Why little chance is left for Bush presidency

Why little chance is left for Bush presidency
By Edward Luce in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: March 25 2007 19:03 | Last updated: March 25 2007 19:03


Most American presidents suffer lame-duck status to some degree or other during the final stretch of their second term, progressively losing influence and the ability to achieve results. But for George W. Bush, who still has 22 months left in office, the prospects are starting to look worse than that.

In the last month Mr Bush has been dealt a series of hammer blows that pose a threat to his hopes of salvaging a respectable legacy for his presidency.

These have come in addition to the defeat of his Republican party in mid-term congressional elections last November in a setback that was widely attributed to the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, which Mr Bush’s subsequent “new way forward” has done little to assuage.

With neither he nor Dick Cheney, his vice-president, running for the presidency in 2008 – the first time since 1952 that the White House has not had a stake in the forthcoming presidential election – Mr Bush has an ever-diminishing leverage over Republicans.

“The only way a Republican can win next year is by running as a Washington ‘outsider’,” says a campaign adviser to a leading Republican contender. “The last thing a candidate should do is to associate closely with a president whose standing is as low as it is.” Only 35 per cent of voters approve of how Mr Bush is doing his job (see chart) – just half the level of four years ago, when he launched the invasion of Iraq.

On top of these limitations to his legislative goals, which on paper remain ambitious, the White House has been engulfed in scandals in the last few weeks. Last month Mr Bush accepted the resignations of Francis Harvey, army secretary, and then Kevin Kiley, the army’s surgeon-general, following the Washington Post’s exposure of conditions for soldiers recovering in America’s military hospitals.

The revelations, which struck a dissonant contrast to the military backdrops that Mr Bush so frequently deploys for set-piece speeches, sparked congressional outrage. The frequently shoddy treatment back home of soldiers wounded in Iraq undercut Mr Bush’s argument that the Democratic leadership in Congress was letting American soldiers down in the field.

On Friday the House of Representatives attached conditions to Mr Bush’s requested $100bn (€75bn, £51bn) in emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. So far the effects of Mr Bush’s 21,500 troop “surge” to Iraq – “his last throw of the dice”, according to one Republican senator – have failed to sway a disillusioned American public.

Another embarrassment came with the conviction this month of Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Mr Cheney’s former chief of staff, for perjury and obstruction of justice during an investigation into the leaking of a CIA undercover officer’s identity in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion.

Much of the detail in the litany of leaks and clandestine manipulations in which senior Bush administration officials indulged after it became apparent Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction may have been lost on the American public. But the impression derived from the six-week trial was of an administration racked by in-fighting and internal subterfuge during a period when it was supposedly at its strongest.

Now, Mr Bush is caught in a brewing constitutional battle with Congress over his refusal to allow the public testimony of senior White House officials – including Karl Rove, his leading strategist – over the allegedly political sacking of eight federal prosecutors late last year.

As is often the case with Washington scandals, the original transgression turns out to be less important than subsequent ineptitude in managing the crisis. In this instance Mr Bush’s decision this month to release 3,000 pages of government e-mails that omit three weeks’ worth of exchanges has raised suspicions of a cover-up.

The fact that Mr Bush said he would permit officials to testify only in private and without transcription – on the grounds that he did not want to see a “show trial” on Capitol Hill – could yet provoke a legal battle between the two branches of government. Many see in Mr Bush’s stonewalling of Congress the fingerprints of Mr Cheney, whose abiding passion is to restore the presidency’s “executive privilege”, which he believes was lost during the 1970s Watergate crisis.

“When the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986, Ronald Reagan permitted all his senior officials, including George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to testify before Congress,” says Bruce Fein, a senior lawyer in the Reagan administration. “For Mr Bush to blankly refuse to waive ‘executive privilege’ on an issue as seemingly trivial as this makes it almost inevitable there will be some kind of a constitutional crisis.”

Whichever twist this crisis takes – and few would give Alberto Gonzales, Mr Bush’s controversial attorney-general, much chance of surviving it – the mood in Washington is a far cry from last November, when Mr Bush promised an era of bipartisan co-operation after his party’s defeat in the mid-term elections.

The president repeated his message in his State of the Union address in January. “We are not the first to come here with a government divided and uncertainty in the air,” he said. “Our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on – as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done.”

On the domestic front, Mr Bush listed a number of initiatives he believed he could accomplish with Democratic co-operation. These included moves towards energy independence for the US, reform of its broken immigration system and balancing the budget. If things went really well, the White House could even lay the groundwork for reforming the fiscally unsustainable federal pension and healthcare systems.

But the increasingly embittered debate over Iraq – and Democratic insistence on attaching strings to future funding of the war – has sucked the oxygen out of the White House agenda. The threat of congressional subpoenas over the sacked prosecutors has further poisoned the atmosphere. Time is running out.

“We are working on the assumption that the 2008 presidential contest will make it hard for us to get anything done after September unless the groundwork has been laid,” says the chief of staff of one of the Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill. “With the exception of immigration reform, where the White House is pushing to get something done, Mr Bush isn’t making the effort. It is as though he has already left it to the history books.”

Indeed, both Mr Bush and Mr Rove, who remains the president’s closest adviser, frequently refer to the judgment of history and, in particular, to the fate of Harry S. Truman, who left office in 1952 a deeply unpopular figure but whose standing in history is high. Implicit is the belief that Mr Bush’s “war on terror” and his invasion of Iraq will be as central to America’s success in the next few decades as Mr Truman’s cold-war framework was to the second half of the 20th century. Even conservatives – few of whom call themselves “Bush Republicans” – find this a stretch.

“Mr Bush could go down as one of the worst presidents in American history or as one of the better ones,” says Lindsey Graham, the senator for North Carolina. “If in 10 years from now Iraq is a stable democracy, then perhaps there will be Bush Republicans.”

Regardless of his growing lame-duck status at home, Mr Bush will retain full sway over foreign policy until he leaves office. As Mr Graham says: “The president is still relevant as commander-in-chief.” But the fact that US army chiefs warn that the military is dangerously overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan deprives Mr Bush of much of the room for manoeuvre he possessed in his first term.

Perhaps partly as a consequence of the setbacks America has suffered on the battlefield, Mr Bush has begun to dilute some of the implacable unilateralism of his first term.

This month he permitted US officials to attend talks in Baghdad with Iraq’s neighbours, including Iran. Last month Mr Bush endorsed a six-party deal with North Korea that cut directly against his strategy of isolating the “axis of evil” states until they divested their weapons of mass destruction. He even permitted Condoleezza Rice, his increasingly powerful secretary of state, to overrule the US Treasury and release all $25m of the North Korean funds that had been frozen in a Macao bank.

Unsurprisingly, conservative disaffection is trained on Ms Rice. “The entire inter-agency process broke down over the North Korea deal,” says John Bolton, who stepped down in December as US ambassador to the United Nations. “I have been told that officials turn up to inter-agency administration meetings where the state department official says: ‘Secretary Rice has decided to do this.’ The permanent bureaucracy is re asserting itself.”

However, others caution against assuming that Mr Bush has caved in to what one official calls a “Baker-Hamilton” presidency – after James Baker, the former secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic lawmaker, whose critical report on the war in Iraq in December has largely been ignored by the White House. Most of the key hardliners of Mr Bush’s first term have departed – notably Mr Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, who is now president of the World Bank, and Donald Rumsfeld, who was ejected as defence secretary the day after the Republican mid-term election defeat.

But Mr Cheney is still a live force. Many believe the vice-president remains inured to the normal checks and balances of Washington politics, in spite of having lost a number of recent internal administration battles to Ms Rice. In particular, they point to Mr Cheney’s unwavering desire for regime change in Iran – which, in spite of Tehran’s own growing internal divisions, remains committed to uranium enrichment.

“It is clear Mr Bush has decided to bequeath the Iraq problem to his successor – he knows it can’t be fixed in a few months,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser when Jimmy Carter was president. “But on Iran the picture is quite different. Both Mr Bush and Mr Cheney have made it repeatedly plain they intend to solve the Iran problem before they leave office. Ms Rice can always be overruled.”

PEANUTS PERHAPS, BUT CONGRESS FINDS IT HAS POWER

Having promised in January to make America’s 110th Congress “the most ethical in our nation’s history”, Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, arguably set the bar a little too high.

In last Friday’s Iraq emergency spending bill, Ms Pelosi permitted the inclusion of $74m (€55m, £38m), for the storage of peanuts, $25m for spinach farmers and $252m for the milk industry – items not usually associated with the prosecution of a faraway war.

Yet these traditional scraps of pork barrel achieved the desired purpose of securing enough votes to pass a bill that for the first time would put limits on Mr Bush’s ability to continue the war. The $124bn bill passed by a narrow 218-212 majority.

Just a few days before the vote, which will have a largely symbolic effect since Mr Bush has promised to veto it, some Democrats were starting to panic about the possibility of a humiliating defeat. Through a mixture of charm, pork and cajolery, Ms Pelosi managed to fuse the party’s liberal and hawkish wings into one block. Only 14 voted with the Republicans.

“Today, the House of Representatives passed legislation that will, for the first time, set a date for the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq and begin to end the war,” she said after the vote.

“President Bush continues to offer an open-ended commitment to a war that cannot be resolved militarily.”

Nothing of dramatic substance has so far been achieved under Ms Pelosi’s 10-week-old incumbency. But by the standards of the previous Congress, which the Democrats successfully labelled as “Do Nothing” in the countdown to last November’s mid-term elections, it is positively Stakhanovite.

Having pledged within the first 100 hours to pass the “six for 06” promises on which the Democrats had campaigned, Ms Pelosi duly delivered – even if she had to redefine the pledge as the first 100 “legislative” hours, which took almost three weeks.

Most of the measures, such as a small interest rate cut on student loans and a modest rise in the minimum wage after a nine-year freeze, were largely symbolic. But as an exercise in public relations it drew a clear line between the new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill and the 12 years of Republican control that had gone before.

Ms Pelosi also insisted that lawmakers work a full five-day week. In the previous Congress it was standard for representatives to fly into Washington on a Tuesday morning and leave on Thursday night. The fact that a much higher proportion of Democrats than Republicans come from easily accessible metropolitan centres doubtless made it easier on her colleagues.

But perhaps the most visible change is the fact that for the first time since Mr Bush came to office, Congress is discharging its constitutional duty as the watchdog on the executive branch of government.

“It is hard to imagine the previous Congress holding serious committee hearings on the wasted costs of the Iraq war, or on the intelligence failures or on the threat of global warming,” said Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Even if, as is likely, Ms Pelosi fails in her aim of pushing through substantive new legislation, such as a radical bill to tackle global warming or reform of America’s expensive and inefficient system of healthcare, she can claim to be ensuring Congress is performing its oversight role.

For example, significant hearings have been held on the creation of the gargantuan homeland security department (and the influence-peddling criteria by which it has been allocating anti-terrorism funds across America). Congressional committees have also scrutinised controversial provisions within the USA Patriot Act, which has been liberally interpreted by eavesdroppers at the FBI.

And there have been countless Iraq-related sessions that have exposed problems such as the poor quality of protective equipment with which many US soldiers are provided on the battlefield, or the inadequate treatment of military veterans by the US army.

Yet providing oversight is a relatively easy pledge to redeem. Far tougher will be to provide legislative solutions to the really substantive problems such as fixing the deficit-prone US fiscal system, which would involve politically courageous reform to the entitlement system, or creating a more rational domestic pricing system for energy. On these the signs are less good.

This week the Democrats will unveil their budget for the next fiscal year in the House of Representatives. Having in January adopted a “pay-go” budgetary rule, by which any spending increase or tax cut be offset by equivalent revenue-raising measures, Ms Pelosi will have to make tough choices about which of the Democratic party’s social spending promises should go unfulfilled.

She will also have to decide whether to postpone for another year the increasingly urgent task of reforming the alternative minimum tax, which was designed to ensure the very rich pay a minimum amount in taxes but which is increasingly hitting the middle classes (since it was never indexed to inflation).

Ms Pelosi must make the politically tough choice of deciding which of Mr Bush’s large tax cuts from his first term should be dropped when they expire between 2009 and 2011. Having regained Congress after a long spell in the wilderness, Democrats are acutely mindful of the dangers of being labelled the party of “tax and spend” or even “class warfare” that might accompany any decision to abolish Mr Bush’s tax cuts.

In the meantime, however, Ms Pelosi is enjoying her moment in the sun. Like Mr Bush, with whom she has relatively cordial personal relations, Ms Pelosi knows that within a few months the increasingly glaring 2008 presidential race may well have blotted it out.