Bush Is Set to Strike Back at Democrats

President Bush is going on the offensive.

The president has just had one of the worst months of his presidency, with his approval rating skidding below 50% in the Gallup Poll for the first time. His administration is under new scrutiny over its decision to go to war in Iraq. Even his past service in the National Guard has come under attack as a Vietnam War hero leads the Democratic presidential pack.

Now, after holding their fire for much of the month, Bush and his aides are setting in motion a new strategy to try to turn the slide around.

On Friday, the president named a commission to explore intelligence failures. This weekend, the president will take the unusual step of giving an hourlong interview to a Sunday morning news program.

“This is a signal that the president is going to go back on offense,” said former GOP chairman Rich Bond. “It’s what he does best, personalitywise.”

Bush aides have tried to downplay the bad news, pointing out that many reelected presidents started out farther down in polls at the beginning of the election year. And they suggested a drop in the approval rating, which plummeted 11 points in the last month to 49% in a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, was only natural.

“I thought it was going to happen when a Democratic nominee emerged,” said Matthew Dowd, a top Bush campaign strategist. “There has been a coalescence around [Massachusetts Sen. John F.] Kerry quickly. Both sides have strong bases. That’s what we anticipated.”

But until last week, Bush aides had said they expected the plunge to come somewhat later, in the spring.

“It was sooner than they expected and more intense,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “Just because you see bad luck coming, doesn’t mean the bad luck stings any less.”

For the president, January’s bad news was unrelenting. Testimony by his former chief weapons inspector cast deep doubt on the rationale for Bush’s signature issue, the war against Iraq, and he was forced to agree to set up an independent commission to investigate.

Kerry quickly took the lead in the race for the Democratic nomination, and much of the party fell in behind him, focusing their attacks on Bush rather than on one another.

And that wasn’t all. Bush’s annual State of the Union address got tepid reviews. Critics lambasted the president for raising the cost estimate for his Medicare reform plan by $130 billion and proposing a 2005 budget with record deficits. And Democrats revived an issue that Bush had hoped was laid to rest in 2000: the question of whether he failed to fulfill his duties as a National Guardsman in the 1970s.

“There was a confluence of events over the last month that in large part we knew were going to happen. And the Democrats had the stage all to themselves,” said White House communications director Dan Bartlett.

Gallup Senior Editor David Moore said the news coverage in January appeared to have a strong effect on the public’s view of the president.

“The last few weeks have been like the period around a convention, given that you had two major contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, and at the same time you had bad news for the president on [weapons of mass destruction],” he said. “It was an overwhelmingly negative time for Republicans in that sense.”

However, Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert with the American Enterprise Institute, said the drop in the polls may be less significant than it appears. Bush’s rating had been buoyed higher than might be expected in December by news of the capture of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, she said.

“We really need to wait until March to see how the election shapes up,” Bowman said. “That’s when the numbers begin to have more predictive value.”

All the same, the president and his staff have decided it is time to strike back.

“We know that the best defense is a good offense,” said a top Bush aide. “We will be aggressively setting the record straight and setting the president’s agenda for the future.”

The Bush response will have two parts, Dowd said: “We correct mischaracterizations of the president and his record. And we correct mischaracterizations that they’ve made about themselves.”

The first part of that formula will be the job of the president. And his first big effort will come today, when Bush sits for an hourlong interview for the NBC program “Meet the Press.” The network expects to air excerpts today on the evening news. The full broadcast will be Sunday. “Meet the Press” airs in Los Angeles on KNBC at 8 a.m.

The aide to the president was expecting tough questioning from host Tim Russert. Bush “doesn’t mind those interviews and conversations,” the aide said. “He’s actually been looking forward to it.”

The White House hopes 16 million to 20 million Americans will tune in to hear the president, the aide said, with segments broadcast on several NBC programs and on the Spanish-language network Telemundo.

The second half of the Republican response -- to define the likely Democratic nominee an unfavorable light -- is the job of the party, the campaign and presidential “surrogates.”

The chief surrogate is Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie, who came out swinging on the National Guard dispute this week and gave a preview of how he intends to discredit Kerry.

“I believe what they’re up to is making up false charges, and what would be slander under other circumstances,” Gillespie said in a telephone interview.

The goal of Democrats, he said, is to distract attention from Kerry’s “record of voting to weaken our national security.” Gillespie said that included votes against the 1991 Gulf War and cutting $1.5 billion from intelligence.

Gallup’s Moore said the breakdown of recent poll results suggested that most of the president’s slippage came from Democrats and independents who previously had looked on the president favorably.

Republicans said many of the Democrats are likely just “returning home” to their usual side of the political spectrum now that there is a likely nominee. But the results also suggested that some of those turning away from Bush, especially independents, can be won back once the president has a chance to articulate his own point of view.

Until now, the Democrats have been speaking “in a vacuum,” the Bush aide said. “When you start comparing and contrasting, the picture will change.”

Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this report.