Last week a different Bush was on display. Unnerved by the flat response of GOP fat cats at a dinner in Houston, Bush reverted to his strident side. Departing from his prepared text, he ad-libbed a rambling defense of his presidency. “I have a responsibility to lead,” he said, “and I’m not going to let Democratic liberal carping keep me from leading.” Meanwhile, Bush the pragmatist was busily compromising with the same Democrats in Congress. The week before, he had dropped his threats to veto civil-rights legislation, despite his earlier denunciations of a “quota bill.” Last week he ordered his top aides to negotiate a compromise on extending unemployment benefits, even though he had vetoed similar measures twice before.
Bush’s transformation is not hard to explain. The triple K strategy has run head-on into reality with a capital R-recession. The president first sensed trouble around Labor Day, when he read a “misery index” in The Wall Street Journal that showed that a majority of Americans believed that the country was on the wrong track and that the economy was their biggest worry. At the time, Bush’s aides counseled patience. The country would grow out of the recession, argued Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, budget chief Richard Darman and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Michael Boskin. But the latest numbers tell a different story: many indicators are down, and last week unemployment rose to 6.8 percent. Overall, growth during Bush’s administration has been a weak 1.4 percent. No president since World War II has been re-elected with such an unimpressive economic performance.
In the White House, near panic has set in. Bush’s advisers uneasily watched former attorney general Richard Thornburgh lose a 44-point lead in the Pennsylvania Senate race to an obscure Democrat, Harris Wofford, after being painted as a pro-status-quo stiff from Washington. At a dinner of 15 top GOP strategists last Wednesday night, many worried that the same labels could be applied to George Bush. Several of the operatives complained that Bush, who is scheduled to travel abroad two out of the next five weeks, was spending too much time overseas.
Bush got the message. He told a gathering of congressional leaders the next day that he would craft a legislative package aimed at improving the economy and highlighting his domestic agenda. But his aides are divided over what that package should look like. The more politically minded, like Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher, want Bush to take an aggressive stance, vowing to cut capital-gains taxes. But Bush’s more cautious friends, like Brady, warn that tax cuts will have little immediate effect on the economy, and that Bush runs the risk of being branded as the rich man’s friend if he pushes on capital gains. Visibly frustrated by the debate, Bush told his aides that he felt like he was standing in the middle of a hurricane. All he could hear was the noise swirling around him.
A president is supposed to be able to count on his chief of staff to referee such disputes. But on domestic issues, Bush must turn to a man he no longer feels completely comfortable with or entirely trusts. Chief of staff John Sununu has been burned by his highhanded use of government planes and limousines, and last week the rumor mill began tying him to the BCCI scandal. Sununu’s former aide, Ed Rogers, took a $600,000 fee to represent one of BCCI’s principals, Sheik Kamal Adham, prompting a conflict-of-interest investigation by White House counsel Boyden Gray. NEWSWEEK has learned that Gray’s investigation will clear Sununu and Rogers of a conflict of interest regarding BCCI. But senior administration officials and congressional sources say questions remain concerning Sununu’s connections to BCCI.
On the merits, Bush agrees with his old friend Brady that the best approach to the economy is probably to do not much of anything. Bush is a keen politician, though, so he will try to make what his aides call “perceptual changes”–sleights of hand to make it seem the administration is doing more than it actually is. But the country is growing impatient. If the president fails to change the economy, the voters may be tempted to change presidents–assuming the Democrats themselves can come up with a tempting alternative.
