GEORGE W. BUSH was sworn in almost ten months ago, yet it’s remarkable how his presidency has completely changed directions. I don’t mean it’s changed politically. Rather, it’s changed in terms of its preoccupations. It has gone from being a domestic-policy presidency to one centered on foreign policy and the nation’s defense. I was reminded of this huge change again yesterday as I listened to Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, as he spoke during a forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. Rove talked about the first time Bush thought about running for president. The then-Texas governor thought education would be one of his issues. So, during the 2000 campaign, it proved to be–along with tax cuts, military modernization, faith-based initiatives, and Social Security reform. Of these, only military modernization isn’t a domestic-policy matter, and of course Bush didn’t really talk much about how he’d actually command the military. On January 20, Bush went over his five big issues in an inaugural address that encouraged us all to behave more virtuously toward our neighbors. Bush didn’t see war on the horizon–he saw a nation that badly needed his compassionate conservatism. But now here we are, three months and a day since September 11, and not only has Bush become a war president, and a darn good one so far, but his domestic-policy presidency isn’t much to write home about. True, he got a tax cut through Congress. But when the hijackers struck, little progress had been made on the other domestic policies. Nor, if I heard Rove correctly, is the White House now beavering away on a postwar agenda that would re-introduce Bush as the domestic-policy president he once thought he’d be. Rove said that domestic policy meetings “tend to go quicker.” I don’t take that to mean Bush is uninterested in domestic policy, only that he has more pressing matters to attend to. The question is, how long will these more pressing matters (al Qaeda, bin Laden, the remaining Taliban; Iraq; Iran; Somalia; etc) be around. Bush has wisely prepared the nation for a protracted war. There are no signs that the American people are unwilling to endure a long war, or that they will be exasperated with Bush if he fails to return to his domestic policy agenda and start visiting elementary schools–as, by the way, he was doing when the planes were commandeered on September 11. It’s not unreasonable to say that Bush may well run as a war president in 2004. It’s just that no one would have thought that in early September–least of all Bush himself. Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
