These are tough days for the president of the United States. When you consider the speech on Iraq that had the feel of a force play with two outs, the slumping poll numbers that provoked the speech, the ugly reality of the facts on the ground, and the lack of good options to respond in Iraq, you know there are not a lot of high fives being exchanged around the White House.
And then there is the friction on the Hill. The Central American Free Trade Agreement is in trouble, while the Social Security reform effort is ricocheting between sad and tragic. Then, of course, there is the saga of John Bolton, whose nomination to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has become a kind of Rorschach test for the administration. Since it was first announced in March, the Bolton confirmation effort has proved to be a study in how this administration handles adversity. And in the short term, adversity seems all the rage. The bottom-line conclusion is that this White House hardly even acknowledges adversity. Look at Bolton; look at Iraq.
How do you explain the head wind the Bolton nomination has faced? The argument that Democrats are being partisan falls short, because partisanship seems to be the norm in today's Washington. And that has not prevented a long, sometimes improbable, list of GOP triumphs on legislation, nominations, and general agenda setting. So it may be that the trouble with Bolton is Bolton.
But the problem with the nomination may be with a White House that can't find a way to pull it down. President Bush keeps insisting on an up-or-down vote on Bolton. He seems assured that such a vote would secure approval for him. Yet we know Bolton could not get 60 votes. Does this raise a question about whether he is the right person for the job? Not at 1600 Pennsylvania, where the strategy is to plow ahead regardless of how much things change. No UN ambassador in the last 30 years has been confirmed with fewer than 80 votes in the Senate. Both Jeane Kirkpatrick and the embattled Richard Holbrooke got 81 votes. But no one voted against Kirkpatrick in 1981 (she served as Reagan's first-term UN envoy), so it amounted to unanimous approval. Holbrooke, when he was finally confirmed in August of 1999, had only 16 dissenters.
With support for Bolton mixed, it would not be implausible for the administration to concede a miscalculation and to send the Senate another nominee. But it's not that kind of party.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a big booster of the president, says there were mistakes and miscalculations in Iraq. “I think the truth is that right after the fall of [Saddam Hussein's] statue, people like me assumed that we would be embraced in a larger way,” Graham said on CNN after Bush's speech. “We didn't have enough troops, right after the fall of the country, to secure the borders. I blame myself as much as anybody, but the truth is we've made mistakes in judgment, underestimating the level of the insurgency, maybe not having enough troops at the beginning -- and we paid a price for that.”
Yet the administration seems weak on self-reflection. And that is why Bolton is likely to get the job in New York by recess appointment. The larger question is whether the administration is continuing to hurt itself with its overdeterminism on so many issues as it heads into the last, and traditionally very difficult, throes of a two-term presidency.
The polls say yes. History says wait and see.
Many Americans are wondering what took so long for the president to get into trouble. All the problems that beset the administration were on the table long before the 2004 presidential election. And yet Bush won. So what's happened since those heady days in Ohio?
Some say the chickens have come home to roost. The I-told-you-so attitude among liberals raises the question about whether this translates into their rising fortune.
“We are completely bipolar up here,” says one Democratic aide in the House. “We are happy that they are messing up. But we also know that there is no one on our side, with the possible exception of [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid, who could play on their level nationally.”
Nevertheless, the Bolton nomination could mean -- at the very least -- a disruption to the president's winning streak.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
