The White House went pink tonight, part of worldwide campaign at more than 200 landmarks around the globe this month to commemorate breast cancer awareness.
During a ceremony at the White House, First Lady Laura Bush flipped a switch and suddenly a building that has been white ever since John and Abigail Adams took up residence there in 1800 was suddenly pink. She said:
We're showing our support of breast cancer awareness and research in a historic way. In recognition of the mothers, daughters, sisters and wives who struggle with this disease, we're lighting the White House in pink, which is the color of the cause. May our lights tonight shine as beacons around the world, a signal of the United States' commitment to saving lives for breast cancer.
Check it out:
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press
Twenty years ago, President Ronald Reagan gave a global trade speech in a warehouse in the Midwest, and the large shipping containers piled behind him suggested the potential reach of American manufacturers.
Today, President Bush spoke at an office products warehouse in Chantilly, Va., a Washington suburb, and the boxes that formed the backdrop could serve as a less sunny economic metaphor: unsold merchandise.
He used the speech and question-and-answer session that followed to repeatedly defend his decision to intervene in the marketplace with last week's $700-billion support package (he twice used the word "rescue" to describe it, avoiding the more common, but emotional, term: "bailout").
Bush, speaking to local businesspeople, said:
You know, I basically believe that if people make bad decisions in the marketplace, they ought to fail. The problem is, in this case, failure would have cost you. What appeared to be something that might have been isolated, you know, in New York would have cost you the job.
He said he tried to explain this when he was in his hometown of Midland, Texas, this past weekend.
Some old guy said, 'you know, hey,man, what are you doing?' And I said, 'I'm recognizing reality, that this is a serious economic situation that requires strong government action.'
To those who might grumble that the government is bailing out Wall Street execs who made bad calls, Bush said:
Listen, people are angry about the fact that people look like they're dragging out money when there's failure. I understand that. i don't mind rewarding success. It's when people make money on failure. And I think there's going to be -- there needs to be a reassessment of these packages. There needs to be a reassessment of how interconnected people became, how they made promises that they were not in a capital position to fix.
He also sought to soften the blow to stockholders:
A President Bush speech on the economy these days is a cross between reality TV and a 1930s musical:
It's a tough world out there, but sunny days are coming. Just hang in there.
Or, as Bush put it today: "I know that the days are dim right now for a lot of folks. But I firmly believe tomorrow is going to be brighter."
Tough? He used the word roughly a dozen times this afternoon in a speech and question-and-answer session at an office products company in the Washington suburb of Chantilly.
Here's a sample:
"We have been through tough times before..."
"We have faced tough times, after the terrorist attack of 9/11, and we came through strongly, and we're going to come through this."
"No question that times are tough. But no question America will emerge."
"It's not an easy problem. No question about it, it's tough times."
"...I am -- I am -- I am confident in the long term for this country."
"I would remind people that, you know, we have been through tough times before. You know, one of the things that I'm concerned about is the psychology of people. They're basically saying, 'Oh, this is just too tough.' The good news is, in America, we generally don't do that."
"This isn't the first time the American economy has faced challenges, and it's not going to be the first time that we haven't recovered and come out better either."
Democrats in Congress wanted to talk to two of President Bush's top aides about the politically tainted firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. The House Judiciary Committee wanted former White House counsel Harriet Miers to testify and White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to turn over documents.
In early court rounds, the Dems won. In fact U.S. District Judge John Bates ordered the two Bush advisors to cooperate with the congressional investigation into the scandal that sent former Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales packing.
But the Justice Department went to court with Vice President Dick Cheney's favorite refrain: Congress cannot force presidential aides to cooperate because that would infringe on the executive branch's constitutionally protected independence.
Now a federal appeals court has used a different argument to foil the House Democrats' demands. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit basically said in its opinion that time's up on this administration:
The present dispute is of potentially great significance for the balance of power between the legislative and executive branches.... Even if expedited, this controversy will not be fully and finally resolved by the judicial branch ... before the 110th Congress ends on January 3, 2009. At that time, the 110th House of Representatives will cease to exist as a legal entity, and the subpoenas it has issued will expire.
To compel the aides' cooperation, the court said, "would be wasting the time of the court and the parties."
Lawyers for House Democrats have said they plan to continue the investigation during the next session, after a new administration takes office. In other words, they'll issue fresh subpoenas.
But Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, top Republican on the House panel, had another idea: just drop the case.
The decision may turn on who wins the White House in November -- and what tone he wants to set in Washington.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: Alberto Gonzales. Credit: Seth Wenig / Associated Press
Is the United States in a recession? No word yet from the White House.
With President Bush trying to instill confidence in the economy during his final months in office, the answer to that question permeates life around the president.
Of course, it is unknowable at this instant -- and won't be determined until quarterly economic figures are released. And those will be looking backward.
Still, there is a sense of deja vu: Sixteen years ago, as Bush's father was fighting for his political life, the sense of economic gloom doomed his presidency. Never mind that by the time he left office, the economy had begun to turn around.
The current President Bush is zigzagging: He is acknowledging the anxiety and real losses brought on by the economy under his stewardship as he presents a sympathetic front -- though not coming close to the persuasiveness of Bill Clinton's "I feel your pain" demeanor -- and he is also holding out hope for brighter days.
The latter was at the heart of Bush's message Monday that the economy would be just fine.
His next round: this afternoon at Guernsey Office Products Inc. in the Washington suburb of Chantilly, Va.
Bush spent part of the morning on the telephone, with some of the key U.S. economic partners abroad: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
The president presented "the various measures that the United States is taking to bring stability to the markets, as well as the importance for all countries to work together to coordinate our actions on finding solutions to the problems that are facing all of us," White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said.
The U.S. stock market is down. World financial markets are in free fall. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson is scrambling to put in place his $700-billion rescue plan. And a billboard in Times Square pitching consumer products shares space with an electronic news ticker that shows Wall Street's reaction to a new plan by the Federal Reserve to buy lots of short-term debt.
Asked to explain why the expensive bailout -- which infuriated the public and could cost several congressmen their jobs at the polls in November -- isn't working, financial experts argue that it's a question of too little, too late. As Georgetown University's Martin Evans explained to the Washington Post:
People are realizing that the Paulson plan is not going to be nearly enough. It's not because the plan is ill-conceived. It looks like it's the right thing to do. But the problem is just growing astronomically.
Bob Barr, the former congressman from Georgia who is running for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, has a different theory. He says the White House, as it did in Iraq, hyped a dilemma to win support for massive intervention. And he said the administration's expensive bailout only made things worse.
The Bush administration once again misled Americans into believing extreme danger was imminent and extraordinary U.S. government intervention was required to save our country. And once again, the intervention of the Bush administration made it worse.... We've gone from threats of mushroom clouds and alleged vials of anthrax to threats of massive unemployment and no credit for student loans.
Arguing that Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain were also complicit in the "alarmism and paranoia," Barr said that President Bush and the major-party presidential candidates "took a bad situation and made it worse -- with taxpayers picking up a huge debt."
Barr's solution? "Bush, McCain and Obama should have taken a deep breath and stayed out of the way as the market continues its painful adjustment process."
Mentioning neither William Ayers and the Weather Underground nor the Keating Five, the two hot topics du jour of the presidential campaign, President Bush managed nevertheless to quietly slip himself into the campaign today by delving into a secondary issue: What standards a president should apply when picking judges. (*Update: We misspelled Ayers' name earlier but have now corrected it.)
Bush did not have to say about whom he was speaking. He never said "Obama" or "McCain," "Democrat" or "Republican."
But speaking to a conservative legal gathering in Cincinnati, he injected the subject of judicial appointments -- from the district court level up to the Supreme Court -- into the debate, and made it clear that in considering election choices, the president's role in nominating jurists must not be overlooked.
But the president was using a double-edged sword. It is a topic that can energize activists in both parties.
"The lesson should be clear to every American, and that is: Judges matter," he said. (If anyone doubted that, he offered this statistic: He has nominated more than one-third of the judges now holding lifetime appointments on the federal bench.)
No surprise in his instructions: Find judges who will "interpret the Constitution and not use courts to invent laws or dictate social policy."
And no surprise that they fit nicely with John McCain's approach.
On the day that the Dow Jones industrial average fell below 10,000 for the first time in four years, President Bush said this afternoon that "in the long run, this economy is going to be just fine."
Inserting remarks on the economy at the top of a speech in Cincinnati on the judiciary, Bush sought for the second time in a matter of hours to demonstrate confidence in the nation's economic future and to justify the massive government intervention that he signed into law on Friday.
"It's a resilient economy," the president said. 'It's a productive economy with good workers."
As for what's going on at the moment:
This is a reminder that we have been through tough times and we're going to come through this just fine.
He said that earlier in the day in San Antonio, he had coffee with three small-business people and that his advice to them was "to keep, you know, selling their products and working hard."
As Countdown to Crawford noted a little while ago, isn't that pretty much what he said after the 9/11 attacks?
Three days after he signed the $700-billion legislation intended to help the nation out of its credit crisis, President Bush tried today to deal with the angry criticism that came so close to scuttling it -- and continued to ripple over the weekend.
"A lot of people here in Texas and around the country are not pleased with the government having to take the steps they took," the president said, after meeting in private with a group of small-business people at a pharmacy in San Antonio, who then trooped out onto the street to provide the photo-op backdrop.
Sometime soon, seven years after it invaded Afghanistan, the Bush administration is expected to settle on a new policy to stabilize that still-fragile country. As Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander there, said:
I think we are in a very tough fight -- a tough counter-insurgency fight. We're [at] a higher level of violence than we were this time last year. We are seeing a greater amount of insecurity in certain areas. The idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.
McKiernan made news last week when he suggested that the now-famous "surge strategy" that Gen. David Petraeus fashioned for Iraq -- working with tribal leaders -- might not work in Afghanistan because of "a degree of complexity in the tribal system which is greater than what I found in Iraq years ago." Of the 400 major tribal networks in Afghanistan, he said, "a lot of that traditional tribal structure has broken down."
The fact is our aid that is given is extraordinarily ineffective for many years, and they've done nothing about it. So now they're talking about it, but there's nothing they can accomplish in the last days of the administration.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: Gen. David McKiernan meets with President Bush in the Oval Office to discuss the Afghanistan policy on Oct. 1. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images
After terrorists struck on 9/11, killing 3,000 people and shaking Americans to their core, President Bush launched a "war on terror" but told consumers to keep on spending.
"Get down to Disney World in Florida," he said two weeks after the attack. "Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed."
Now, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University is arguing that in encouraging spending instead of sacrifice as the nation went to war first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, Bush fueled a binge of credit card spending. Andrew Bacevich wrote in Sunday's Washington Post:
Bush seems to have calculated -- cynically but correctly -- that prolonging the credit-fueled consumer binge could help keep complaints about his performance as commander in chief from becoming more than a nuisance. Members of Congress calculated -- again correctly --that their constituents were looking to Capitol Hill for largess, not lessons in austerity. In this sense, recklessness on Main Street, on Wall Street and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue proved mutually reinforcing.
Bacevich, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, further argues that the "go to Disney World" strategy also eventually forced Bush to scale back his own ambitions to transform the Middle East. Public appetite for war ebbed with increasing casualties and costs. Now, says the professor, the bill is due.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: Eric Draper's White House photo of President Bush addressing 9/11 rescue workers via bullhorn at ground zero on Sept. 14, 2001.
If you were watching only the polls, Wall Street or Afghanistan over the last several months, you could be forgiven for thinking President Bush had been having a rough go of it, what with a job-approval rating rivaling that of Richard M. Nixon at his lowest, the tumbling Dow and the resurgent Taliban.
But you'd be wrong. It really hasn't been an entirely bad closing act for Bush. Indeed, he's on a roll. At least that's how the White House sees it.
Consider:
Last Monday, he suffered a legislative wipeout when the House rejected the $700-billion plan Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. hatched to deal with the credit crisis. By Friday, the president had signed an only slightly revised package into law. No other legislative issue carries greater importance for the president as his time in office wanes.
On Wednesday, he will sign a civilian nuclear agreement with India that won congressional approval last week. Apart from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been one of the most important -- and troublesome -- foreign policy issues on Bush's agenda for several years.
Remember the chant "drill, baby, drill" at the Republican National Convention last month? Congress heard it. After balking for years -- decades, really -- at relaxing rules against offshore exploration for oil and gas, it went along with the president's own initiative to ease government obstacles. The measure doesn't open up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to be sure, but it is nonetheless one of Bush's top energy priorities.
Not bad for a lame-duck president and one of the least popular at that.
But wait, there may be more.
Speaking with reporters after a closed-door forum with small-business people at the Olmos Pharmacy in San Antonio, the president said he was looking forward to moving back to Texas, "but in the meantime, it looks like I'm going to have a lot of work to do, between today and when the new president takes office."
As Dan Eggen, writing in the Washington Post, noted today, White House officials see such victories as underscoring "a year in which Bush has repeatedly pushed through major legislation on Capitol Hill regardless of troubles in the polls or the overwhelming focus on the presidential race."
For the White House transcript of the president's remarks to reporters this morning, click on "Read full story" ...
It isn't that director Oliver Stone is trying to influence the Nov. 4 election. Really. It's just that his biopic on George W. Bush is due to be released Oct. 17, about three weeks before voters head to the polls.
In an interview last week with the Times of London, Stone said in advance of the release that his new movie portrays President Bush as, well, a character.
It's a comedy only in the sense of tragic comedy. You laugh in your mind because Bush is a goof-ball, because he's awkward, but at the same time he has a stubbornness, a John Wayne ethos, an anger, an impatience, that make him fascinating. You may hate Wayne's politics, but you may well enjoy his company on screen.
The movie, starring Josh Brolin as George W. Bush and Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, is "a human portrait of a man, not meant to insult people who believe in what Bush believes in," said Stone, whose earlier works on "JFK" and "Nixon" stirred controversy. Brolin, he said, portrays Bush as "charming, which I think he is." Stone also compared Bush to his father, George H.W. Bush:
I think he (W.) is a wonderful salesman, charismatic to many people and he has a politician's ability to touch and reach, which his father never had. So he did outdo his father -- as a salesman.
Stone told The Times he's not sure the public will rush to the theaters to see a movie about an unpopular president, even though he tried to walk in the president's shoes. He explained:
It's my job ... if I'm dramatizing his life ... to step above my hate.
But enough of words. Here's the latest trailer leaking out of his studios.
Barely three months before he will move back to Texas, the president and his wife, Laura, visited his boyhood home today in Midland, Texas, for the first time since moving to Washington.
It's an amazing experience to come back to a place where you were raised. Laura was raised in Midland, I was raised in Midland. This is one of the three homes I lived in, and I kind of remember it. The bedroom — actually I do remember the wood on the wall in the bedroom.
"I learned a lot of values that I hold dear here," the president said, adding that he told friends in the community "that, you know, even though I had to deal with a lot of tough issues, that I'm still the same person that they knew before and that, you know, I'm wiser, more experienced, but my heart and my values didn't change."
The home, built in the 1940s, was, of course, the home of two future presidents. The first President Bush grew up in the considerably more posh surroundings of Greenwich, Conn. He and his wife, Barbara, moved to Midland when he was starting out in the oil business in the years after World War II.
The second President Bush and his wife also lived in Midland as newlyweds. As Countdown to Crawford reported last month, their first house there recently went on the market for $239,900.
The president was in Midland to attend today to speak at a fundraiser for the Republican National Committee and Republican congressional candidates.
As for his return to Texas, the president owns a 1,600-acre spread near Crawford, down Prairie Chapel Road. That's where he's spending the weekend.
Maybe what happens in Nevada should stay in Nevada.
The president was stuck in Washington, making last-minute calls in the effort to win congressional approval for a $700-billion financial rescue plan. So Vice President Dick Cheney was tapped to go to Reno in his place and address the White House Conference on North American Wildlife Policy.
President Bush created the conference in 2007 via executive order, and charged it with drafting a plan to guide future wildlife conservation efforts to protect "the nation's hunting heritage."
Bush, introducing Cheney via video, explained why he was still in Washington and added, "In my place I have sent my favorite hunter."
Cheney, alluding to the 2006 accident in which he accidentally shot his hunting partner and lawyer friend Harry Whittington in the face with pellets, told the crowd he'd taken a lot of grief over the incident over the years, "most of it from the president. The president says to me, 'Here I am at 30% in the polls and you shot the only trial lawyer in Texas who supports me.' "
Then Cheney launched into his rendition of why Bush will be remembered as a great conservationist. The vice president said the White House is even now expanding its efforts in conservation.
Over the next five years, even after Bush has left the White House, Cheney said the administration will have put into place tax incentives that could add 7 million acres to the Conservation Reserve and restore 4 million acres of wetlands.
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
