Bush Builds Strength in Crisis, Risk in Rancor

Few presidents have faced such a radical shift in circumstances so soon after taking office as George W. Bush.

Elected while the nation was still luxuriating in peace and prosperity, Bush has been forced to grapple with recession and a devastating foreign attack on the American mainland.

As a candidate, Bush focused on domestic issues--cutting taxes, reforming education, bolstering religious charities. Now he spends most of his time prosecuting a distant war and trying to fortify the nation’s internal security. Even in foreign policy, he has pivoted from emphasizing reductions in American obligations abroad to assembling a U.S.-led coalition against terrorism.

In all these respects, Bush is presiding over what amounts to an inverted presidency. His first year ends with him in a very strong political position--far stronger than seemed possible when he won his bitterly disputed victory after losing the popular vote just over a year ago, but arriving at it by a route utterly different from the one he set out upon.

Much like Bill Clinton before him, Bush came to Washington promising to reshape the debate on domestic issues and provide his party a more centrist image. But, as the stalemate over economic stimulus legislation last month underscored, his presidency has tended to reinforce, rather than realign, the traditional domestic divisions between the two political parties, particularly over the role of government.

Since the attacks, though, Bush has soared in public esteem for his performance in the arena where his experience was thinnest: the management of national security and foreign affairs. Surrounded by an unusually seasoned team, he has become a steadying and reassuring figure, powerfully expressing the nation’s outrage over Sept. 11 and channeling it into a fiercely efficient military campaign in Afghanistan. As much as his domestic agenda had divided the country and Congress before the attacks, his wartime leadership has unified them.

“The circumstances make the person, and there’s a general sense that the president has stepped up, with an incredibly good team, in this situation after Sept. 11,” says former Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, the campaign chairman for Al Gore, Bush’s rival in the 2000 presidential election. “I think you have to give him a solid A . . . at handling what is the defining piece of his presidency.”

The tension between the unifying effect of the war and the centrifugal pull of domestic disputes will shape the coming months, and perhaps the remainder, of Bush’s term. Terrorism’s challenge will provide Bush continuing opportunities to transcend traditional politics and unite the country in his role as commander in chief.

But domestic issues, submerged since Sept. 11, also seem certain to resurface this year, and disputes over health care, energy, the environment and, above all, the return of federal budget deficits could reopen the divisions that surrounded Bush during his presidency’s first months.

“The bipartisanship and consensus in Washington that occurred after Sept. 11 never really took hold very firmly,” says Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker. “It’s really like the Christmas truce in 1914 during World War I. The two sides came out of their trenches and sang carols, then went back and shot at each other. That’s probably what we can expect for [this] year.”

Until Sept. 11, the defining political characteristic of Bush’s term had been polarization. Polls showed the country sharply divided along partisan and ideological lines over Bush’s agenda, his performance and even his qualifications for the job. Burdened by the sagging economy, Bush’s overall approval rating by late summer had dipped to about 50%, the danger zone for any incumbent.

The Sept. 11 attacks, and Bush’s response, blew all that away. In the latest Gallup Poll, his job approval rating stood at 86%, the highest for a president concluding his first year. On questions surrounding the war, he’s inspiring confidence even among most who doubted him.

“His relationship to the country has changed,” says John Podesta, a White House chief of staff for President Clinton. “People accept Bush as a guy who can lead the country and a person who has the stuff to actually sit in the Oval Office. People questioned that; not just Democrats but a wide swath of independent voters. I don’t think they really question that anymore.”

In many ways, the challenge of the war has highlighted Bush’s personal strengths. The war has played to Bush’s preference for focusing on a few priorities rather than grappling simultaneously with a swarm of nuanced issues. And it has shown him again to be calm and confident in his own judgments during moments of crisis.

“The greater the pressure, the more focused and disciplined he gets,” says Mark McKinnon, his chief media advisor in 2000. Says another top White House official: “He wants to have all his options clear . . . all the homework done. Then he makes decisions and he sleeps at night.”

Those around Bush say he’s been equally comfortable making choices to set the broad strategy and delegating the day-to-day military decisions. He’s become much more confident in the president’s role as communicator in chief, comforting and exhorting the nation. So far, in his public statements and in the conduct of the war itself, he’s found a balance that has won broad support from voters at home and from governments abroad. He has seemed resolute, but almost never rash, about pursuing Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

“He’s a steady guy,” says Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.). “There’s a reassuring feeling.”

Yet even while winning that broad support for his management of the war, Bush still faced pitched battles last fall over domestic issues such as airport security and his economic stimulus package. Those conflicts highlighted the other half of the forces shaping his presidency: domestic disputes almost as powerful as the instinct toward wartime solidarity.

In his first year, Bush compiled a solid overall record of moving his ideas into law. Even with power on Capitol Hill narrowly divided between the parties, Bush pushed through Congress the largest tax cut since Ronald Reagan’s presidency: a $1.35-trillion, 10-year package only modestly pared down from his original proposal. He achieved a sweeping reform of federal education programs that closely tracked his campaign blueprint. He helped shape a rapid-fire series of wartime measures to repair the damage of Sept. 11, stiffen security at airports and provide federal officials new authority to monitor and pursue terrorists. And he advanced his plans for a national missile defense and a new round of free trade agreements.

What Bush hasn’t done is smooth the jagged lines of partisan and ideological division in the capital. As a candidate, Bush often said he would pursue a new era of bipartisanship and “change the tone in Washington.”

Most Washington analysts agree that he has established an amicable personal tone for his dealings with Congress, though even that has begun to fray lately as the White House has winked at Republicans who have excoriated Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). But as Bush pursued a vanguard conservative agenda centered on limiting government spending, retrenching regulation and reducing taxes, the policy gulf between the two parties remained enormous.

Among Bush’s priorities, only the education bill, which was shaped through months of unusually bipartisan negotiation, drew broad support in both parties. Bush also attracted a respectable minority of Senate Democrats for the scaled-back tax bill and oil-state House Democrats for his energy plan.

But on most important questions, the administration shaped proposals that attracted little support across the aisle. Most tellingly, just three of 205 Democrats voting in the House and one of 50 in the Senate sided with Bush’s initial budget. Most of Bush’s initiatives faced just as much resistance from the opposition party as Clinton’s did. As a result, the administration and the Democratic Senate remain stalemated over a patients’ bill of rights, aid to religious charities, energy policy and campaign finance reform.

On all these issues, centrist Democrats whom Bush courted during the campaign complained that his agenda was much more conventionally conservative than he had promised, leaving them little opportunity for alliance.

“I don’t think he’s really persuaded many people that he is bringing about fundamental changes in the Republican governing outlook,” says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank that Bush praised during the 2000 campaign. “That turned out to be more useful for the campaign than it did for his actual governing philosophy.”

As in the election, Bush’s legislative success depended less on attracting Democrats than on solidifying Republicans. On virtually every major issue, from taxes to energy, more than 90% of House Republicans backed Bush’s position, much greater support than House Democrats gave Clinton early on.

Resistance from three moderate Republican senators forced Bush to trim his tax cut, and the decision by one of those three, Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont, to quit the GOP and become an independent gave Democrats control of the Senate. But overall, Senate Republicans also supported Bush in solid numbers.

Though some issues, such as a promised agenda to help strengthen communities, could offer Bush opportunities for bridge-building in 2002, the central domestic fight ahead promises more of the polarization evident early in his term. Looming over all domestic questions in Washington this year are the return of the federal budget deficit under the weight of war, recession and the tax cut Bush drove through Congress last spring.

As spending priorities from homeland security to prescription drugs for seniors are squeezed, a growing number of Democrats are likely to call for rolling back the later stages of that tax cut--an idea the president staunchly rejects. That conflict is likely to rekindle familiar partisan firefights and overshadow any Bush effort to reposition the GOP on domestic issues.

“The changed budget circumstances are going to force the president to rewrite his game plan, and the game plan is going to look much more like the traditional Republican strategy, which is to shrink the size of government to preserve lower tax burdens,” says Robert D. Reischauer, former director of the Congressional Budget Office.

The paradox is that the same qualities that have made Bush such a unifying figure in the war help explain why his agenda has been so polarizing at home. On both fronts, Bush has displayed an unshakable confidence in his ideas and a bulldog determination to advance them.

That has struck the right wartime chord for a country eager to enlist behind a resolute commander in chief after the Sept. 11 attacks. But on domestic issues, Bush’s resolve has translated into an ambitious conservative agenda that often sweeps beyond the bounds of consensus in a nation whose political allegiance is divided almost exactly in half. One year into his presidency, Bush stands as both a symbol of national unity and a reminder of our enduring divisions.