Bush Betrays Base

Two days after winning re-election last fall, President George W. Bush declared he had earned plenty of political capital, and "now I intend to spend it." As the events of the last six months suggest, he might have already spent this capital.

Mismanagement of a national disaster, soaring gas prices, a series of investigations and indictments, a failed initiative to reform social security, a quagmire in Iraq and now his worst nightmare - his recent appointment of his crony, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. Bush's second term is on a downward spiral. His approval ratings have hit a new low of 37 percent, according to a recent CBS news poll.

Bush has become a "trust me" president whom nobody trusts. Democrats never trusted him on anything anyway. But now even his own base, the conservatives, doesn't trust him anymore. All for good reason, though. They trusted him on fiscal responsibility but what they got was a president who is a spendthrift. A president who has done more discretionary spending than even Lyndon Johnson and who hasn't vetoed a single spending bill in his entire tenure. They trusted him to fight and win the War on Terror, but got a war fought with incompetence and complete lack of planning, resulting in the endless meandering in Iraq. They also trusted him to hire competent people, and above all, to appoint more justices in the mold of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who can move the highest court of the land decisively to the right. Instead, what they got were sometimes purely incompetent and sometimes just mediocre cronies, at every place in the government from FEMA to the Supreme Court.

Last week, after Miers' appointment, Charles Krauthammer, an arch-conservative, wrote in his weekly syndicated column, "If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the President of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her. Nominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America's constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom." Harsh words indeed - especially when coming from his own troops on the right.

It all started when a group of senators now called the "Gang of 14" from both parties, without approval from the White House, forged a deal that allowed some, but not all, of Bush's stalled judicial nominees to receive an up or down vote. Despite the threat of a presidential veto, the house passed a measure easing his restrictions on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research with 50 Republicans joining most Democrats. His effort to win passage for an immigration guest worker program is stalled. And most recently, 46 Senate Republicans joined the Democrats to pass a defense bill that included a provision restricting the use of torture by American troops, also in the face of Bush's threat to veto the bill.

But despite all his recent problems with a Republican controlled Congress, it is the Bush administration's fumbling response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that underscores his current political problems. His pledge to spend whatever it takes to rebuild the Gulf Coast without considering any cuts on spending has caused concern among fiscally conservative Senate Republicans, like Oklahoma's Tom Coburn, who said he is not inclined to vote to extend the Bush tax cuts without some fiscal restraint. Such concerns among the Republicans in the Congress might hamper Bush's plans to move forward with the next phase of his agenda, namely to make his tax cuts permanent and to abolish the federal estate tax.

Presidents define the agenda and lead. They advance their agenda building a consensus around it- something Bush did in his first term, when he built a case for the invasion of Iraq. With more than three years still left for his administration, he seems to have lost control of the agenda. He is in danger of becoming a lame-duck faster than most second term presidents, and unless he redefines his agenda - or somehow finds another "bull-horn moment" to rescue his second term - prospects for a strong Bush legacy and a returning GOP majority in 2006 seem to be diminished.

Sources: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/charleskrauthammer/2005/10/07/159653.html http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/166quhvd.asp http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/06/opinion/polls/main924485.shtml http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB112683100347942461-kM9B_ZdHXBIBtE_DC16GPc93EZ8_20060916.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top