Taking Command in Crisis, Bush Wields New Powers

CRAWFORD, Tex., Dec. 31 — It was late on a Saturday, just days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when President Bush was ready to sign an order freezing the assets in the United States of suspected Islamic terrorist groups, the first showy financial strike against Al Qaeda. The order was to be announced, or so the plan went, the following Monday by Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill. But the president suddenly had another idea.

"I am about to sign this order," an aide recalled Mr. Bush saying. "Why am I not announcing it?"

The staff scrambled, and by Monday morning it was the president, not Mr. O'Neill, who made the announcement, reinforcing the message that Mr. Bush would direct the war against terrorism on many fronts.

Nearly a year after taking office, Mr. Bush has seized the catastrophe of Sept. 11 to project himself as the commander in chief at the center of the crisis and to reach for new powers.

His most assertive action was a November order establishing military tribunals for accused terrorists, but Mr. Bush has also moved to keep presidential papers secret and permitted sweeping government efforts to investigate anyone suspected of terrorism. To help in those investigations, he expanded government wiretapping and allowed the monitoring of communications between some people in federal custody and their lawyers.

And yet Mr. Bush returns to Washington next week facing a variety of challenges. In foreign policy, he is trying to avert a war between India and Pakistan, and monitoring the financial collapse of Argentina, which an administration official acknowledged today had not been a sufficient focus of the White House after Sept. 11. Domestically, Mr. Bush says he will try to revive an economic stimulus package that failed in a bitter round of partisan Washington combat at the end of December. He also faces Democrats increasingly willing to challenge his policies, even while avoiding taking on a president with high approval ratings.

Mr. Bush did win big legislative victories on a $1.3 trillion tax cut and an education bill, but the White House is not expecting as easy a ride in 2002.

"He's got more problems with the Congress than with the public," said John Morton Blum, the Yale historian who taught Mr. Bush 20th-century American politics in college.

The result is that Mr. Bush is likely to spend a considerable portion of his political capital if he hopes to revive the agenda he laid out so forcefully a year ago.

"I think the lesson he learned from his father's presidency is that if you have capital you must use it wisely — but use it," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director.

And he has shown that he is willing to use it to accomplish goals that go far beyond prosecuting the war. With only cursory consultation of Congress, he announced the American withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, with surprisingly little backlash from Russia or the allies. Similarly, Mr. Bush threatened a veto if Congress spent more than he wanted on domestic security. Congress protested, then acquiesced.

Some historians say Mr. Bush seems captivated by Theodore Roosevelt, who grabbed more power for his office than any other president since Abraham Lincoln. The week before his inauguration, Mr. Bush kept a book of Roosevelt speeches on the coffee table in his living room at the Texas ranch, where he was preparing his inaugural address. On Friday at his ranch, Mr. Bush said he had just finished reading "Theodore Rex," the second volume of Edmund Morris's biography of Roosevelt, this one focusing on the White House.

"I see in Bush's performance to date the very large possibility that his model for the presidency is essentially that of Theodore Roosevelt," Mr. Blum said. So far, he added, "I think he has claimed powers, and tried to aggrandize the office."

But unlike Roosevelt, Mr. Blum argued, Mr. Bush "doesn't exude power, at least not yet."

Other historians say Mr. Bush's presidency has expanded simply because of circumstance.

"The story of Bush has been the aggregating of power over the last few months," said William E. Leuchtenburg, a historian at the University of North Carolina, "but I doubt that it has an awful lot to do with Theodore Roosevelt.

"In any war, there's going to be a very great accretion of power to the president," he said, adding, "He has an area he can roam around in and be as big a president as he wants to be."

Such a turn of events once seemed improbable: Mr. Bush began in the cold rain of January with an uncertain mandate, lost Republican control of the Senate by the spring, then faced a disappearing surplus and a menacing recession by the end of the summer. With no notice to the allies, he declared that the Kyoto treaty on global warming was "dead," adding to European fears about an isolated America determined to go it alone. Mr. Bush's staff worried that his presidency seemed small.

But then came Sept. 11, when Mr. Bush's powers as commander in chief coincided with the desires of many of those swept back into office by his election. First among them was Vice President Dick Cheney, who said he believed that Bill Clinton had squandered the power and prestige of the presidency.

"I think it starts with a strong cabinet," said Andrew H. Card Jr., Mr. Bush's chief of staff. "Look at the people in the news since Sept. 11 — Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell. They are strong leaders. But they also brought a great appreciation of the power of the presidency to their offices."

Mr. Card added that when the attacks occurred, "the president knew he had to be commander in chief in the broadest sense of the word — commander of the military, but also of the firefighters and the police and the mail carriers."

At home, Mr. Bush used his powers through much of the fall to bend Congress to his will. In November, when he was under severe pressure, even from Republicans, to increase spending for domestic security, he resisted. On Nov. 6, he summoned a delegation from Capitol Hill and bluntly announced that he would veto legislation that went beyond the $40 billion he had already agreed to for this fiscal year for countering terrorism and rebuilding New York.

Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin and the ranking minority member on the Appropriations Committee, had expected a negotiating session rather than an ultimatum. He was furious.

"I said," Mr. Obey recalled, " `You can say anything you want, this is your house, Mr. President. But I've been coming down here for 30 years, and this is the first time that a president has told me his mind is closed before the subject is even opened.' " Mr. Bush was unmoved. "Thank you very much," he told the delegation, several people present said. "I've got another meeting."

An administration official said Mr. Bush had not meant to be rude, just uncompromising. "It was also a test of who was going to be paramount, the legislature or the executive, when it came to spending," the official said.

As commander in chief, Mr. Bush made it clear from the first days of the war that he alone would make major strategic decisions. On the first weekend of bombing, he silenced a debate among his advisers about whether to broaden the war on terrorism's goals to include toppling Saddam Hussein of Iraq, saying that decision would come only after Al Qaeda was routed. And while European leaders have argued it would be a mistake to expand the war to Iraq, Mr. Bush had made it clear that he alone would make that call.

Critics say Mr. Bush is showing his true stripes as a unilateralist who is interested in alliances only when they do not get in his way. Mr. Bush's closest advisers disagree.

"George Shultz had this idea that you `garden,' which means you have to constantly tend to your alliances," said Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. She added that while "the president is very much of that school, that never meant, from his point of view, that you simply go along to get along," citing his decisions on the Kyoto agreement and the A.B.M. treaty.

"You have to stand for something," she added. "You have to have a sense of what American interests are." Often that fits into a broader alliance, she said, and "the war on terrorism is a great example of this."

That is also a telling example of the Bush style. In the first days after the attacks, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney decided that all the major strategic decisions about the war would be made in Washington. They built a coalition in the loosest sense — with the exception of Britain, all the members were nonvoting partners.

"No one wanted to re-create the worst moments of the gulf war, when the allies and the Arab states argued about what to do next, and how," one aide said.

As he tried to create workable alliances abroad, Mr. Bush found he also had to repair relations among agencies of the executive branch. Aides said Mr. Bush was stunned to discover after Sept. 11 how little the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. communicated. He set a new course, aides say, and now insists that Director Robert S. Mueller III of the F.B.I., sit in on the daily C.I.A. briefing in the Oval Office. The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, then remains for the F.B.I. briefing.

"It's not unusual for the president to say at the end, to the two directors, `Now I want you two to go off and work on this specific problem,' " Mr. Card said. "And the message travels down pretty fast."

Bush said right off the bat that overturning Roe v. Wade was not in his vision during the campaign. He realized, as I do, that this is going to take time. The culture has to be changed first.

I am not sure what your Russia tangent has to do with anything. Guess it just needed to be thrown out?

I never EVER would have argued vehomently, or even tepidly, that Bush's daddy was pro-life.

Dubya is not his dad.

I am watching as he changes perceptions and works towards changing the culture. I am pleased with the progress so far.

Anyways, go paint N'awlens (or however is the proper way to pronouce it) red.

This year, conservatives will find a way to work together. The optimist in me demands it. We will pave the way to save lives.

It is the most important issue of our time, even while the nation is focused on terrorism.

What bothers me is that the nation has been propelled into a wild goose chase for one bearded camel-like man that will inevitably last for too long and will have the duped cheering and sighing the whole way through. Our funds will trickle into the military... our men and women will fight overseas... and the nation will continue in this quasi-war state, while people run around in their trendy patriotic fashions, blessing the president and the "fight for freedom". If the government was serious about fighting terrorism, Osama would have been paste on the cave wall months ago, and all the organizations would be gone already. But this fight will never end... big brother has made their "Emmanuel Goldstein", and the proletariat is none the wiser.

Bless you, Hugh, you have seen the deeper truth! The nation will need a change of perspective to get behind efforts to change abortion policy in America. To affirm life, individual lifetimes begun at conception, will require even literary works that offer the truth in differing genres that reinforce/affirm the illimitable value of the individual human being even found in the womb at their most vulnerable.

This year just begun will be one of the most crucial years in America's history, as the trials present for solution by a people united, for the democrat party knows a united people present the most danger to the divisive methodology of their party power plays. This year will be hallmarked by efforts to divide the people, efforts by the closet socialists, the democRAT party. The issue of protecting individual lifetimes begun and running already in the womb (to last in that borrowed womb for only a few months, as measured against a lifetime alreay begun) will be a crucail gut check for the pubbies. If the pubbies meet the challenge openly and honestly, the people will embrace life; if the RATS succeed in obfuscating the truth of preborn individual life, the nation will be corroded beyond repair ... and the year 2002 is the decisive year of note.

Once more...and pray they understand.

You are imprisoned by your paranoia. What a rotten, fear-filled, miserable existence you live.

And you are a cowardly twit Kevin.

I'll stand with Reagan and these words spoken by him:

Well, I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down--up to man's age-old dream--the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order--or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.

In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the "Great Society," or, as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a "greater government activity in the affairs of the people." But...the full power of centralized government--this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don't control things. A government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose..

Ronald Reagan, urging voters to support Barry Goldwater, addresses the nation in "A Time for Choosing," October 27, 1964.

I've been a member of The Republican Party for over 30 years here in Fla. I've worked on Jeb Bushs campaign and am in charge in transporting nursing home voters to the polls in a 3 county area for the RNC. I have a large extended family, many whom are not politically astute and who depend on me to advise them. It is arguable that my efforts produced more then the number of Republican votes for G.W. than he won Florida by. We barely won this election. Traitors like like you will insure that it will be the last election the GOP wins. You don't lose 30 year veterns and former YAF members and remain viable in conservative politics. Of course I know you hope to make up the difference with all the liberals such as yourself who will flock to the GOP filled with admiration for Big Daddy Government. Go suck an egg you dolt.

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