Chapter One
The Insurgent Leader
It’s February 2, 2005, and President George W. Bush has a lot on his
mind. In a matter of hours he’ll deliver the State of the Union
address in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the
Capitol. The speech will set both the tone and the agenda for his
second White House term. And, as always, it will be nationally
televised and watched worldwide as well. He’s practiced the speech
twice before on a TelePrompTer and may once more.
His priorities are bold and controversial. Two weeks ago, in his
inaugural address, he announced a crusade to uproot tyranny and
plant democracy around the world. Many American and foreign
political leaders, plus the usual horde of media commentators, found
the idea grandiose or simply naive. So the president needs to flesh
out his ambitious plan convincingly. As luck would have it-and
Bush’s luck is legendary-his task has been made easier by the
breathtaking success of the election in Iraq two days earlier.
Before the election, the Washington press corps expected little from
the Iraqis. A Washington Post reporter, Dana Milbank, suggested
sarcastically that the Iraqi turnout at the polls might number only
in the dozens. He was off by 8.5 million.
Bush has other big issues to talk about besides Iraq. He wants to
privatize Social Security partially and make the wobbly system
solvent for generations to come; he wants to overhaul the tax code;
he wants to tilt the ideological balance of the federal courts to
the right; and he wants to inject free-market forces into America’s
dysfunctional health care system.
For now, though, the president has to attend an off-the-record lunch
in the White House study adjacent to the State Dining Room. “Why do
I have to go to this meeting?” Bush asks his communications
director, Dan Bartlett. “It’s traditional,” Bartlett explains.
Indeed, for years, the president has hosted the TV news anchors for
lunch on the day of the State of the Union address. It’s an
invitation the anchors eagerly accept. Peter Jennings and George
Stephanopoulos of ABC, Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams of NBC, Chris
Wallace and Brit Hume of Fox, and Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff of
CNN will be there. So will Dan Rather of CBS, magnanimously invited
in spite of having sought to derail the president’s reelection
campaign by spotlighting four documents (later proved to be
fabrications) that indicated Bush had used political pull to get
into the Texas Air National Guard and avoid Vietnam duty, and that
he had been honorably discharged without fully completing his
service. (At the lunch, Rather will suddenly appear solicitous of
Bush. “Thank you, Mr. President,” he will say as he leaves. “Thank
you, Mr. President.” Bush will betray no hint of satisfaction.)
Bush’s dread of the lunch is understandable. With few
exceptions-Hume is one-the anchors are faithful purveyors of the
conventional wisdom, which is usually gloomy regarding outcomes that
might cast Bush in a good light. It is also tinged with liberalism,
and wrong. The president agrees with practically none of it.
Sure enough, once the lunch meeting begins, the president takes
issue with many of the anchors’ claims. Stephanopoulos suggests
congressional Republicans rightly fear that Social Security reform
will hurt them in the 2006 midterm election. “You don’t understand
the politics of the issue,” Bush responds. Woodruff says that
critics worry the president is resolved to take on tyrannies
everywhere. “I wasn’t aware that was a criticism,” Bush answers
sarcastically. Jennings says an American general in Iraq told him
that the Syrians are helpful there. “I’d like to talk to that
general,” Bush says in disbelief. In fact, the Syrians are nothing
but trouble, he adds, and have been all along. Bush chastises his
media guests for negativism. “Nobody around this table thought the
elections were going to go that well in Afghanistan, Palestine,
Ukraine, and Iraq.” And they darn well should understand that he
intends to dominate Washington and impose his priorities: “If the
president doesn’t set the agenda,” Bush declares firmly, “it’ll be
set for you.”
Bush’s conduct at the lunch-edgy, blunt, self-confident, a bit
smart-alecky, disdainful of what the media icons are peddling-is
typical. In private or public, he is defiant of the press, scornful
of the conventional wisdom, and keen to reverse or at least
substantially reform long-standing policies like support for
undemocratic but friendly autocracies and the no-tinkering approach
to Social Security. Stephanopoulos’s notion about potential
political harm from seeking to reform Social Security, Bush says, is
thirty years behind the times.
Years ago, Donald Rumsfeld answered a reporter’s query by saying,
“First let me unravel the flaws in your question.” Bush has adopted
a less bellicose version of the Rumsfeld model. Not surprisingly, he
was drawn to Rumsfeld personally. In picking a defense secretary,
Bush was initially inclined to go with former senator Dan Coats of
Indiana. But he wanted someone who would stand up to Secretary of
State Colin Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney in national
security deliberations. He turned to a certifiable tough
guy-Rumsfeld. Coats became ambassador to Germany.
REBEL
President Bush operates in Washington like the head of a small
occupying army of insurgents, an elected band of brothers (and quite
a few sisters) on a mission. He’s an alien in the realm of the
governing class, given a green card by voters. He’s a different kind
of president in style and substance.
He’d rather invite his first envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and his
wife, Francie, to a quiet evening at the White House than appear at
a Washington gala or social event. The night before the White House
Salute to Gospel Music, Bush encountered the Gaither Vocal Band
rehearsing in the East Room. He invited them to dinner. Instead of
consulting “experts” on Third World development, Bush tapped U2
singer Bono as an adviser and ally on aiding sub-Saharan Africa. He
invited Bono, a crusader for debt relief for poor countries, to two
meetings in the Oval Office and rebutted a British reporter’s
sneering reference to him at a White House press conference in June
2005. “I admire him,” the president said. “He is a man of depth and
a great heart who cares deeply about the impoverished folks on the
continent of Africa.” Bono sent Bush a note of thanks for defending
him.
Bush is neither an elitist nor a champion of elite opinion. He
reflects the political views and cultural tastes of the vast
majority of Americans who don’t live along the East or West Coast.
He’s not a sophisticate and doesn’t spend his discretionary time
with sophisticates. As First Lady Laura Bush once said, she and the
president didn’t come to Washington to make new friends. And they
haven’t. They chiefly socialize with old friends, many of them
Texans. Bush’s view is that he and his aides are in Washington to do
a job, then clear out of town. The day after the 2004 election, Bush
reelection campaign strategist Matthew Dowd left a sign with the
letters “GTT” on his office door. He had “gone to Texas” as quickly
as possible to take a teaching post at the University of Texas and
work as a political consultant. Bush will follow in 2009.
There are two types of presidents: those who govern and those who
lead. A governing president performs all the duties assigned by the
Constitution, deals with whatever issues or crises crop up during
his term, and does little else. He’s a caretaker. Richard Neustadt,
in his seminal book Presidential Power, characterized such a
president as essentially a clerk. Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush,
was a president who mainly governed. So was Dwight Eisenhower and,
for most of his time in the White House, Bill Clinton.
Bush is a president who leads. “If we do not lead, people will
suffer,” the president told me in an interview I conducted
specifically for this book. He controls the national agenda, uses
his presidential powers to the fullest and then some, proposes
far-reaching policies likely to change the way Americans live,
reverses other long-standing policies, and is the foremost leader in
world affairs. All the while, he courts controversy, provokes the
press, and polarizes the country. The president doesn’t worry about
running the day-to-day activity of his own government; all he has to
manage is the White House staff and individual cabinet secretaries.
His job, he told me, is to “stay out of minutiae, keep the big
picture in mind, but also make sure that I know enough about what’s
going on to get the best information possible.” To stress the point,
during our interview in the Oval Office Bush called my attention to
the rug; he had been surprised, he said, to learn that the first
decision a president is expected to make is what color the rug
should be. “I wasn’t aware that presidents were rug designers,” he
told me. So he delegated the task-to Laura. Typical of his
governing style, though, he gave a clear principle as guidance: he
wanted the rug to express the view that an “optimistic person comes
here.”
An approach like Bush’s allows a president to drive policy
initiatives, so long as he has a vision of where he wants to take
the nation and the world. Bush, despite his wise-guy tendencies and
cocky demeanor, is a visionary. So were Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Ronald Reagan. They, too, were leaders, as controversial and
polarizing as Bush.
To the political community-that amalgam of elected officials,
aides, advisers, consultants, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and
journalists-Bush is a total surprise as president. In A Charge to
Keep, his campaign book ghostwritten by adviser Karen Hughes and
published in 1999, Bush foreshadowed his governing style and his
reliance on his evangelical Christian faith. “I don’t wait well,”
Bush said. He saw his job as chief executive as being “to set [the]
agenda, to articulate the vision, and to lead.” His interest “is not
the means, it is the results.” His faith, Bush said, “frees me.
Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like. Frees me
to try to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well.
Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next.” Few
read the book and fewer still took it seriously. It was dismissed as
superficial and self-serving.
Bush himself was seen as an intellectual bantamweight who would have
difficulty governing after losing the popular vote to Al Gore in
2000 and winning the White House thanks to a 5-4 decision of the
U.S. Supreme Court. He would have to govern as he had as governor of
Texas. There, he had collaborated with Democratic lieutenant
governor Bob Bullock and a Democratic legislature. In Washington,
Democrats wanted Bush to function, in effect, as a national-unity
president. Congressional Democrats would be partners in forging
policies. It would be a degree of bipartisanship rarely seen in
Washington. After all, Bush had said repeatedly in the 2000 campaign
that he wanted to restore a tone of civility and cooperation to
political relations in Washington. Republicans held only narrow
majorities in both houses of Congress. And with a half-dozen
moderate Republicans in the Senate always prepared to jump ship,
Bush could not count on winning passage of his top priorities or
confirmation of his appointees.
But the president quickly dashed expectations of two-party rule. He
showed no signs of political weakness-quite the contrary. He stuck
to his agenda of tax cuts, conservative judicial nominees, aid to
faith-based programs, and education reform. Bush knew Democrats in
Washington were not the same as Democrats in Austin. They were more
liberal. If Democrats wavered, they faced the wrath of the liberal
special-interest lobby, a collection of groups that represent-or at
least claim to represent-organized labor, liberals, feminists,
environmentalists, gays, foreign policy doves, and minorities. With
their liberalism undiluted, Democrats on the Hill soon came to
dislike the president. Bush found that he didn’t like many of them
either, particularly Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader.
Only on his education reform package, dubbed No Child Left Behind,
did the president find enough common ground for a compromise with
Democrats. His partner was the Senate’s preeminent liberal, Edward
Kennedy. Soon after his inauguration, Bush had invited the senator
and the entire Kennedy clan to the White House for a screening of
Thirteen Days, a film about President John F. Kennedy and the 1962
Cuban missile crisis. Once the education bill was enacted, Bush and
Kennedy took a two-day tour to tout their accomplishment. They
joshed and teased like longtime pals. But the friendship soured as
Bush pursued conservative policies that Kennedy loathed. Bush’s idea
of bipartisanship evolved into a congressional strategy of combining
nearly all Republicans with a handful of Democrats. It worked. Ten
Senate Democrats voted for the Bush tax cuts, providing the margin
of victory for passage.
Democrats, the press, and the Washington establishment all
underestimated Bush. But that was hardly novel. The same thing had
happened to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his cousin Theodore. The
Washington community hopes that new presidents will be steeped in
the intricacies of foreign and domestic policy, adept at political
maneuvering, and high in brainpower; it undervalues the personal
traits, character, and values of presidents.
There were great expectations for Clinton, a polished policy wonk,
and Jimmy Carter, who promised to read the fine print of every bill
he signed. Both were failures, Clinton because of his indecision and
undisciplined personal habits, Carter because of his
counterproductive policies. Richard Nixon, with his political savvy
and deep experience, also appeared destined for success before his
paranoia doomed him.
FDR, TR, and Bush, on the other hand, were prematurely judged to
fall short of presidential specifications. While still New York
governor, Theodore Roosevelt had been dumped on William McKinley as
his vice presidential running mate in 1900 by powerful New York
Republicans who wanted him out of their hair. That was hardly an
auspicious beginning for what became a dazzling career as a national
leader. On the eve of FDR’s inauguration as president, he was
dismissed by columnist Walter Lippmann as “a pleasant man …
without any important qualifications for office.” Lippmann surely
would have felt the same or worse about Bush.
What elite opinion missed about FDR, TR, and Bush was their
temperament. Bush is actually a mixture of FDR and TR, with FDR’s
cool optimism and TR’s pugnacity and determination. This combination
strikes some, especially critics, as arrogance. A more charitable
view is that Bush has the temperament of a self-assured Texas male.
To those who insist he swaggers, Bush responds, “In Texas, we call
it walking.” Bush has a penchant for embracing big projects. He
dismisses many issues as “small-ball” or “mini-ball”-not worth a
president’s time and attention. One of his favorite sayings is “We
didn’t come here to do school uniforms.” It’s a dig at Clinton, the
master of the mini-proposal.
(Continues…)
Crown Forum
Copyright © 2006
Fred Barnes
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-307-33649-2
Excerpted from Rebel in Chief
by Fred Barnes
Copyright © 2006 by Fred Barnes.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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