EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT: David Frum's "The Right Man"

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT
The only excerpt anywhere of The Right Man, the controversial new White House insider’s assessment of America’s 43rd president, by former speechwriter David Frum.

From September until January 2001, the nation’s business was debated in hushed, decorous tones. Some of us were naïve enough to expect that the change might even be permanent, or at any rate lasting.

President Bush hoped that could be so. He scheduled breakfasts with the four top congressional leaders in the Family Dining Room. He courted the Democrats with special assiduity and thanked them loud and often for their cooperation. “It is oftentimes said,” he observed while taking questions at the Cabinet table on Oct. 21, “that when it comes to foreign policy, partisanship stops, and that’s exactly what has happened ... because whether you’re Republican or Democrat, we all want to win this war.” And he offered them concession after concession.

The Democratic leaders wanted airport security screeners to join the federal workforce. Bush assented. They wanted federal unemployment and healthcare benefits for workers displaced by the terror attacks. They got them. They asked that New York’s emergency aid pay not just to rebuild lower Manhattan, but to improve it. So it was done. They urged Bush to focus his post attack economic stimulus on low-wage workers. He did that, too.

What did Bush get in return? On Jan. 4, 2002, Daschle accused Bush of responsibility for the “most dramatic fiscal deterioration in our nation’s history.”

Daschle’s speech was an extremely strange one: Hundreds of thousands of people were losing their jobs every month; the U.S. airline industry was plunging toward bankruptcy; the stock market was twitching; the dollar was slumping — and Daschle was worried about the disappearance of that great pile of money he had mentally earmarked for his postwar spending spree.

The push and shove of normal politics had returned, and they became personal, as they always do.

Early in January, The New York Times reported that some Daschle aides were complaining that Bush seemed “disengaged” and “uninformed” at the breakfasts with congressional leaders. Soon afterward, I attended a meeting at which Bush issued stern orders: Nobody in the White House was to reply to this story. There must be no criticism of Daschle, not a single word. It was a magnanimous order, but it was delivered in a more embittered tone than I had ever heard from him. He sounded as if he felt not merely angry, but surprised — and betrayed.

Bush believed that Sept. 11 was an event as historically profound as the beginning of the Cold War. And on the Cold War model, Bush had hoped that Daschle would grow into the Arthur Vandenberg of his administration, Vandenberg being the formerly isolationist Republican senator from Michigan who put aside his differences with President Truman on domestic policy to help pass the Marshall Plan and military aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947. Instead, Daschle was proving himself Bush’s Robert Taft, another senator (and would-be president) who could not let go of the partisan animosities of the past — or curb a sharp and spiteful tongue.

I don’t know whether Daschle ever offered any personal apology for the secondhand insult. The purpose of the breakfast meetings was to draw the leaders of Congress closer to Bush. Did Daschle fear being pulled too close? Was he looking for some way to break Bush’s embrace? Did he hope by offending Bush to be disinvited from the breakfasts — and thus (in his own mind, at least) be relieved from any duty to support the president in time of war? A friend of mine put this last question to Daschle directly — and the only reply the majority leader made was an enigmatic smile. Whether Daschle intended it or not, relations between the men never recovered. The leadership breakfasts dwindled away.

But New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pungently summed up the emerging point of view of the Democratic Party, or at least its liberal wing. “I predict,” he wrote in a Jan. 29, 2002, column, “that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society.” Daschle never denied the significance of the war quite so boldly. But from the Jan. 5 speech onward, he and the Senate Democrats certainly acted as if they agreed with Krugman that the war was really a distraction from more important domestic issues. There would be no more sinking of old differences for the common cause.

Between Sept. 11 and the end of the year, close to one million Americans lost their jobs. At the beginning of October, Bush outlined a set of proposals for cushioning the economy’s plunge. Despite his amazing popularity, the proposals represented his best assessment of the halfway point between the Democrats’ wish list and his own. If there was ever a moment at which a president might get carried away with his own power, the first week in October was it. But Bush restrained himself and suggested proposals that would have administered a good old-fashioned Keynesian jolt to the slumping U.S. economy.

The House quickly approved a plan resembling Bush’s. The Senate spurned him. So Bush tried again. In late October, Republican and some conservative Democratic senators negotiated a less-generous stimulus plan. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill gave it the nod on Bush’s behalf — and again Daschle rejected it.

Budget Director Mitch Daniels wrote a memo in December pointing out that when Franklin Roosevelt mobilized the nation to fight World War II, he ordered that all expenditures be “held at the present level and below, if possible, and all new work projects trimmed out.” Between 1939 and 1942, federal social spending was cut by 22 percent.

Daniels was not suggesting — not seriously, anyway — that we attempt to emulate FDR’s draconian fiscal discipline. But he did try to remind Congress that the year in which the federal government had to rebuild New York, save the airline industry, help modernize the nation’s emergency forces, and fight a war on the other side of the planet against all the governments implicated in terrorism was not the ideal time to raise domestic spending. The senators blew right past him. As they saw it, a year when all these commitments had to be paid for was a perfect time to spend more on their pet projects — with everybody so distracted, people were unlikely to notice the pilfering of a few hundred million dollars here and the misdirection of a billion over there.

The new leadership of the Senate hardly bothered to tabulate this spending. Daschle listed three causes for the country’s move from projected budget surpluses to projected budget deficits: the war, the recession and the Bush tax cut. He did not even mention spending. And of course Daschle attributed “most” of the deterioration — 54 percent — to the tax cut.

In the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, 2001, the U.S. government had posted a budget surplus of $127 billion. At the time of Daschle’s speech, January 2002, the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a deficit of $21 billion for fiscal 2002. It would ultimately weigh in at more than $106 billion. Almost all of this hard, hold-it-in-your-hand swing from surplus to deficit can be attributed to war and recession: The tax cut accounted for only about 15 percent of it.

What Daschle was lamenting on Jan. 5 was the drastic shrinkage in the surpluses projected for the decade from 2002 to 2011. In January 2001, these were estimated to total $5.6 trillion. By January 2002, they had shrunk to $1.6 trillion. Daschle was right that the Bush tax cut was the single most important cause of this shrinkage. Over the next 10 years, the federal government would have $4 trillion less to play with than Daschle hoped, and of this $4 trillion close to one third had been sent home by the Bush tax cut. No surprise there: Returning the surplus to the taxpayers before Congress could spend it had been one of the tax cut’s principal objectives. But what had happened to the other two—thirds of the surplus?

The short answer is that, by Daschle’s own accounting, it was the slowdown in economic growth after Sept. 11 that ate most deeply into this spendable $4.3 trillion.

Congress’ endless demands for more money for domestic programs, war or no war, did not help, either.

Daschle saw the “who lost the surplus” argument as a devastating weapon against Bush. But Bush was delighted to play Roosevelt to Daschle’s Hoover.

So, at the beginning of December, Bush fired up Air Force One to campaign for his second round of anti-recession tax cuts. His first stop was Orlando, Fla., a city hit hard by the collapse in the travel business. Bush would visit a job training center and then lead a Town Hall meeting.

The Town Hall was not one of Bush’s favorite formats, but today, these people were happy just to see their president’s face and hear his voice. They had pulled their children out of school. And when Bush stepped onto the stage — in front of a giant banner that read “Fighting for American Workers” — they cheered and waved and cheered some more. These were not the dedicated partisans of the Republican National Convention. They were a cross section of central Florida — white, black and Hispanic; young, middle—aged and old; Christian, Jewish and Muslim — and they were cheering so loud that I worried they would hurt themselves. So this, I thought, is what a 90 percent presidency looks like.

Back on the plane, Bush passed through the rear, still flushed with exhilaration.

So how could this revered national figure fail to pass an acceleration of his tax plan through a Senate that had passed the original plan in record time only six months before? One theory blamed his Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill. O’Neill had supposedly failed to impress the New York financial community, and that, in turn, had supposedly undercut his clout with Congress.

No question, O’Neill could sometimes be ham-handed. But whatever O’Neill’s sins and vagaries, the failure to sell the stimulus package cannot be laid at his door. Treasury secretaries do not sell economic programs. Presidents do.

Or presidents don’t. And Bush didn’t. When Daschle assumed full control of the Senate on June 7, Karl Rove’s ground game ceased to work so well. Bush claimed in mid-December that he had the votes to pass the stimulus package if it came to a vote. I’m sure that was true. But it’s the Senate majority leader who decides what comes to a vote and what does not. And the only way to change the mind of an unwilling majority leader is by bringing immense public pressure to bear on him. And such a game would require Bush to play rougher than he had ever willingly played before.

Daschle was too cool a customer to be frightened by the mere fact of Bush’s popularity. He knew that a 90 percent approval rating is like the million—dollar banknote in the Mark Twain story: too big to be easily cashed.

To have forced his tax cut past Daschle, Bush would have had to threaten him with a direct leader-to-leader clash on fiscal issues. He would have had to stop being president of all the people and resume his former identity as a Republican president with a Republican agenda. Bush would probably have won that clash, but Daschle would have achieved his larger aim: shattering the mood of national unity and returning the country to politics-as-usual —or rather, politics-uglier-than-ever.

For in the first week of December 2001, American financial markets were rocked by appalling news: The Enron Corporation, the world’s largest energy trader, confessed that it had been guilty of the biggest fraud in American financial history and was about to go bankrupt.

The tone of much of the reporting on Enron insinuated that the Bush team was somehow complicit in the Enron debacle or, at any rate, had benefited from Enron’s fraud. Enron was often described as Bush’s “biggest supporter.” This was crazy. If you total every dollar that Enron, its affiliates, and its executives and their families gave to Bush’s two gubernatorial campaigns, his run for president, the recount fight, the Republican convention in 2000, and the Bush inaugural in 2001, you would arrive at a figure of at most $1 million. That’s a figure that would impress Bush’s favorite movie villain, Dr. Evil. But considering that Bush raised $190 million for his presidential run alone, Enron’s financial contribution to Bush’s political career amounted to little more than a rounding error.

The shock to the Bush staff from the Enron collapse, and especially to the more junior staffers who had not been forced to sell their shares to meet government ethics rules, was direct and painful. Their retirement plans and personal portfolios tumbled in value, a painful loss for people in government, who often supplement their salaries by drawing on their savings. The Enron bust depressed real estate values in Austin and Houston, another painful loss for those Bush staffers who had not yet sold their former homes. Even the president’s mother-in-law lost money on Enron.

The Bushies’ loss was the Democrats’ opportunity. You almost have to admire the audacity of the Democrats’ maneuver. In one breath, they took credit for the booming stock market of the 1990s; in the next, they blamed Bush for the fraud and corruption of the individual companies that made up the stock market. Had the situation been reversed — had a Democratic administration come to power just as eight years of corporate excess and wrongdoing under a Republican president came to light — nobody would think to blame the new administration for the crimes committed during the old administration’s tenure. And just to make sure of that, the new guys would have hauled the old guys’ Treasury secretary and Securities and Exchange Commission chief in front of a Senate investigating committee and tortured them for days on national television.

“And what were you doing, Mr. Secretary, while these tycoons were robbing their shareholders?”

Early in January, the president summoned his writers into the Oval Office for a preview of the coming year. His message boiled down to this: We’re finished on the home front until November, boys. We’re finished on taxes, except maybe for capital gains — if we win the war, we’ll get our recovery. We’re finished on education, too — we have three years to see how the new reforms work. He spent a quarter of an hour angrily denouncing the Enron executives who had sold their stock while their workers’ accounts were frozen. He said over and over: “How could they do it? I don’t understand it.”

One idea after another for a major domestic or economic speech was thrown at him: Healthcare? Trade? He shot them all down.

It took us a while to get the message, but get it we eventually did. There was no more domestic agenda. The domestic agenda was the same as the foreign agenda: Win the war, then we’ll see.

Did you love the thing about writing DUH on the speech?

I sure did! That was one of the times that I laughed out loud while reading the book...I believe Frum had written this line for President Bush: "I have seen it with my own eyes.." The President circled "with my own eyes" with his Sharpie and wrote "DUH" next to it. Frum was chastised and admits it. I thought it was really funny. He told the story well.

In May 2001, Bush gave the commencement address at Yale. When work began on the speech, Bush seemed uninterested in it. His feelings toward his old school were less than fond. When one of the writers working on the speech unearthed some curious bit of Yale history, Bush asked him with surprise: "Did you go to Yale?"

The writer said no.

Bush replied, "Well, you didn't miss much."

Yet he ended up working harder on that Yale speech than any speech he gave that spring except the State of the Union. The longer he worked on it, the more sentimental he became -- and the more candid. In the end, the speech evolved into the most self-revealing document of that first year. "When I left here, I didn't have much in the way of a life plan. I knew some people who thought they did. But it turned out that we were all in for ups and downs, most of them unexpected. Life takes its own turns, makes its own demands, writes its own story. And along the way, we start to realize we are not the author."

And that was why Bush was so confident: not because he was arrogant, but because he believed that the future was held in strong hands than his own."

"You do the same thing Reagan did"

Name 3 things Reagan did besides the first tax breaks and increased military spending?

Tip O'Neil ran all over Reagan and once the Senate went to the Rates in 84 he was a lame duck for the next 6 years ! He had to make a deal for everything ! The list of non-conservative things Reagan went along with is several pages long so don't think it would be any different with Bush?

I remember thinking about Reagan with distain back then like some of the 1 percenters think about Bush II here on FR. Looking back I was a fool.

The book was enlightening, I agree. Things like how the President brooded about stem cell research...Frum says he tried to get Bush to pull back from being so "pro-life". He says Bush ignored what he had to say after listening and motioned him out of the room. Frum said Bush was not going to back away, he was going to hold to his principles. He said the President said to Frum, "So, you'd be pragmatic - not moral?" There are many other interesting things in the book. Unfortunately, Frum had fallen for the "Bush is dumb" media line before meeting the President. I think he was really surprised. He even talks about the cold-eyes look that Bush gives someone when he feels betrayed or lied to. Our President runs circles around people because they just will not give up their belief that he is dumb. They always end up paying the price for that in the end.

You raise outstanding points about Reagan. I think that he was indeed a great President. Now let's look at those who use his name the most here on FR.

The Eleventh Commandment? It's like he never said it, even though they think that mentioning Reagan's name places them above everyone else. Also, Reagan signed the Mulford Act while governor of California in 1967. That was a gun control measure. If GW had signed a similar bill here in Texas as governor, you'd never hear the end of it by his most outlandish detractors.

Isn't that amazing?

Birth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.

Bush faces no serious problems. Baloney!! Bush's problems are the equal of or more serious than what Reagan had to face. You obviously have a great desire to ignore what's in front of you. I'll bet you were determined to hate Bush no matter what. Live in the real world.

Well good evening! I am glad to see your cheerful self back on the thread. How was your Sunday? I am interested in what occupied your time. I am sure it wasn't something as plebian as football.

Did you write a few short essays? Translate Homer from the original Greek? Work quadratic equations for fun?

Did you, perhaps, write to the President and give him the benefit of your expertise? I really wish you would do so.

There are people that pay $100,000 for a few essays? Or is that your estimation of their worth?

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They pay, and there's more than a few of them. Dialogue terminated.

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