affairs, unilaterally if necessary, when he's convinced that they are complicit in terrorism. At home, his conservative policies include not just the tax cuts but reducing regulation, promoting domestic energy development, fostering government secrecy, and promoting faith-based solutions to social problems. Last week, Bush once again delighted his conservative allies by signing a law banning the controversial procedure called "partial-birth" abortion. This triggered court challenges that Bush vows to fight vigorously. "The very characteristics he has as a person, that he's always had, which is a lot of discipline, a focus, and a toughness . . . those were the characteristics that our country especially needed after September 11 . . . in a leader," first lady Laura Bush told U.S. News (related story). "And I see that he still has that focus. He still has that discipline." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in an interview: "He thinks about American influence and power being used for great causes, not just for marginal change." This came through clearly in Bush's declaration to the National Endowment for Democracy last week that America's mission is to spread democracy around the globe, including the Mideast. "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country," Bush said.

Many historians have their doubts. "When it comes to the vision thing," says presidential scholar Fred Greenstein, editor of a new book, The George W. Bush Presidency: An Early Assessment, " . . . Bush is the virtual antithesis of his highly pragmatic father, whom he has faulted for not building on the momentum of victory in the 1991 Gulf War to rack up domestic accomplishments on which he could campaign for re-election. George W. Bush does have the vision thing, not because he is an aficionado of policy but because he holds that if a leader does not set his own goals, others will set them for him. The question in the case of the younger Bush is the viability of his vision . . . ."

While Bush hasn't wavered, there are increasing calls for him to specify a way out of Iraq. "The public is looking for a strategy and an endgame," says Doug Schoen, one of President Bill Clinton's pollsters. Only a bare majority of Americans now support Bush's foreign policy, Schoen notes, and more than half say the country is headed in the wrong direction. "It's . . . the perception that comes across each night on the TV screen that we are not in control of the security situation," Schoen says. "We're . . . sort of at a tipping point. Unless he turns the numbers around, he'll soon be in a more perilous situation than he's already in."

Taking charge. All this highlights the profound changes Bush has wrought in the areas of national security. After September 11, Bush did something that startled almost everyone: A foreign-policy neophyte, he summarily took charge, united the nation, and sounded all the right notes. "I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it," he told a joint session of Congress nine days after the 9/11 attacks. "I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people."

Bush has been true to his word--so true, in fact, that his adversaries say he has overreacted. Dallek credits Bush with rallying Americans in the months after 9/11 but adds that "a fierce political divide has opened up in the country. Nothing is comparable to divisions over a war. It's costing blood and young American lives."

The roots of Bush's Manichaean ideas may be found in several places. His born-again Christianity reinforces his desire to draw bright lines around what he considers right and wrong. His background in the oil industry of Midland, Texas, gives him a sense that simple solutions are best and that the intelligentsia tend to overly complicate things. His natural instinct is to find a mission and drive inexorably to accomplish it.

Greenstein and other academic observers say Bush got off to a lackluster start but responded to 9/11 with sure-footedness. Crises test presidents, and Bush rose to the challenge. Fate served up a transformative event that gave him opportunities and challenges few other presidents have faced, putting him in a group with Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman.

Most Americans agreed that he reacted with strength. "If you go back to September 11, it was an earthquake for the United States--I think no less dramatic than what happened to us with Pearl Harbor," Rice told U.S. News. "In fact, maybe more dramatic, because there hadn't been an attack on our [mainland] territory since the 19th century." Rice adds that any American president would have responded "in some fashion," but she says Bush chose a particularly "bold and broad response." "If you look now at the way the world views the security threats of the 21st century," she explains, "we finally have an answer to what . . . we're dealing with in the post-Cold War world. And I think this president is almost singularly responsible for that."

Bush tells aides his philosophy is "you can't sweep problems under the rug," whether it is Iraq's noncompliance with United Nations resolutions or his belief that the U.S. economy needed the stimulative impact of those massive tax cuts.

U.S. News has learned that Bush is considering still another dramatic initiative--calling new attention to Fidel Castro's repressive dictatorship in Cuba. Senior administration officials say the president isn't advocating military action against Cuba but prefers "agenda setting," in this case emulating Ronald Reagan's repeated condemnation of communism in the Soviet Union. "The president has a tendency to speak that clearly in a way that lets oppressed people know that they're not alone," says a senior Bush adviser. "And I think you'll see more of that." It's no coincidence, of course, that such an initiative would be popular among Cuban-Americans in Florida, a key swing state.

Rice calls these "consequential times," like the period after World War II when Truman and his administration built NATO, helped reconstruct Europe with the Marshall Plan, moved to contain communism, and recognized the State of Israel. Underlying Bush's philosophy, she elaborates, is a concept he takes from the Founding Fathers: "his bedrock belief that freedom and the desire for freedom is universal, that it comes not from America and not from mankind, but from a higher power. . . . No culture, no peoples are exempt from that desire, nor should they be denied the ability to have that freedom."

Bush tells his aides several times a day "we are doing the right thing. . . . We're on the right course . . . and we have got to use America's power to good and consequential purposes--and that's what we're doing." Says a senior aide: "If anything, I think he is the one who keeps his team focused that way."

Staying the course. On domestic issues, Bush believes he has learned from the mistakes of his father, who broke his "read my lips" pledge, agreed to raise taxes, and thereby alienated his conservative base. Bush, under the guidance of counselor Karl Rove, is keeping faith with his conservative base not only by promoting tax cuts but also with measures like the "partial-birth" abortion ban, the fight against AIDS in Africa, and his push for faith-based solutions to social problems. "The president's strength is that people trust him, and he knows where he's going," says Ron Kaufman, a longtime family friend who worked in the White House for Bush's father. "Americans love to be led by strong leaders."

On the morning of Sept. 14, 2001, just before Bush's famous visit to ground zero in New York, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card told U.S. News, Bush "was completely in command of all the responsibilities he had as president." He met in the Oval Office with FBI leaders and challenged the way they did their jobs. When FBI officials told him how they would pursue and prosecute the terrorists responsible, the president demanded to know: "How are you going to prevent the next attack from happening?" It's a question he has asked regularly ever since.

Yet there are risks to this approach. As historian Brinkley argues, America operates in a world where few things are black and white, and Bush's overwhelming certitude could be dangerous. Brinkley points out that Bush, asked to name his favorite book, came up with Marquis James's biography of Sam Houston, The Raven. Houston was a drunk for the early part of his life; then he found God and became a righteous moral spirit, a self-styled warrior for God. Bush too gave up drinking, found God, and has become a moralist who sees the world in black and white.

Bush's passion for physical fitness parallels his commitment to spiritual fitness. He is careful about his diet and has given up nearly all sweets. He gets up at 5:30 a.m. each day, arrives at the Oval Office between 6:40 and 7 a.m., and immediately meets with Chief of Staff Card and National Security Adviser Rice. He reads intelligence reports and meets with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, and others at 8 or 8:25 a.m. He leaves the Oval Office at 6 or 7 p.m. and takes briefing books home to study. He has dinner with his wife and, sometimes, family and friends. He doesn't like to schedule evening events, preferring to remain in the East Wing residence and channel-surf on TV, checking out sports coverage before he turns in, at about 9:30.

Weights and measures. Bush gets peevish when he doesn't exercise and recently was forced to change his regimen when he strained a calf muscle and hurt his knee after failing to warm up properly before a jog. Now he works out on an elliptical trainer and simulates running in a swimming pool, looking quite ridiculous in a big workout belt as he hops around in the water, according to aides. The president also lifts weights. During a stop in Bangkok, Thailand, during his Asia-Pacific trip in late October, he managed to find time to work out at a private gym and joked that he had broken the overseas presidential record by bench-pressing 205 pounds five times. His best lift was 215 pounds at the Camp David gym, not bad for a 57-year-old 187-pounder.

This goal-oriented determination permeates virtually everything Bush does. When protesters delayed his motorcade from downtown Manila to a scheduled speech to the Philippine Congress, he told aides he intended to make the speech, no matter what. He raised the prospect of traveling by helicopter but, in the end, the streets were sufficiently cleared to allow him to deliver the address as planned. Aides say the president never anguishes over decisions, preferring to gather information, make a decision, and move on. Says a senior adviser: "He is not somebody who is constantly reassessing, because he believes that this is an historic moment and we have to be there, fully engaged." During that Asia-Pacific trip, he had little interest in sightseeing or sampling the culture of the places he was visiting. But he did manage to spend a couple of hours in a suite at the Kahala Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Honolulu watching Game 5 of the World Series between the Yankees and the Marlins.

Like his father, President Bush has a keen sense of fate. Bush the elder recently told a friend he now sees a silver lining in his defeat a decade ago. "I love my life," the former president said. "I love being with my kids and my grandkids. If I had not lost to Bill Clinton, George wouldn't be president today, and Jeb [another son] wouldn't be governor of Florida."

For his part, the current president tells friends he is doing his best, and if Americans think he is going too far, they can "vote for somebody else." If he loses next year, his friends predict that he will go happily back to his ranch in Texas. Like his father, Bush doesn't wring his hands or agonize. The elder Bush told one of his son's advisers recently about a spot in the Oval Office where a president can stand and peer out at the Washington Monument, allowing himself to be captured in photos, pondering the issues of the day, as Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy once did. "He won't pose for that picture," the elder Bush said proudly. Like his dad, George W. Bush believes the presidency is an opportunity and an honor, not a burden.

At home, his conservative policies include not just the tax cuts but reducing regulation, promoting domestic energy development, fostering government secrecy, and promoting faith-based solutions to social problems...

Damn. You mean he's actually trying to fulfill campaign promises??

Hell, that is something new, ain't it.

Oh yes, this has been one tough autumn for the President and his party...I mean, hell, they've only taken out three Democrat incumbent governors and replaced 'em with Republicans, the economy is rebounding with higher growth and productivity rates, and each day the total of dead terrorists grows.

Yes, if this is a bad autumn...wait until he has a good one next year.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said in an interview: "He thinks about American influence and power being used for great causes, not just for marginal change." This came through clearly in Bush's declaration to the National Endowment for Democracy last week that America's mission is to spread democracy around the globe, including the Mideast. "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country," Bush said.

Freedom is finding allies in every country. Freedom finds allies in every culture.
And as we meet the terror and violence of the world, we can be certain the author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of freedom.
With all the tests and all the challenges of our age, this is, above all, the age of liberty. Each of you at this endowment is fully engaged in the great cause of liberty, and I thank you.
May God bless your work, and may God continue to bless America.
George W. Bush - Age of Liberty speech
Keyword: AGEOFLIBERTY

No President in history has faced momentous adversity better than George W. Bush -- Abraham Lincoln included.

We, the people, are blessed in having George W. Bush as President of the United States.

"you can't sweep problems under the rug..."

That should be his message. Repeat it and explain it next year over and over until people make jokes about it. And, even if they make jokes about it, they'll remember that those words are Bush's and that he believes them and acts according to them. It's the best summation for everything he's done and the proper indictment of BillyJeff's 8 years.

I'd add to the reply I just posted. Every letter to the editor written in support of him should have that phrase in it, too. It should be what the whole campaign is about. Re-elect Bush and you'll send back a guy who won't sweep problems under a rug. Elect Dean and you'll send a guy to DC who will ask permission from the UN and form committees and discuss till all hours of the night and never get anything done about those problems.

No President in history has faced momentous adversity better than George W. Bush -- Abraham Lincoln included.

Isn't this kind of a stretch?
While I fully expect President Bush to face and overcome even more harrowing times than Lincoln in the next five years, what Lincoln and Roosevelt faced are beyond
anything that's happened since.
I think HE is up to it, the only question in my mind is are WE as a nation?

What unsettles much of official Washington, however, is that this is essentially a gambler's philosophy. Bush has put down all his chips and is letting his presidency ride on the outcome, take it or leave it.

This is what separates great leaders from marginal leaders. Great leaders realize that there are more important, more immediate concepts than re-election.

Re-election is good; re-election allows you more time to implement changes for the better. There are events and challenges, though, that force you to choose between blind indifference and a need to protect the country so that, God willing, we will live to see better times in the future.

I hope not, but if this president manages to save this country at the expense his own continued president, then so be it. God is watching, and history, also, will remember him well.

This column is a smear job from the jibe about President Bush wearing cosmetics (note the use of the word in its most feminizing sense), and how "ridiculous" he looks when doing his pool exercises while his knee heals, to the idea that the results are still out on the effect of the tax cuts when we have a 7.2 increase in the economy and a roaring creation of new jobs. There was no such hatchet job on the former, bloviated, puce-complexioned, jiggly, finger-pointing, cheeseburger-snarfing occupant of the people's house. (/rant)

No President in history has faced momentous adversity better than George W. Bush -- Abraham Lincoln included.

Some might consider that statement to be a stretch. But considering the facts -- that today's battlefield is the entire earth and that humanity is now faced with groups threatening slavery for all that are not in power -- it is no stretch at all to realize that winning this war is monumentally important to everything America stands for and that George W. Bush is standing tall in defending Americans and all others that strive for freedom.

From the start, Bush has been a "crisis president," forced to deal with a series of traumatic events and to make decisions more difficult than those faced by his recent predecessors.

One crisis after another, yes, but all were passed down to him from his predecessor... America can't afford another Democratic president.

And thank God for Dubya being at the helm to clean up Clinton's damage to our country.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.