There’s bad political news for President George Bush, coming in the form of a Washington Post article declaring:”Bush’s Political Capital Spent, Voices in Both Parties Suggest.” This is bad news for Bush for several reasons:
- It’s a watershed political story. Every unfolding political story has a kind of “script.” This now declares that Bush has used up his political capital and is, in effect, if not running on political empty heading into dreaded lame-duck status.
- It’s a story that now will begin to influence the conventional wisdom. Why? Not just because it’s not just a quickie news story, but a story crammed with quotes from heavy hitters, most of them being quoted by name. A Newsweek Periscope item, this ain’t.
- It not only etches a portrait of what it claims is a Presidency entering into a period of diminishing successes, but it quotes members of the President’s own party as saying the White House has a “tin ear” when they try to give it advice.
Can this — and the conventional wisdom — change? Sure. On a dime.
But this is a definite SHIFT — and look for its thesis to be echoed now in reports in other media outlets. Here are a few direct quotes from the piece:
“There is a growing sense of frustration with the president and the White House, quite frankly,” said an influential Republican member of Congress. “The term I hear most often is ‘tin ear,’ ” especially when it comes to pushing Social Security so aggressively at a time when the public is worried more about jobs and gasoline prices. “We could not have a worse message at a worse time.”
And:
“He has really burned up whatever mandate he had from that last election,” said Leon E. Panetta, who served as White House chief of staff during President Bill Clinton’s second term. “You can’t slam-dunk issues in Washington. You can’t just say ‘This is what I want done’ and by mandate get it done. It’s a lesson everybody has to learn, and sometimes you learn it the hard way.”
And:
Many experienced Washington hands believe that Bush has the opportunity to reestablish his clout if he focuses his efforts. “Every president goes through patches like this,” Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker, said in an interview. “Reagan had a difficult patch in August ’81, but he came back and was strongly successful. Clinton, if you’ll remember, in June or July of ’95 looked like he couldn’t get anything done and then won reelection. These things come and go.”
To get back on track, Gingrich said, Bush should pare down his Social Security plan to its central element, personal investment accounts funded by payroll taxes. “I don’t think he can get complex reform through,” Gingrich said. “It’s too hard with the AARP opposing you and all of the Democrats lined up against it.”
And:
Such weakness has unleashed the first mutterings of those dreaded second-term words, “lame duck,” however premature it might be with 3 1/2 years left in his tenure. “The Democrats are doing everything they can to make this president a lame duck,” Republican consultant Ed Rollins complained on Fox News on Friday. William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, wrote recently about “the impression — and the reality — of disarray” in urging Bush to wage a strong fight for the nomination of John R. Bolton as U.N. ambassador.
And:
“He’s not a lame duck yet, but there are rumblings,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian. Dallek said Bush’s recent travails remind him of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who overreached in his second term by trying to pack the Supreme Court, a move that backfired. “Second terms are treacherous, and presidents enter into a minefield where they really must shepherd their credibility and political capital,” he said.
Meanwhile, this administration’s biggest mistake is pointed out by a Democrat:
John D. Podesta, a top Clinton aide who runs the Center for American Progress, a research institute that promotes ideas that counter conservative policies, said Bush made the mistake of trying to turn a successful election strategy of catering to his base into a governing philosophy that excludes Democrats.
“What surprises me is that they seem to be unable to adjust particularly to the circumstances,” Podesta said. “They promoted their Social Security case. It bombed. I would have thought they would have tried to change the subject or tried a different strategy. ‘You’re with us or against us’ works well when you’re fighting al Qaeda, but it doesn’t with Social Security, and they don’t seem to have another play in the book.”
Indeed, coalition building seems to be off the radar screen. The Post details declining poll numbers, Karl Rove’s calm belief that Bush will get Social Security reform, the nuclear-option, and other developments and factors, but the bottom line is this:
This kind of story doesn’t get run unless there is a strong PERCEPTION out there and people feel free to talk. The Post story underlines a political shift, a perception that White House clout is either on the decline or damaged — and that it’s unlikely this administration will recoup the momentum it had for so long. None of which will make Bush victories easier to achieve in the future.
UPDATE: Some very interesting thoughts from the independent thinking conservative site Thoughts Online. Read this post in full but here is a small taste 4 U:
Unfortunately for Bush, the election was more a referendum on John Kerry….What the public wanted from Bush was to NOT do the things that John Kerry stood for: no kissing up to the French, no wavering in the war on terror, no voting for it before voting against it, and so on.
Of course, and understandably so, Bush didn’t see things this way. Admitting you were the least of two evils is not exactly the way one goes about trying to rally support for doing the things one wants to do. And Bush’s ego – as big as that of any politician – wouldn’t ever allow him to view Kerry as having lost the election – no, the history books would show, would have to show, Bush as having won the election…..
The Post never bought into Bush’s claims that he had any type of mandate. They never accepted Bush’s claim that he had political capital to spend pushing conservative policies. It’s only now that the Post is retroactively giving him political capital, only so they can now declare it gone. Along the same lines, can Bush be in trouble for losing something that he never had? I think not, but perception is what matters in Washington and so long as there are those claiming he is in trouble, then he’s likely to be in trouble…
Indeed, perception is what creates a context for media coverage (the next cycle if Bush starts to gain is Bush’s newly won popularity and comeback), helps foes decide whether battling you is a worth it, or lost cause — and helps politicos within your own party decide how far out on a limb to go for you.
If Bush’s press, polls, and image continue along the same path, very soon the only limb GOP Senators will want to go out on is Paris Hilton’s…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.