Bush Just Doesn't Learn

October 31, 2005

5:13 PM

With the indictment of Lewis Libby and possible indictment of Karl Rove, President Bush faces a fateful choice. Bush can adopt a bunker mentality and try to appease his base of social ultra-conservatives and military hawks, who have brought him such grief. Or he can reach out to the broad mainstream of American politics, as he pretended to do when he ran as a “uniter, not a divider” in 2000.

Who would have predicted that the Bush machine would implode so spectacularly, on so many fronts simultaneously? It is worth pausing a moment to take stock of it all:

The vice president's chief aide is indicted on perjury and obstruction charges that potentially implicate Dick Cheney himself, since Cheney personally told Libby of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson's position. Whether or not an indictment of Karl Rove follows, this investigation puts the dubious origins of the war back in the public spotlight, and will inexorably lead to even more damning evidence that the case for taking America to war in Iraq was based on deliberately faked information.

The religious right humiliates Bush on the Harriet Miers nomination. This will leave Bush furious at his usual allies, weakened politically, and Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress more determined to prevent the far right from dictating the next nominee.

The Republican leader (and chief enforcer) in the House, Tom DeLay, is indicted for corrupt campaign money-laundering, while his opposite number in the Senate, Bill Frist, faces potentially criminal conflict-of-interest charges for dumping stock (supposedly in a blind trust) in a public company controlled by his family just before the stock tanked.

The president is caught flat-footed in the most serious natural disaster in a century.

First-term Bush appointees who opposed the Iraq war belatedly go public, including former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, with the unmistakable inference that George Bush Sr. did not support his son's ill-considered war. The 2,000th American combat death in Iraq underscores the continuing decline in public support for the Iraq War and the administration generally.

Some of this stunning political collapse reflects ideological hubris; some of it is ordinary corruption taken to an extreme.

What now? Bush could recover by governing as the moderate he once pretended to be. One slightly encouraging portent is Bush's appointment of Ben Bernanke to chair the Federal Reserve. With the world's markets watching, he did not dare name an ideological extremist.

With the religious right having deserted him over Miers, Bush could return the favor and name a distinguished centrist who would attract Democratic and moderate Republican support. If this were the Clinton presidency, you would expect the president to “triangulate” -- forsake his own party base and reach out to the opposition, as Bill Clinton did to enact NAFTA and welfare reform.

But instead, Bush is appeasing the base that just humiliated him, suggesting that the man just doesn't learn. If Samuel Alito's name indeed reaches the Senate, Bush can expect a battle royal, and from a weakened position.

Bush would do well to appoint a new chief of staff and senior political adviser, contain Cheney's role, and shake up his cabinet. He might reject the dismal military adventurism of the neocons, turn to traditional foreign-policy realists, and begin cutting his (and America's) losses in Iraq.

While liberals may take some grim satisfaction that the mendacity, overreach, and sheer incompetence of the Bush administration are at last backfiring on the Republicans, it is small comfort. For this is our country, too, and we have to live with the consequences.

Barring an impeachable offense, these people will be running the country for 39 more months. We will be left with the legacy of their destructive policies for years, if not decades, to come.

One can only hope that Bush will respond to the damage created by his calamitous alliance with the far right by rejecting the captivity of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, and turning outward. Given all the temptations in this dangerous world, and all we've learned about the administration's cynicism in using the politics of fear and division to manipulate public opinion, one shudders to think what misadventures Rove might dream up if Bush, in his present damaged condition, circles the wagons.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. A version of this column appeared in the Boston Globe.