Hard as He Tries, He Can’t Be Un-Clinton

Reality bites. One could almost hear President Bush chewing the inside of his cheeks Thursday as he announced that he was dispatching Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Middle East, reversing his “hands off” policy--a policy that had clearly failed.

Bush is proud, but he’s a politician, too, and so he ended up yielding to one of the most powerful forces in politics: regression. Yes, regression, the statistical concept that explains why the policies of one president change so little from the policies of the previous president.

Every White House starts out with a degree of contempt for its predecessor, determined to do things differently. But the full measure of Bushite contempt for the Clintonians became clear in February, when Ari Fleischer gibed that after “an attempt to shoot the moon and get nothing, more violence resulted.”

His argument was that the Camp David negotiations in late 2000 actually escalated the fighting. The White House spokesman quickly apologized for his precise choice of words, but it was obvious that he was merely expressing the general sentiment of his colleagues.

The events of Sept. 11 hardened Bush’s resolve to be the un-Clinton, convincing the Texan that the time of pinstripes was past and the era of uniforms lay ahead.

In his speech to Congress nine days later, the president unveiled the sharp edge of his new doctrine: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

Such black-and-white phrasing was applicable to Al Qaeda, but most of the rest of the world has proved decidedly grayer. And as the months passed, world attention turned to other issues.

Commentator John Simpson wrote last week in the Telegraph--the most conservative and pro-American of the British dailies--that the United States now is virtually alone in the world, not realizing that the events of Sept. 11 are “a part of history.” He added, “For most governments around the world, the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan closed the account.”

Many, perhaps most, Americans wouldn’t agree, of course, but America is just 5% of the world. And the views of the other 95% count for something. That was proven Thursday, as pressure from other nations forced the Bush administration to detour, at least temporarily, from its effort to focus on a “regime change” in Iraq.

As the president said Thursday, Powell will be heading to the Middle East “to seek broad international support” for some sort of settlement.

Yet Bush’s shift was so sudden--the White House gave reporters just an hour’s notice of his remarks--that key supporters were caught by surprise.

On Wednesday, the Project for the New American Century wrote Bush an open letter, praising him for his laissez-faire Middle Eastern policy. That was April 3. On April 4, with terrorism undiminished, Bush announced that Powell would begin negotiations.

Gary Schmitt, executive director of the project and one of the signatories, did not hide his disappointment.

“A little bit of a mission impossible,” he lamented in an interview, adding, “it’s actually kind of dangerous” to send America’s top diplomat on a mission with so little chance of success.

But, of course, Bush’s newfound engagement is just beginning. The realities of leading a peace coalition, as well as a war coalition, will inevitably force the president to make further changes in his original policy. And who knows? Maybe he will “shoot for the moon” and actually try to reach an agreement to stop the killing.

And that’s where the concept of regression comes in.

More than a century ago, the British social scientist Francis Galton, studying the height of children, noticed something interesting. Tall parents tended to have tall children, as one might expect, but the children were not, on average, as tall as their parents. And the same was true of short parents; their children were short, but not as short as their parents. This is the so-called “regression effect,” in which extremes tend to collapse toward the middle.

What’s true for kids is also true for presidents. Bush wanted to be different from Clinton but found himself yielding to the political equivalent of regression. And so his policies have taken a familiar turn, toward the muddled middle, into the deep rut of presidential precedent.

Bush might not like it, but that’s the problem with reality. It has to be reckoned with, even when it hurts.