Bush to Preach Priorities on Midwest Trip

At first glance, the 10-hour trip President Bush is making today to Wisconsin and Michigan is no more than a traditional Labor Day swing into the Rust Belt--the sort in which presidents engage routinely to promote their economic programs among industrial workers.

But Bush’s visits to a carpenters’ training center in Green Bay, Wis., and a Teamsters picnic in Detroit are emblematic of the autumn the White House planners have in store for him, as he seeks to cast himself as the defender of a struggling economy and above the fray of Washington budget squabbles.

As Democrats seek to portray Bush’s increased Pentagon spending (up $18 billion, to $330 billion next year, if approved) and last spring’s tax cut ($1.35 trillion over 10 years) as budget-busters eating up the government’s surplus and threatening Social Security, the president plans an offensive to focus on what his aides are calling “security” issues: economic, health and national security matters. At the same time, he will attack what they are calling “partisan opponents” for focusing on the arcane budget process rather than on the priorities of the people.

If nothing else, the White House team and allies among congressional Republicans argue, they have learned lessons from two GOP failures of the last decade: The first was the failure by the president’s father, the 41st president, to convince the country in 1992 that, during a period of economic turmoil, he had their interests at heart. The second was the GOP’s failure to counter Bill Clinton’s mastery of the presidential stage when fighting budget battles with Congress.

Indeed, they are beginning to sound like holdovers from the Clinton White House. On Friday, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said, “The president is going to focus like a laser beam on the economy, education, opportunity and security this fall.”

As the Clinton team did with its war rooms, the Bush team has set up a network to spread its economy-and-budget message each day.

On Thursday, the Bush team dispatched “talking points” to Republican allies with these instructions:

“Remember to make this point to everyone you talk to today: The president has taken immediate action on his strong economic recovery plan to cut taxes to get working families immediate help, to pay off historic levels of debt and to increase trade to create American jobs and sell more goods and services to the world. The president’s partisan opponents have no economic recovery plan whatsoever. They have done nothing to help the economy, while the president has sided with working families and acted immediately.”

That is the heart of Bush’s message--one that he is likely to press today among laborers and during a busy travel schedule his aides are mapping for the fall. The strategy draws largely from the one they followed during the spring, when Bush made frequent, quick forays into key states to pressure individual members of Congress to support his tax plan.

In this case, Bush will try to bring home to individual communities the impacts that the tax cut, increased international trade and his education program might have.

But one question faces the Bush team: Is anybody listening?

“The test lies ahead,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which studies public opinion and the media. “People have a generally favorable view of the president, but people haven’t paid a lot of attention to the president.”

In addition to reflecting the lessons learned from the 1990s, the new effort reflects a changed reality--a worsening economy and a slipping budget surplus--as well as pressure on the White House from Republicans in Congress to take advantage of the singular position offered by the presidency.

“Republicans feel it is important that the bully pulpit be used more frequently,” an aide to the GOP congressional leadership said. “Clinton was a master during budget negotiations at pointing out the differences between Republicans and Democrats.

“Republicans are reasonable; Democrats are fiscally irresponsible,” he continued. “That kind of message portrayed constantly over the fall would be helpful. It’s important that we use the loudest microphone that we can.”

And that microphone is Bush, talking about Social Security, Medicare, education and the economy, while presenting the Democrats as mired in budget minutiae.

“Priorities and the bully pulpit beat process every time,” said a White House official outlining the president’s plans, on the condition he not be identified.

What better place to locate that pulpit than among union members closely identified over the last two decades as Reagan Democrats--generally conservative Democrats whom Ronald Reagan pried away from their political home and who have been flirting with Republicans ever since.

Most recently, Bush has won support from the carpenters’ union and the Teamsters with his effort to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to exploration for oil and gas, though he has battled the Teamsters concerning allowing Mexican trucks free access to U.S. highways under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Within the White House, the effort to appeal to union members, including those who provided important support last fall to Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, is seen as a flanking maneuver around the Democrats; it takes advantage of the president’s ability to draw a Labor Day audience, or, on other occasions, to use the White House’s Rose Garden for policy pronouncements awash with political content.

“We have a louder microphone; we can win the rhetorical war,” the White House official said.

Besides arranging a busy travel schedule crisscrossing the country, Bush will avail himself of multiple opportunities to present himself in a leadership capacity: On Wednesday, he begins a series of meetings with Mexican President Vicente Fox, who is arriving for the first state visit of the Bush presidency. At the end of the month, Bush will spend three days in New York, an extended visit for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. And in October, he will make his first visit as president to China.