DEAD AGENDA
Publicly, the White House will tell you that it intends to push
ahead with two of its big legislative issues throughout the fall:
making permanent the first term tax cuts and Social Security
reform.
Even privately, with the political and policy debacle that the
White House created with its Clintonian response to Hurricane
Katrina, policy and political types at 1600 Pennsylvania insist
what’s left of an agenda is still viable.
But at this stage of the game, barring some imaginative
political moves that bear some resemblance to the Bush
Administration circa 2002, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even
some longtime Bush team members in various Cabinet level
departments say this Administration is done for.
“You run down the list of things we thought we could accomplish
and you have to wonder what we thought we were thinking,” says a
Bush Administration member who joined on in 2001. “You get the
impression that we’re more than listless. We’re sunk.”
Too pessimistic? Maybe not. Rumors are flying through various
departments of longtime senior Bush loyalists looking to jump, but
with few opportunities in the private sector to make the jump look
like anything more than desperation. Almost daily, complaints from
Cabinet level Departments come in to the White House about lack of
communication coordination on even basic policy matters.
“What happened was that some of the best people who were working
in the Administration during the first term, but who weren’t
necessarily Bush campaign members or weren’t particularly close to
the White House, jumped when they saw opportunities being filled by
under-qualified but more politically connected people,” says a
current Administration senior staffer in a Cabinet department. “In
this department we lost three quarters of the people who should
have been encouraged to stay, and most of them left simply because
they had received no indication they would be considered for better
or different opportunities. And many of these folks would have
stayed.”
But enough about the lack of a team to implement a message.
Let’s look at the mission.
Congressional committee sources on both sides of Capitol Hill
predict tough slogging on anything of policy consequence. “Social
Security is dead as far as my chairman is concerned. So are the tax
cuts,” says a Ways and Means staffer of Chairman Bill
Thomas.
Before hurricane season wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast and in
Washington, the thinking was that Thomas was poised to take up a
major tax bill that might feature several critical components of
the Bush Administration’s Social Security reform. Now those plans
appear to have dimmed considerably.
According to one school of thought, some GOP tax policy changes
might have contributed to a more market-oriented approach to
reconstruction efforts in the Katrina recovery. Instead,
Republicans were stunned to hear about programs that read as if
cribbed from the Clinton Administration.
Although Republicans on the Hill are left with a bit of wiggle
room to make adjustments to the Bush proposals, they will need
political cover if they are to successfully navigate a path made
difficult by the Bush team’s allowing the media and Democrats to
paint the GOP into a corner.
COURTING PRACTICES
Changes in the political landscape do not appear to have
dramatically changed President Bush’s views on a Supreme Court
nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor.
As of Friday, sources close the White House said the
long-standing favorite of conservatives to replace O’Connor, Judge
Edith Jones, had not yet met with the President to
discuss the opportunity.
When asked about the seeming lack of consideration of Jones, a
White House source counseled against reading too much into it.
“There have been plenty of opportunities in the last few weeks for
the President to meet with people under the radar. We’ve done it
before, we’re doing it now.”
Bush has met with at least one women, federal appeals Judge
Priscilla Owen, though insiders say there are
doubts she has the personality to accomplish the kind of PR blitz
successfully undertaken by Judge John Roberts.
One reason Owen maybe be given greater consideration is the G.W.
Bush’s history with her, compared to G.H.W. Bush’s history with
Jones.
“Owen is tied to this President Bush. He fought for her, and she
stood by him during that fight,” says another White House source
about Owen’s long confirmation ordeal. “Jones is tied to the first
President Bush. She was perhaps the alternate pick to
[David] Souter. For this
President Bush to pick the woman everyone now knows played second
fiddle to his father’s greatest mistake might be too much to ask
for.”
Another name that has moved quickly forward is former Deputy
Attorney General Larry Thompson, who would be
nominated having served not a day on the bench. Thompson, though,
is almost universally liked by the Bush Administration, worked
closely with the President on the Corporate Fraud Task Force, and
has no paper trail to speak of from his time in government.
However, Thompson, according to current and former associates,
is believed by many to be a moderate Republican, with pro-abortion
leanings. And while people point to his time as a scholar at the
Brookings Institution after leaving the Department of Justice in
2003, there was no liberal like-mindedness in that move, according
to Brookings sources. “We wanted a conservative, and Larry was
someone we had targeted, particularly because of his ties to
business. We thought he’d be good for fundraising,” says a
Brookings scholar.
