Rejuvenated Bush Prods Congress on Education, Defense

President Bush jumped into the Washington political fray from afar Wednesday, pressing Congress to put his education proposals and defense budget at the top of its autumn agenda.

One day before ending his nearly monthlong summer visit to Texas, the president set an agenda for Congress that also urges speedy action on a patients’ rights measure and a provision providing prescription drugs to Medicare patients.

Although the proposals are not new, they come amid a rapidly souring budget picture. Since the president and Congress left Washington, their budget offices each reported that the once-soaring surplus is nearing the vanishing point.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the surplus, projected last May at $275 billion, was closer to $153 billion. When the Social Security surplus is not counted, the overall federal budget surplus becomes a $9-billion deficit, the CBO said. In comparison, the White House Office of Management and Budget projected a $1-billion surplus.

Either way, the president and Congress face a period of unaccustomed belt-tightening. Bush, who pushed through a massive $1.35-trillion tax cut, will now have to win support for his $18.4-billion increase in the defense budget and education plans. Making that case Wednesday, Bush said, “I know this nation still has enemies and we cannot expect them to be idle. Security is my first responsibility and I will not permit any course that leaves America undefended.”

Back in Washington, Democratic leaders continued their campaign to blame Bush for the dwindling budget surplus. In a letter to Bush, the Democrats asked him to detail how he intends to finance his defense budget as well as other initiatives without tapping Social Security funds.

“It is imperative that you provide specific guidance on how you intend to pay for the additional initiatives that you are calling for,” said the letter, which was signed by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and the two ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Budget Committees.

Increasingly, the issue of the tax cut’s effect on the budget surplus is angering voters and helping House Democrats, Gephardt said Wednesday in Los Angeles.

“Our poll numbers are the best they have been in probably six years,” Gephardt said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. “And Bush is suffering right now on the issues of the deficit and Social Security and where did the surplus go.

“People are just very much against going into Social Security. They say don’t fund tax cuts, don’t fund education, don’t fund anything. [Social Security] is your first priority.’ ”

But Bush is sidestepping the invitation to argue about whether CBO or OMB budget surplus projections are correct, calculating that substantive policies matter more to most people that the budget process.

“The president is focused on America’s priorities, like the economy, education, Social Security, Medicare, defense and health care,” said a budget strategy memo circulated by the White House. “The president’s partisan opponents are focused on Washington budget games.”

Vacation May Have Helped Bush Image

For the president, the return to Washington today from a vacation that began 26 days ago also brings this new wrinkle: Even as he disappeared from Washington, he may have inched forward his image as a leader with his careful deliberation of the debate over stem cell research and his forays from the ranch to pitch such issues as education and missile defense.

Now, said James Ceaser, a University of Virginia professor of American politics, “the idea that he has lost control of his presidency is gone.”

Certainly, others take issue. They say Bush had an empty playing field in August, but the country paid him little heed and the only competition for space on front pages and television broadcasts came from the saga of the missing Chandra Levy and her relationship with Rep. Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres).

Nevertheless, the president is returning to Washington focused on the heart of his budget--with the possibility that his time off may have given him enhanced clout.

“Our batteries are charged,” he said Wednesday.

“In the next few weeks, Congress will face some critical choices and some old temptations,” he told about 15,000 participants in the American Legion’s national convention here. “I’m asking them to let go of some of the old ways of doing business in Washington, D.C. . . . Often the important things are put off to last. And in the meantime, lots of new spending gets thrown in.

“Near the end of the process, suddenly we hear that Congress is about to go over the budget, so the items that have been saved for last are the ones most likely to get cut. Guess what usually has been saved for the last? The defense bill, leaving our national security at the mercy of budget games and last-minute cuts. This year, we might even see our administration’s two highest priorities, education and national defense, being played off against each other.

“Let us put education and national defense at the first of the line, and not at the last.”

The defense plan would seek the largest increase in Pentagon spending since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The education proposal is built around the president’s demand that in return for greater federal assistance, local school districts increase annual testing of students to determine whether new programs are succeeding. The House and Senate must reconcile differing measures each has passed.

Bush made only passing reference to the dwindling surplus and the debate over whether he is to blame for pushing through the largest tax cut in 20 years.

Knocking any “second-guessing,” he said: “I presume those who now oppose tax relief are for raising your taxes. That would tie an anchor on our economy, and I can assure you I won’t allow it.”

Some critics of the president say that he gained little in the last month that will help him battle the Senate, where Democrats now control the agenda.

Bush Skills Lacking in Democratic Polls

Geoff Garin, a pollster, said focus groups and public opinion surveys he has conducted for the Democratic National Committee found that the president is seen as “a nice guy and a moral person,” but lacking the skills of a strong and dynamic leader.

“It’s the vacation that sticks in people’s minds,” and not the stem cell speech he gave on prime-time television or his “heartland” forays to the Rocky Mountains and Rust Belt states during his vacation, Garin said.

Thomas Mann, a scholar of the American presidency at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington, said, “We’re potentially on the edge of a global recession and a more explosive situation in the Middle East than in a decade.”

Neither has brought out the president’s leadership skills, he said, and the shrinking budget surplus demonstrates “how Pyrrhic his victory” on the tax cut has been.

But a veteran Democrat who has worked on each presidential campaign since Hubert H. Humphrey sought the presidency in 1968 conceded that Bush “is in command” and “is performing pretty soundly.”

But the bigger question about Bush’s leadership--and one he will seek to answer in his battles with Congress starting next week--is this: Will he command respect?

“If we get into a really stiff recession, would we follow him? People would have a hard time heeding his call,” the veteran political operative predicted.

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Times staff writer Greg Krikorian contributed to this story.