by James Mann
Bush was too experienced a politician to let Kerry set his own narrative for the campaign without challenge. In March, the Bush team seized the offensive. Kerry was preparing to give a speech in West Virginia in which he planned to attack Bush for his lack of support for veterans. The day before the speech, the Bush team aired a television spot called “Troops,” attacking Kerry for having voted against a funding bill that provided $87 billion for American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. The suggestion was that Kerry was a typical antiwar liberal.
Kerry took the bait. At the West Virginia event, he defended himself by pointing out that it was merely one of a series of procedural votes he cast on the measure. “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it,” he inartfully explained. As soon as Bush heard those words, he called Rove. “There’s our opening,” Bush said. Kerry had handed Bush and his team the theme they exploited throughout the general-election campaign: that Kerry was a flip-flopper who failed to take clear stands on issues and to stick with them.
During the general-election campaign, Bush talked about his domestic agenda for his second term. He said he wanted to reform Social Security by partially privatizing individual accounts and to reform the immigration system by offering a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants. In turn, Kerry sought to keep the focus on Bush’s handling of the Iraq War.
Bizarrely, however, the campaign became swept up in old issues stemming from the Vietnam War. Bush’s opponents once again raised old questions about Bush’s combat-free service in the National Guard. Meanwhile, at the height of the campaign a murky pro-Bush group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, ran television spots attacking Kerry’s war record and his patriotism. Even Senator John McCain of Arizona, while supporting Bush, called the ads deplorable and said they reminded him of Bush’s attacks on him in the 2000 Republican primaries. Bush disavowed the Swift Boat ads, asserting that they were made by an independent group that was not connected to his reelection campaign. He subsequently made a mild plea, unheeded, for a ban on advertising by all independent groups. Writing years later, Rove observed defiantly, “I had no role in any of it, though the Swifties did a damn good job.”
Ultimately, the Bush campaign succeeded in portraying the president as down-to-earth and Kerry as an elitist out of touch with the moods and lifestyles of ordinary Americans, even though, by family background, income, and education, Bush qualified as an elitist as much as Kerry did, if not more so. At the simplest level, Kerry carried himself with patrician bearing, while Bush did not. Bush had long ago learned the lessons from his congressional campaign in 1978, when his successful opponent depicted him an Easterner from Andover and Yale. By 2004, George W. Bush was especially adept at putting himself forward as a good ol’ boy, joking, wisecracking, and happy to sit down over a (nonalcoholic) beer.
By historical standards the Bush-Kerry election was close, not as close as that four years earlier but tighter than in most presidential years. On Election Day, exit polls appeared to show that Kerry was winning. When the actual votes came in later that night, they showed that many of the exit polls had been wrong. By the next morning, when Bush was declared to have won the state of Ohio with its twenty electoral votes, Kerry conceded defeat.
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In his postelection news conference, Bush served notice that he intended to accomplish a lot in his second term. He said he planned to move ahead with far-reaching changes in the Social Security system and immigration reform. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” he said.
Bush also moved quickly to reshape his national security team. He appointed Rice, his closest aide, as secretary of state, and elevated Rice’s former deputy Steven Hadley to national security adviser. With these actions, Bush established his personal control over foreign policy. Powell, who had told the president that he planned to step down as secretary of state after the November elections, had a momentary change of heart and suggested he would like to stay on the job, but Bush rebuffed his offer. Several other participants in the bureaucratic battles of the first term, such as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, either resigned or were moved to other jobs.
On January 20, 2005, in his second inaugural address, Bush set forth a vision of America’s role in the world that was breathtaking in ambition. The focus was on spreading democracy across the globe. In a relatively brief speech, he invoked the words “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” forty-nine times. “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he declared. Since he had not described American policy in such broad terms early in his presidency, it was fair to wonder whether Bush was, in effect, retrospectively seeking to justify the war in Iraq as an effort to promote freedom rather than to deal with the supposed weapons of mass destruction that were never found.
The next day, New York Times columnist William Safire observed that Bush “now drives his critics batty by exuding a buoyant confidence reminiscent of Truman and F.D.R.” Few realized it, but at that moment, on the first days of his second term, Bush’s presidency was probably at its apex in its ambition, influence, and public support. It was about to begin a long slide downhill.
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Bush’s first defeat came with Social Security. Throughout the late winter and spring of 2005, he barnstormed the country, making the case that Americans should be allowed to invest their Social Security earnings in private accounts. But this campaign went nowhere; Bush had misjudged both the public’s appetite for Social Security reform and his ability to persuade the electorate.
He knew he held only a slim majority in the country, but his hope was to get Social Security privatization through Congress with the same lightning speed that he had pushed through his tax cuts in 2001. Back then, congressional Republicans had united to support the tax cuts, while the Democrats were divided; the tax measure passed with the help of Democratic defections. But when it came to the Social Security proposal, these political dynamics were reversed: Democrats rapidly joined together in determined opposition, while congressional Republicans were lukewarm in their support. Few Republicans wanted to be recorded as voting against the existing system, when such a vote could pose a problem in the next congressional elections. In a version of political hot potato, House members urged that a vote be put off until after action by the Senate, while Senate Republicans wanted the House to go first. As a result, Bush’s plan to overhaul Social Security died a slow death. It was not even brought to a vote: in the fall of 2005, House Republican leaders told Bush they had decided to move on to other issues.
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In late summer, Bush’s political fortunes were dealt another severe blow. A tropical storm formed in the Atlantic and moved toward the American mainland, growing into Hurricane Katrina. As it passed over Florida and headed across the Gulf of Mexico, it gathered strength to become a rare category five hurricane, one of the worst storms in a century. Katrina hit New Orleans with full force: the levees broke; the city flooded; and chaos and looting broke out on the streets. Overall, Katrina, which caused more than 1,800 deaths, destroyed at least 300,000 homes, and caused roughly $100 billion in property damage, was the most expensive storm in American history.
By his own subsequent admission, Bush moved too slowly in marshaling the full force of the federal government to deal with the storm. When he sought to send federal troops to help New Orleans, he ran into bureaucratic resistance both from state officials in Louisiana and from the Pentagon. Governor Kathleen Blanco of Louisiana did not want the military deployment, because it meant she would have to surrender control over her state’s National Guard forces. Rumsfeld was loath to send American forces, then in the midst of two ongoing wars, to carry out a domestic mission for which they had not been trained. For days, with New Orleans in growing turmoil, Bush was unable to
overcome these obstacles. Finally, after failing to win the governor’s support, he sent more than seven thousand active-duty troops anyway, although, in deference to local sensitivities, they were given no law-enforcement powers, and their army commander was obliged to report to the governor on anything relating to the National Guard.
These delays were compounded by major problems in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), whose leadership had been handed over to Bush’s political appointees. Bush’s first director had been Joseph Allbaugh, a longtime friend and colleague who had served as chief of staff when Bush was governor of Texas. Allbaugh left when FEMA was turned from an independent agency into a part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security. As his successor, Allbaugh recommended his own longtime friend Michael Brown, who had been serving as FEMA’s general counsel. Before joining the administration, Brown’s primary experience had been as judges and stewards commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association. Even Karl Rove, not generally opposed to appointments of Bush’s political supporters, had argued that Brown lacked the qualifications to run FEMA. Bush appointed him anyway. During Hurricane Katrina, FEMA’s responses were so slow that Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff finally asked Bush to relieve Brown of his responsibilities. Bush brought in a replacement to take charge of the response to Katrina, and Brown soon resigned.
Bush displayed a poor sense of public relations in dealing with the storm. Early on, he allowed himself to be photographed on Air Force One looking down at the storm damage as he flew over Louisiana without stopping there. There were good reasons to avoid making an on-the-ground visit, he maintained: he did not want to distract attention from the relief efforts. Yet the photo made him appear detached and distant, precisely the opposite of the perception Bush had established with his visit to Ground Zero in New York City after September 11. A few days later, Bush made things much worse. Seeking to boost morale in FEMA and its director, he declared in front of reporters, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” Even more than the airplane photo, those eight words became an enduring symbol of the administration’s failure.
Years later, Bush acknowledged his mishandling of Katrina. “I prided myself on my ability to make crisp and effective decisions,” he wrote. “Yet in the days after Katrina, that didn’t happen. The problem was not that I made the wrong decisions. It was that I took too long to decide.”
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On July 1, 2005, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her decision to step down from the seat she had occupied for twenty-four years. That gave Bush a chance to shape the future of the Court. Replacing O’Connor, however, turned into a prolonged process that included another damaging political defeat for the president.
After three weeks of candidate vetting, Bush settled on the nominee he wanted: John G. Roberts, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the nation’s most powerful appeals court. Roberts’s elite legal and conservative credentials were strong: he had graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, served as a Supreme Court law clerk, and rose to become principal deputy U.S. solicitor general. He had argued more than three dozen cases before the Supreme Court. Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times’s Supreme Court correspondent, praised him at the time of his appointment as a jurist “deeply anchored in the trajectory of modern constitutional law.” From Bush’s viewpoint, Roberts possessed one other noteworthy asset: he was only fifty years old, young enough potentially to serve on the Court for three decades or more.
Then the surprises began. While Roberts was awaiting his nomination hearings, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who had thyroid cancer, suddenly died. That opened a second vacancy. Bush quickly withdrew Roberts’s nomination as associate justice and instead appointed him to assume Rehnquist’s place as chief justice. For the second open seat, Bush chose a close White House aide whose friendship dated back to their years in Texas together: White House counsel Harriet Miers, who had once been Bush’s personal lawyer.
Not surprisingly, the Miers appointment elicited criticism from liberals and Democrats. Yet it also drew surprising and impassioned opposition from conservatives. The Republican right had long complained that too many Republican appointees, such as William Brennan, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and O’Connor herself, had turned out to be more moderate or liberal than expected. Miers had virtually no track record from which to glean her underlying beliefs on constitutional issues. Her principal qualification for the job was her close association with Bush. However, that would have little meaning at all after he left the White House.
Bush sought to overcome the conservatives’ objections, accusing his critics of elitism because Miers had graduated from Southern Methodist University Law School rather than Harvard or Yale. The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, who for years had been one of Bush’s strongest defenders, offered a devastating response to this argument. “This is not about the Ivy League,” he wrote. “The issue is not the venue of Miers’s constitutional scholarship, experience and engagement. The issue is their nonexistence.”
After three weeks of such criticism, Miers asked Bush to withdraw her nomination. Bush quickly went along. To take her place, he nominated Judge Samuel Alito of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who was, like Roberts, an experienced, identifiably conservative jurist. Alito won confirmation by the relatively narrow margin of fifty-eight to forty-two, with the vote overwhelmingly along partisan lines.
Once Roberts and Alito were sworn in, they were in position to move the court in a more conservative direction, and the votes they would cast became part of Bush’s long-term legacy. Yet in the short run, the failure of the Miers nomination was another sign of Bush’s flagging political influence, even in his own party. It demonstrated the growing distance between Bush and the Republican right, which was beginning to think beyond the Bush years. The tensions with the conservatives would burst forth once again with far greater impact during Bush’s hectic final months as president.
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Overseas, the situation in Iraq continued to deteriorate. Bush scored one major achievement at the beginning of 2005, when Iraqis turned out in large numbers to vote in their first free democratic election. Pictures of voters happily holding up purple fingers, indicating that they had voted, filled American newspapers and television screens. The military situation, however, remained grim. That year roughly seventy-five to eighty Americans were killed each month in Iraq and another four hundred to six hundred were wounded. Head shots of those who died were a regular staple of television and newspaper coverage, and these photos had a more lasting impact than the purple thumbprints.
At home, the rancor over the war was even greater than at the time of the invasion. With Kerry’s defeat, the Democrats began to move steadily leftward, reflecting a growing antiwar sentiment. In the Senate, where prominent Democrats had years earlier voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, there were now ever harsher attacks on Bush.
Bush’s decision to launch the Iraq War gave rise to a series of investigations, mostly in Congress but also at the Justice Department. In the fall of 2005, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, was indicted for perjury in connection with a federal investigation into the leaking of the name of intelligence official Valerie Plame. Plame’s husband, a former ambassador named Joseph Wilson, had been critical of the Bush administration’s prewar claim that Iraq was actively developing weapons of mass destruction. Libby’s indictment was a blow to the vice president and set the stage for a frosty dispute between Bush and Cheney in their final days in the White House.
Looking back at the series of debacles in late 2005, including Hurricane Katrina, the failure of his proposal on Social Security, and the unending violence in Iraq, Bush summarized mordantly: “Just a year earlier, I had won reelection with more votes than any candidate in history. By the end of 2005, much of my political capital was gone.”
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Over the previous few years, quite a few of the secret programs Bush had set up after September 11 had come to light. In 2004, a CIA inspector general issued an internal report that questioned the legality of the agency’s use of harsh interrogation techniques. The report leaked, and the world soon learned the meaning of the term “waterboarding.” In November 2005, the Washington Post reported on the CIA’s clandestine program of operating secret prisons (“black sites”) around the world in which it held and interrogated al-Qaeda operatives. Six weeks later, the New York Times revealed the existence of the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program.
Despite this series of revelations, there remained no outside constraints on Bush’s counterterrorism programs. That would soon change. In a sweeping decision handed down on June 29, 2006, the Supreme Court held that some aspects of the war on terror had been illegal and, furthermore, that contrary to the Bush administration’s claims all the prisoners at Guantánamo were entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. In this case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the court ruled five to three that Bush had no authority on his own to set up new military commissions to try al-Qaeda detainees; instead, Congress should have been asked to approve the new system. Thus, the hurried and furtive White House decision making of November 2001—in which Bush signed an order for military commissions drafted by the vice president’s office, ignoring an ongoing review by the cabinet agencies—had resulted in errors that caused the program to be ruled unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court decision had several far-reaching consequences. Bush was forced to go to Congress for legislation authorizing military commissions. He succeeded but only after protracted negotiations. Moreover, following the Hamdan decision, the CIA reviewed its interrogation programs, cut back on some but not all of the harsh techniques, and transferred all of the fourteen al-Qaeda detainees out of the “black sites” and into Guantánamo.