THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION has lived hard, and it shows. Democrats demand the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and few Republicans in Congress rush to his defense. Pro-Rumsfeld noises come mostly from the White House. Without informing the White House, Attorney General John Ashcroft releases memos that damage the credibility of a member of the 9/11 Commission, Jamie Gorelick. This occurs days before President Bush is interviewed by the commissioners, including Gorelick, creating what aides believe is an awkward situation for the president. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff trashes the Bush foreign policy in a magazine interview. At daily briefings, the White House press secretary looks scared of the media.
The administration is like a person who packs a lifetime of work, struggle, and tension into a few furious years. Bush and his team have experienced the crises of two, three, four administrations in less than four years. White House aides can list them: two wars, a recession, 9/11, an anthrax attack, three battles to cut taxes, two scandals, a flip-flop in Senate control, fights over Medicare, education, judges. Constant crisis mode takes a toll. One slightly ailing Bush aide says the “constant pounding” by administration critics has caused his sickness. He’s joking, but just barely. Bush has been assailed enough for several presidential terms.
Under the circumstances, the administration has held up reasonably well. It hasn’t crumbled or become irrelevant, but it is more mistake-prone. It insisted that the Pentagon’s intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone, appear last week at a congressional hearing with General Antonio Taguba, who investigated prison abuse in Iraq. The result was an unnecessary public disagreement between Cambone and Taguba. When Bush spoke recently in Nassau County on Long Island, the White House said the county was second in the number of victims at the World Trade Center. Who was first? The White House couldn’t say–an obvious question and a small but telling failure to have the answer.
The administration has changed. Accused of arrogance, it has become more humble. In his remarks on the National Day of Prayer on May 6, the president said Americans “do not presume to equate God’s purposes with any purpose of their own.” Without mentioning America’s intervention in Iraq, he said: “A humble heart is not an indifferent heart. We cannot be neutral in the face of injustice or cruelty or evil. God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice.” Bush, by the way, scaled back his humor at the White House Correspondents Dinner on May 1 after being zinged by Democrats for an innocuous joke about weapons of mass destruction at an earlier Washington banquet.
When Rumsfeld made a surprise visit to Iraq last week, he sounded anything but triumphal. He likened rough times for American troops in postwar Iraq to the dark days of the Civil War for President Lincoln’s administration. “Can we win? Is it worth it? Those are big questions,” Rumsfeld said. He told soldiers that “there will be plenty of potholes in the road, and mistakes will get made, and people will have to be picked up and put back on that path towards” a democratic Iraq. “But one day you’re going to look back and you’re going to be proud of your service and you’re going to say it was worth it.”
For now, there are doubts about Iraq–not opposition or criticism–even among the uniformed military, a pro-Bush stronghold. And the bumpy stretch in Iraq has made the president less of a commanding political presence in Washington. Bush campaigned for Republican senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania in a bitter primary battle. Specter declared himself a Bush Republican, but when he returned to Washington he voted against the administration on a measure to reform the way overtime pay is applied in the workplace. The measure lost.
Bush himself seems the least worn down by facing crisis upon crisis. His aides attribute this equanimity to his decision-making style and temperament. Bush likes dealing with big issues, not “smallball” as he calls less weighty matters. He makes decisions easily, without handwringing or excessive deliberation. Afterwards, he doesn’t second-guess himself. That he’s not dogged by doubts has been cited by critics in the media as a weakness. And this criticism is often coupled with complaints about Bush’s Christian faith, which many in the press resent. In truth, Bush’s certainty, whatever its source, is his strength. Would it really be preferable to have another Bill Clinton in the White House, making decisions on Iraq, unmaking them, then making them again and perhaps again? The answer is no.
Rumsfeld’s Civil War analogy–he’s reading a book about Ulysses S. Grant and the war–has a revealing insight. He noted the “unbelievable criticism” of Lincoln and his generals. “But they were steadfast,” he said. Bush has been steadfast, too, but an emerging conventional wisdom in Washington suggests this hasn’t helped Bush politically. Poll numbers on job approval and public sentiment about the direction of the country are seen as precursors to losing the election on November 2. Lincoln was in trouble at this point in 1864. The capture of Atlanta by General William Tecumseh Sherman saved him. A dramatic breakthrough in Iraq may be needed now to save Bush.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
