Bush Will Try to Swing Spotlight to Tax Cut Plan

With his personal popularity strong, but the outlook for his top legislative priorities uncertain, President Bush tonight faces the first real test of his ability to generate public support for his most controversial ideas.

Bush will address a joint session of Congress at 6 p.m. PST, opening a sustained effort to sell a tax and budget plan centered on his proposed $1.6-trillion tax cut. Most analysts agree this marks a new stage in Bush’s presidency, one that will strain his communication and legislative skills far more than his first days in office did.

“This is the first test of whether he can use that pulpit to sell, and with his tax cut, he has a hard product to sell,” said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political scientist who closely observed Bush as governor.

Bush has enjoyed an extraordinarily placid first five weeks, largely because he has been overshadowed by the storms raging around his predecessor, Bill Clinton. In many ways, the intense controversy over Clinton’s exit from the Oval Office has eased Bush’s entry into it.

But most analysts agree that the withering spotlight on Clinton has made it more difficult for Bush to focus attention on his policy priorities. And after a strong initial surge of support, Bush over the last two weeks has faced rumbles of resistance to some of his key ideas--particularly among moderate Senate Republicans uneasy about the size of his tax cut.

“They have been unable to break through the Clinton news and other issues to focus on their programs,” said John Weaver, the chief political strategist for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). “We have yet to see whether this president can actually sell to the American people a program that is somewhat controversial.”

Tonight’s speech isn’t expected to reach the filibuster-like lengths that Clinton’s addresses sometimes achieved. But White House aides say that while it’s likely to avoid many rhetorical flourishes, the speech won’t be as terse as many of Bush’s appearances.

“I will spend enough time speaking so that people will understand where I’m coming from, but not too long so they go to sleep,” Bush said Monday.

The speech is likely to focus primarily on Bush’s tax and budget plans, though he is also expected to give his biggest push so far to his proposal to restructure Social Security by creating individual accounts that workers could use to invest in the stock market for their own retirement. One White House source says Bush is planning to propose a presidential commission to study Social Security reform--but with a tight enough deadline for recommendations that Congress could begin considering them later this year.

This relatively tight focus fits the pattern of Bush’s political career. As Texas governor, Bush’s style was to pick a few issues and concentrate relentlessly on them. Bush doggedly avoided controversies outside of his priority list, and devoted more energy to negotiating privately with legislators than generating public pressure on them through appeals to the voters.

So far, Bush has closely followed that model in Washington. Operating on “a theme of the week,” he has elevated a handful of priorities, led by education, tax cuts, increasing government partnership with faith-based charities, strengthening the military and reforming Medicare.

Bush has stuck to those issues--and held to a few central themes in discussing them--even when that has meant he generates much less intense press coverage than a new president usually receives. Indeed, while he has devoted countless hours to schmoozing legislators, dominating public attention seems to be much less of a priority for Bush than most of his predecessors.

“Let me put it bluntly: The goal is not always to make headlines; it’s to make progress on his goals,” said one senior White House advisor, who asked not to be identified in discussing the speech before it was delivered. “That’s what we focus on. And that means hitting our themes.”

Yet tonight’s speech reflects a recognition among Republicans that to advance his goals, Bush has to more aggressively shape the public debate. While Bush has made progress toward building consensus on some of his priorities, especially education, he has faced stiffening resistance on other fronts, such as Medicare and especially his tax cut.

Even Democratic analysts agree that Bush has shifted the tax debate in his direction since the campaign, forcing congressional Democrats to propose larger reductions than former Vice President Al Gore ran on. But in the last few weeks, it has become increasingly clear that Bush still confronts significant public and legislative skepticism about the full $1.6-trillion cut he has proposed.

In a national survey last week, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that while support for a tax cut has increased modestly since February 2000, tax reduction still ranks well behind spending on Social Security and Medicare and other domestic needs when Americans are asked how they would like to apportion the anticipated federal budget surplus. Reducing the national debt, the top priority of Capitol Hill fiscal hawks, draws almost as much support as tax cuts.

“The first three or four weeks couldn’t have written a better script for their tax plan,” said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee. “In the last two weeks . . . they’ve let the momentum slip away on the tax cut, and that was a strategic error.”

Signs of that slippage are evident on both sides of the aisle. In the last two weeks, two moderate Senate Republicans--James M. Jeffords of Vermont and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island--have said Bush’s tax cut proposal is too big. As many as five other Senate Republicans are discussing ways to tie the tax cut to specified progress in reducing the national debt, an idea both conservatives and the administration believe could undermine Bush’s plan.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), for instance, is crafting a bipartisan proposal with Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) that would link both future tax cuts and spending increases to progress in reducing the debt. That plan could be released by week’s end.

“There may be some growing concern among some Republicans about the security of these alleged surpluses and whether you can base such optimistic scenarios on them,” said Weaver, the advisor to McCain.

These potential Republican defections loom large for Bush not only because the Senate is evenly divided between the parties, but because no Democrat has yet publicly followed Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia in endorsing the administration’s tax plan. Democratic leadership strategists say they are not having trouble maintaining party discipline at this stage of the debate, especially now that some Republican moderates have criticized Bush’s plan.

“It becomes easier as we have Republicans saying the tax cut is too big,” said Ranit Schmelzer, spokeswoman for Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). “It becomes easier to hold Democrats, because it now seems less like a fait accompli.”

Also helping the leadership hold Democrats are polls showing that rank-and-file Democrats display little enthusiasm for tax cuts: in the Pew survey, fewer than one in 12 Democrats ranked tax cuts as their top priority for using the surplus.

Still, strategists in both parties believe Bush might eventually win a few additional Democratic votes if he can generate more public pressure--particularly on Democratic senators such as Max Baucus of Montana, Max Cleland of Georgia, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Tim Johnson of South Dakota, who face 2002 reelection campaigns in states Bush carried. And conservatives remain confident that with enough pressure, Bush can bring back at least some of the skeptical Senate Republican moderates.

It’s in generating that pressure that the Clinton controversy represents such a mixed blessing for Bush.

On the one hand, many analysts agree, the focus on Clinton has allowed Bush to organize his administration and get more comfortable in the new job without the intense scrutiny and controversy that marked his predecessor’s first days. Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Center, notes that the new questions about Clinton’s ethics have also highlighted the aspects of Bush’s personality and character that voters like most. “He is doing well on honesty and integrity and humility,” Kohut said.

But, Kohut added, with Clinton attracting so much attention, “it hasn’t allowed the media to focus on taxes, which has to happen for the public to rethink it, if it is going to.”

Tonight, Bush begins his drive to recapture the spotlight.

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Times staff writers Janet Hook and James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.

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Speech Coverage

TV coverage of President Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress at 6 p.m. PST today:

Broadcast networks:

ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS.

Cable networks:

CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, C-SPAN.

Source: Associated Press