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 Editorials | Issues | January 2007 
Bush Making A Bid to Turn Around His Flagging Presidency
 Sheryl Gay Stolberg - International Herald Tribune
| | US President George W. Bush, seen here in Washington 05 January 2007, will unveil his new strategy for Iraq in a prime-time speech to the nation on Wednesday at 9 p.m. (0200 GMT Thursday), the White House said. (AFP/Jim Watson) |
The 13 senators did not mince words. Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, told President George W. Bush that sending more troops to Iraq "was a mistake," while Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said he too was opposed.
Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, complained of having "a much harder time convincing my constituents that victory is achievable."
Senator Larry Craig, Republican of Idaho, said Bush "got an earful and, I think, appropriately so."
The gathering Friday around the oval mahogany conference table in the Cabinet Room of the White House was hardly the scene that Bush envisioned in April when he hired a new chief of staff in a management shake-up intended to set his presidency on a fresh course. In the eight months since, things have grown only bleaker for the president. Democrats are running Congress, Republican support for the war is evaporating and Bush's sagging approval ratings have not budged.
Now, like a cat on its ninth life, Bush has a chance yet again to turn his flagging presidency around. It may be his last.
Over the next three weeks, beginning this week with a prime-time address to the nation on what he calls the way forward in Iraq, continuing with the State of the Union address later in January and concluding with the release of his 2008 budget on Feb. 5, Bush will set a blueprint for the rest of his presidency. What he does during this critical time may make the difference between a president who can have a vital two years and a lame duck.
"These are the weeks that will make or break the presidency," said Kenneth Duberstein, who in 1987 was tapped by another second-term president, Ronald Reagan, in a shake-up similar to the one Bush began in April. Of the Iraq speech, Duberstein said: "For the past six years, every time the president gave a speech, people said it was the most important speech of his presidency. This is the most important speech."
Bush is widely expected to center his new Iraq policy on a temporary surge in troops. Once the policy is announced, Bush is likely to take his case directly to the American people, with speeches outside of Washington.
In the capital, "there will be some very aggressive outreach efforts," said Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, "not only with politicians, but the press."
The sales job on Iraq will be critical, especially if Bush goes with the surge option. In an interview last month, Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, said Bush "starts from a deep hole in trying to get the American public behind his policy," adding that any shift in course would "have to include extricating Americans from Iraq."
Democrats, who say the message of the November midterm elections was that Americans wanted the troops to come home, will not make life easy for Bush if he tries to do otherwise. On Friday, the newly installed Democratic leaders in Congress — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid — sent a letter to Bush urging him "to reject any plans that call for getting our troops any deeper into Iraq."
Several senators who attended the meeting Friday, Republicans and Democrats, said they told the president they could support an increase in troops only if Bush set specific goals for the Iraqi government and makes it clear that the American commitment in Iraq was not open-ended.
Craig said afterward that he sensed the president got the message.
"A majority of Republican senators are saying that if it's a surge, there had better be a very clear and understandable definition of what all this means and what happens if it doesn't produce," Craig said, adding, "I think the president comes away from this meeting recognizing that how he handles the next week, and what he says, is going to be significantly important in the kind of support that Congress will produce."
January is always an intense month at the White House, the month that a president and his aides spend drafting the State of the Union address and the budget, a blueprint for presidential priorities. But the overlay of a fresh Iraq policy — including a military and diplomatic shake-up, with new generals being sent to Iraq and a change in ambassadors there — has turned a busy time into what Nicolle Wallace, Bush's former communications director, describe as "a crush" of policy reviews and speechwriting.
"I think they're all aware of the stakes, that this is a chance to go to the country and say, 'Let's do this, I've got a plan to finish strong,'" Wallace said.
Bush has already tried to send precisely that message. On Wednesday, the day before lawmakers returned to Washington for the ceremonies handing control of Congress to Democrats, Bush used his presidential microphone to launch a pre-emptive strike, publishing an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal. In it, he called for a balanced budget by 2012 and an end to the pork-barrel projects known as earmarks.
And he said — in the first paragraph — that with one-quarter of his presidency left, he still has "plenty of time to accomplish important things for the American people."
Still, time is running short for the president. By this time next year, the American public may be looking beyond Bush to the fresh crop of presidential candidates and what they think about Iraq. That is not lost on Bush, said Dan Senor, who served as a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq after the war and who is now a strong supporter of the surge proposal.
"My sense," Senor said, "based on the people I've talked to, is that the president has totally absorbed the moment, that this is the moment for him to be large and in charge of policy, and that this may be his last chance to do that."
But Snow emphatically rejects the notion that the Iraq speech is Bush's "last hurrah." He said the speech preparations have created a sense of "energy rather than anxiety" inside the White House.
"Everybody understands it's an important speech," Snow said, "but the president is not prone to melodrama." |
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