Bush’s Agenda Loses Focus

A growing Republican chorus is calling for a staff overhaul inside President Bush’s beleaguered White House, but some conservatives say such a change would stop far short of fixing what they view as a serious flaw: an unfocused domestic agenda.

The war in Iraq is dominating the attention of Bush and his top aides, these critics say, while the recent departure of the president’s top domestic policy advisor after just one year has left the White House without an obvious conductor to direct the sometimes disparate policy-making machine.

“You mean they have a domestic policy?” quipped Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Tanner, an author of the failed Social Security plan that was Bush’s No. 1 domestic priority last year, lamented the lack of a “policy czar” setting clear goals. He described the administration as “exhausted” and “rudderless” on the domestic front.

“There doesn’t seem to be an endpoint for what they’re doing,” he said. “They need to decide what they’re going to do for the next three years.... Staff changes are necessary but not sufficient. If they’re just rearranging chairs and office plaques, that’s not going to do anything.”

Although Bush first campaigned on a largely domestic agenda, experts either said he had achieved much of what he had set out to accomplish or said he had put aside priorities at home to devote time, energy and government resources to the war on terrorism.

His once-sweeping ideas of giving every young worker a private retirement account as part of Social Security and completely rewriting the tax code have been sharply scaled back. On healthcare, with prices rising and tens of millions of uninsured, Bush’s major ideas are creating tax-advantaged health savings accounts and computerizing medical records, hardly the broad overhaul sought by many advocates.

Michael Petrilli, who left the Department of Education in 2005 after four years working on school choice issues, said the administration never settled on an education agenda after Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act passed in his first term.

One idea buried in Bush’s proposed budget would spend $100 million on a national school voucher program. The proposal might appeal to conservatives still angry over some big-spending elements of the No Child Left Behind plan, but experts said it stood little chance of winning support this year in Congress.

Moreover, the proposed American Competitiveness Initiative laid out in Bush’s State of the Union address, aimed at boosting math and science education, has not yet gained traction.

“There doesn’t seem to be much of an education agenda right now coming out of this administration,” said Petrilli, who is now vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which advocates for school choice programs.

“It’s hard to tell what the agenda’s going to be for the next couple of years.”

The competitiveness initiative was perhaps the most far-reaching new domestic idea in the State of the Union speech, encouraging innovation by putting renewed emphasis on teaching math and science. But, critics say, the push has come from a few lawmakers -- not from the White House.

“Somebody really needs to steer it if it’s going to happen, but the sense at this moment is that nobody’s really steering it,” said one GOP lobbyist who works closely with the administration on education issues but spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from the White House.

Such frustration among domestic policy advocates underscores the range of problems facing Bush. Sixteen months after reelection, his second term has so far been dominated by a drumbeat of controversy and crises involving a range of issues, including ongoing violence in Iraq, the administration’s domestic wiretapping program and an Arab firm’s bid to manage operations at several U.S. ports.

Bush is facing the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, in the low to mid-30s.

In one independent survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, a plurality of respondents used the word “incompetent” when asked to describe Bush. In previous polls, the most common word had been “honest.”

The ports controversy exposed festering tensions between the White House and once-pliant GOP lawmakers, who rebelled against Bush’s push for the Arab firm to manage port operations. Many of those lawmakers are feeling increasingly free to express frustration about the administration’s tendency to keep Congress in the dark on important issues.

Many conservatives have openly criticized key Bush initiatives in recent weeks, including a Medicare prescription drug program launched this year has proved complicated, costly and confusing to many seniors.

Last week, several longtime White House allies in the Senate joined with moderate Republicans and Democrats to support allowing the government to lengthen the sign-up period for the drug benefit and to negotiate cut-rate prices with drug companies.

Both votes bucked the White House, signaling concern among Republican lawmakers that the program and other Bush initiatives could spell trouble for the GOP in this year’s midterm elections.

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) set off fireworks when he said last week that he had “concerns about the team that’s around the president.” He told the Associated Press: “All of a sudden we’re hearing the phrase ‘tin ear.’ That’s a phrase you shouldn’t hear. The fact that you’re hearing it says that the kind of political sensitivity, the ear to the ground that you need in the White House, isn’t there at the level that it needs to be.”

Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. has held his job since Jan. 20, 2001. He rises before the sun, arriving at the West Wing ahead of the president. He even sweats with him: Card’s weekend routine often includes riding mountain bikes with Bush at a Secret Service training facility or nearby wildlife sanctuary.

No other chief of staff has shown Card’s stamina for the job except Sherman Adams, who served President Eisenhower for five years and eight months and established the modern model for the post. On Sept. 22, 2006, Card is to break Adams’ record.

Card “is on call all the time,” said a Republican senator with close ties to the White House, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak freely about others in his own party. “I don’t know how he’s done it as long as he has. Is he fatigued? I’d have to say yes.”

He added: “The collective group of people who came in have been there a long time, and it’s inevitable you become insular.... You don’t talk to normal people. You don’t go to a Little League game.

“What I would love is some new faces to come in at senior levels,” the senator said. “Some fresh thinking would be helpful.”

One recent staff change was not planned: the abrupt resignation in February of Claude A. Allen, who for the last year had been Bush’s chief domestic policy advisor.

Allen’s resignation was a mystery to his colleagues until Maryland authorities charged him two weeks ago with theft of at least $5,000 in goods from Target and other stores in the Washington area. Before then, Allen had begun taking on a more public role, sitting in the first lady’s box during this year’s State of the Union address and, days before his resignation, briefing reporters on the president’s budget plan.

Another lingering distraction in the West Wing is the ongoing investigation into who leaked the identify of CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media. A grand jury continues to investigate Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Bush’s closest political advisor and the architect of linking GOP political goals to domestic policy. The inquiry has resulted in the resignation of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was charged with misleading federal investigators.

Strategists close to the Bush White House say Rove is unlikely to leave unless he is forced to by an indictment.

Likewise, Bush, known for his emphasis on loyalty, would be unlikely to ask either Rove or Card to leave.

“I can see them working to make a change,” said one GOP consultant with close ties to the White House, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of discussing internal staff deliberations. “But either Karl or Andy has to stay. The trouble is, we don’t know what Karl’s future is.”

Some White House officials and allies wave off the concerns.

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist said he sees no evidence that Rove is distracted or tired. “Karl’s on top of stuff,” Norquist said. “You get your e-mail responses right back.”

Moreover, some administration advocates say that work is proceeding quietly on some domestic initiatives.

Officials on the White House’s National Economic Council, for instance, convened a meeting last week of conservative think-tank scholars to discuss strategies for expanding the use of health savings accounts, the tax-advantaged savings plans that eligible consumers can use to pay for medical expenses. Advocates view HSAs as a freemarket approach to healthcare, though critics charge that they benefit the wealthiest and least-sick Americans without helping the uninsured.

The White House meeting lasted an hour and a half. “Everyone in the room was energized,” said John Goodman, president of the nonpartisan National Center for Policy Analysis.

Jennifer Marshall, director of domestic policy studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, pointed to the $100-million school voucher idea as evidence that the White House was laying some groundwork for future initiatives. The plan, which would create a pilot voucher program in several cities for schools deemed to be failing, would most likely be adopted as part of a new education package next year, she said.

The idea, found in the president’s budget proposal, has received little public notice.

“Everyone knows there’s very little oxygen in the legislative room this year,” she said. “So there’s a second tier of what needs to be put out there as a marker, and education is probably happening on that lower tier, which doesn’t require headline attention and presidential stumping.”

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Times staff writer Ronald Brownstein contributed to this report.