[Mb-civic] Bush's Fraying Presidency - David Broder - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Bush's Fraying Presidency

By David S. Broder
Sunday, October 9, 2005; Page B07

Three front-page stories on a single day last week testified to the 
unraveling of the Bush presidency.

The lead story in The Post on Thursday reported that "the Senate defied 
the White House yesterday and voted to set new limits on interrogating 
detainees in Iraq and elsewhere," with 46 Republicans joining the 
Democrats to pass restrictions on prisoner abuse so unacceptable to 
President Bush that he has threatened his first veto.

A second story on the same page recounted that "the conservative 
uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday as Republican 
activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers 
to the Supreme Court confronted the president's envoys during a pair of 
tense closed-door meetings."

Participants described it as the biggest split with the GOP base in his 
five years in office.

And elsewhere on the page was the news that the Central Intelligence 
Agency's director had rejected a recommendation from its inspector 
general that he convene a formal "accountability board" to judge the 
possible culpability of senior officials in the failures that preceded 
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The action triggered a statement 
of concern from the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence 
committee and criticism from families of Sept. 11 victims.

These developments came against a background of rising conservative 
criticism in Congress of runaway spending, of continuing investigations 
of the administration's faltering response to Hurricane Katrina and of 
criminal indictments and grand jury probes that have forced out the 
chief White House procurement officer and the House Republican majority 
leader and that may implicate other top officials of both branches.

Coming when Bush is recording his lowest-ever job-approval scores, this 
has led as sober an analyst as John Kenneth White of Catholic University 
to describe this as "a presidency on life support." Noting the 
precipitous decline in Bush's ratings from moderates and independents, 
White argues that continuing problems -- notably the war in Iraq, the 
high cost of gasoline and home heating fuels, and an unending stream of 
deficits -- are likely to plague Bush indefinitely

A valuable historical perspective on all this came from Stephen 
Skowronek of Yale University in a talk to the American Political Science 
Association just before Labor Day. At the time, it seemed a bold -- even 
questionable -- thesis. Now it looks prescient.

Skowronek, a presidential scholar, defined Bush as "an orthodox 
innovator," meaning someone who inherits a governing doctrine from 
others -- in his case, Ronald Reagan -- but applies it in different 
circumstances and with different techniques.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/07/AR2005100701700.html
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