Posted on 01/08/2003 10:24:48 AM PST by Jean S
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.
“He felt not merely angry, but surprised— and betrayed”
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.
Bush had hoped for too much. He had expected the war to trump politics.
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.
This was misleading, and I think it was meant to be misleading.
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.
“Well, who do I blame for that fiasco?”
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?”
Dick Morris was right: Republicans are not so nimble.
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.
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Not long ago average folks believed the world was flat, organisms spontaneously generated themselves and Pagannini was in league with the devil because he played the violin in a way nobody previous to him had been able to. Sorry pal, your belief that average folkd determin the truth by what they believe doesn't hold up.
You and I have no agreement upon what constitutes basic reality. What I'm sensing among a number of people is a repeat performance of Kennedy and Camelot with Bush as the new idol. There was no substance to the Kennedy myth. I see determination to construct a Bush myth without substance. Bush is like a messiahanic religion to some people. It won't seel at my house. Dialogue terminated.
"I'm posting a selection of the reviews of the book, negative as well as positive, at www.davidfrum.com. My favorite so far is an outburst of sputtering fury from Michiko Kakutani: who managed in just 750 words to describe the book as "hectoring," "bellicose," "kneejerk," and guilty of "revel[ing] in ... American power." Guilty on the last point anyway. And the next time somebody asks me about the White House's displeasure with me, I'll be able to tell them that it is nothing compared to the dose of chili powder I seem to have shaken into the soup of those who hate this president."
True. But what average folks believe certainly determines what happens inside our political environment. The vast majority of Americans don't know and don't care how Pagannini played the violin. What they've come to sense is that they trust and like Geo. W. Bush as a person, and as their President. This overwhelming gushing of trust toward the person in the Oval Office is, quite frankly, refreshing considering where things were from 1993-2000.
YOU may not wish to discuss this, but you are not the final arbiter.
I hate to tell you this, but my beautician, who thinks Cheney is ugly and won't vote for him, has an EQUAL vote with those of high intellect, such as you. Therefore, in order for a candidate to be elected, he must appeal to those sordid "common folk," who vote on hair styles, jokes, and who has the prettiest wife. This IS how a large number of the electorate vote.
Until you can get a Constitutional amendment passed requiring an IQ and current events test before voting, it is vitally necessary to appeal to those common people. You betray your ignorance of politics when you smarmingly discount those who aren't as astute as you.
Common people may not determine the truth, but they do determine who gets elected.
INSIDE THE WEIRD WORLD OF GEORGE W. BUSH
From Richard Wallace, US Editor In New York
GEORGE Bush is bad-tempered, ignorant and desperate for approval from his mother, according to an extraordinary new book.
His former speechwriter David Frum, a Canadian right-winger who coined the infamous phrase "axis of evil", paints a disturbing picture of a president and his White House.
And in curious parallels with his arch enemy Saddam Hussein, the world's most powerful man comes across as confused, tightly wound, prone to mood swings and obsessed with petty detail.
"He is often uncurious and as a result ill-informed," says Frum, whose description of Iraq, Iran and North Korea set the administration agenda after September 11.
And he discloses: "Bush had a poor memory for facts and figures."
The book - The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush - is the first insider account of the Bush regime and reveals how the White House is run on strict, almost military lines, a so-called "culture of evangelism".
When Frum joined the president's staff he discovered "this was a White House where attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory".
He reveals that Bush, "an intense Christian", credits God with keeping him off the booze and that cabinet meetings routinely begin with a prayer.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the president summoned five religious leaders - three Christian, one Muslim and one Jewish - to the Oval Office and asked them to pray for him.
Then he offered this confession: "You know, I had a drinking problem. Right now I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office.
"There is only one reason that I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar. I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer."
Frum, 42, repeatedly mentions how Bush and various aides are constantly thanking God, beseeching God's help and urging others to pray on their behalf.
It mirrors Saddam's habit of regularly referencing Allah in his every action and speech.
Bush aides may not drink, swear or smoke, and late-night fast food is forbidden. Even a mild 'damn it' is frowned upon.
In a series of Saddam-style dictats, men must wear blue or grey suits and women must try to avoid brightly coloured clothes.
The president, who likes to be in bed by 10.30pm, is also obsessed about saving electricity, often walking around the White House turning off lights.
Frum jokes: "The television show The West Wing might as well have been set aboard a Klingon starship for all it resembled life inside the Bush White House." [Note: Having read Frum's book, this comment was intended to be a slam at the "The West Wing" in pointing out the utter normalcy of the REAL White House of GWB. Mr. Wallace clearly doesn't get it...He probably finds normalcy to be disturbing.]
He goes on: "In private, Bush was not the easy, genial man he was in public. Close up, one saw a man keeping a tight grip on himself. Bush was a sharp exception to the White House code of niceness. He was tart, not sweet." The speechwriter reveals the president's private views are extreme and boorish.
Bush describes al-Qaeda as "a bunch of nuts" and environmentalists are "green-green- lima-beans." Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is "thuggish". And he would often say sarcastically of Europeans: "They just lurve Arafat." Frum also reveals: "Bush had a much more strained relationship with his mother than is often acknowledged. Barbara can be a difficult-to-please woman.
"Bush married a woman as unlike his mother as possible. His wife was his mother antidote."
Frum says that before the terrorist attacks, Bush was preparing to launch a series of bizarre social engineering measures called Communities of Character.
The issues to be tackled included: "Obscene music lyrics, children not eating dinner with their parents...and so on."
Frum says only Bush's chief political adviser Karl Rove and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have above average intelligence within Bush's inner circle.
But he pays tribute to Secretary of State Colin Powell's political skills. Powell is "the deadliest bureaucratic knife-fighter in the whole administration".
But it's Bush, the man, who surprises - and Frum's final verdict after all the barbs.
He says: "George W Bush is a very unusual person: a good man who is not a weak man. He has many faults. He is impatient and quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic, more conventional in his thinking than a leader probably should be. But outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage and tenacity."
He adds: "He was a rather unfamiliar type of heavyweight. Words often failed him, his memory sometimes betrayed him but his vision was large and clear.
"And when he perceived new possibilities, he had the courage to act on them - a much less common virtue in politics than one might suppose. Bush's vision is not occluded by guilt or self-doubt." Frum quit his £60,000-a-year job soon after last January's axis of evil speech. Insiders say the president was upset that he had taken credit for the address.
But Frum concludes that the president has performed well. "He was hardly the obvious man for the job. But by a very strange fate, he turned out to be, of all unlikely things, the right man."
And yesterday he claimed: "The more I got to know Bush the more I got to like him."
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I don't know whether Bush wants anything. At one point he even expressed indifference about wanting to be president. It's what people determined to create an idol and mesiah out of him are doing is the problem.
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Bush and I would not coexist in proximity. When anger I can clear entire football stadiums by force of profanity is five languages.
The Soviets that Reagan confronted were rational men who cared about perpetuating their power.The Russians loved their children too. These enemies we have now teach their kids to strap explosives on their waist and go into crowds and press a button.
You cannot imagine what a relief that is to the rest of us. We were so worried that you two would get along.
Frankly, after reading your rantings, I'm THRILLED that you don't like him. If you did, I'd be worried about my own sanity.
As I'm sure you know, I am the DUMBEST person on this forum regarding money/economy/etc. I saw the movie Trading Places about a hundred times and STILL do not understand anything at all about orange juice futures.
I do, however, understand "taxing faster than you can spend."
And I'm thinking of Lincoln Chaffee saying "they're taking OUR revenues" this week. Geez.
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That, and much more, occcurred to me. It surprises me that you doubt that it would have.
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