Bush and Cheney: Riding Out on the Hard Line
“It is one thing to see a glass half empty and pronounce it half full. It is another to contemplate the dregs and insist the glass is brimming.”
It was the 10th of April in his final year in office, and President Bush sent several ultimatums to Congress before flying to Texas for a three-day weekend.
In his demands, he directed the lawmakers to:
1) Approve $108 billion in spending for Iraq without attaching strings or domestic spending.
2) Accept the suspension of troop withdrawals from Iraq for an indefinite period.
3) Sign off on a free trade agreement with Colombia without amendment.
The president's attitude on all three issues might best be described as impatient insistence. Why hadn't Congress complied with his wishes already?
Hearing the president, it was easy to imagine him in the spring of 2003, full of the authority that comes with a wartime mission and high approval ratings.
It was as if Congress existed to carry out his program, and as if there were no reason to think any reasonable person would disagree with him on any of the three issues at hand.
All this could be posturing, of course. The president might actually understand the resistance to his priorities far better than he lets on. It is even possible that he would use his days at the ranch, as President Lyndon B. Johnson once did, to schmooze and bargain and cajole the Hill's key members.
If that were the case, they might be days well spent. Back in Washington, the president might stand to get more of what he wants, while still allowing Congress some taste of success.
But will he? This president has never shown much interest in the grit and grind of working the Congress. When he was riding high he could issue directives, or send Vice President Cheney to the Hill to order the troops into line.
That was when his party still controlled the House and Senate majorities. It was also when his approval ratings still defied gravity. For a long time, this man could not seem to wear out the nation's admiration.
But on the day his latest extended weekend began, his approval rating in the Gallup Poll fell to 28 percent — the lowest for any president since Jimmy Carter hit the same number in his last year in office.
What troubles the Bush White House is not so different from those of the Carter years. The country is stuck in an endless stalemate in the Middle East that most Americans find both incomprehensible and insupportable. Gas prices are at record highs. The economy is faltering in the midst of a credit and banking crisis still unfolding on Wall Street.
As for the administration, its response to challenge after challenge ranges from disappointing to dysfunctional. The latest failing involves a regulatory culture at the Federal Aviation Administration that enabled major airlines to fly planes that hadn't been inspected. With that bad news came the overnight cancellation of thousands of flights, stranding passengers at airports across the country.
The president, we are told, will be "keeping an eye" on that situation from Crawford this weekend.
When people look more closely at the Bush administration, they see a cabinet and sub-cabinet in near-constant turmoil. The latest to depart, Alphonso Jackson at Housing and Urban Development, didn't leave because the nation's housing market is dropping or because no one in power seemed aware of the looming mortgage crisis. He left because of allegations he directed lucrative contracts to cronies.
Underlying all of Washington's woes, of course, is the national anxiety over Iraq. Two days of congressional testimony by the respected and popular Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker left an impression of stoic resignation. U.S. troop withdrawals would have to be suspended this summer. More troops would remain after the surge than had been in Iraq before the surge. Progress made is "fragile and reversible."
While some found the report unsettling, the president seemed satisfied. The general would have "all the time he needs." Guarded and cautious as Petraeus and Crocker had been, Messrs. Bush and Cheney were full of new hope. The vice president even checked in with two of his favorite talk show hosts, Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt.
"There's a lot of good things happening," a sunny Cheney enthused.
It is one thing to see a glass half empty and pronounce it half full. It is another to contemplate the dregs and insist the glass is brimming.
5:53 PM ET | 04-11-2008 | permalink
