SCOTUS, version 2.5

The Washington Post says Bush is “poised” to make another Supreme Court nomination tomorrow. Peter Baker writes,

Judging by the names the White House floated by political allies in recent days, Bush seems ready to pick a candidate with a long track record of conservative jurisprudence — one who would mollify the Republican base, whose opposition to Miers’s nomination helped scuttle her chances. Several GOP strategists said the most likely choice seemed to be federal appeals judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., with judges J. Michael Luttig and Alice M. Batchelder also in the running.

Any of the three would draw support from many conservative activists, lawyers and columnists who vigorously attacked Miers as an underqualified presidential crony. At the same time, the three have years of court rulings that liberals could use against them. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said yesterday that he has already warned the White House that nominating Alito — who is often compared to Justice Antonin Scalia — would “create a lot of problems.”

Concerned Harpies Women for America have let it be known they really like Alito and Luttig. Frightening.

Home Alone II

Nancy Gibbs and Mike Allen write in Time that George Bush has become estranged from his closest advisers:

“The problem is that the President doesn’t want to make changes,” says a White House adviser who is not looking for a West Wing job, “but he’s lost some of his confidence in the three people he listens to the most.” Those three are his Vice President, Dick Cheney, whose top aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, has been charged with brazenly obstructing the investigation into who leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame; Bush senior adviser Karl Rove, who while not indicted has still emerged as a player in the scandal; and chief of staff Andrew Card, who gets some of the blame for bungling the response to Hurricane Katrina and even more for the botched Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. “All relationships with the President, except for his relationship with Laura, have been damaged recently,” the White House adviser says. The closest aide who is undamaged is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice–who is off minding the rest of the world–and, of course, Bush himself. “The funny thing is everybody’s failing now, in which case perhaps it’s time to look at George Bush’s relationship with George Bush.”

According to Gibbs and Allen, some White House aides hope that this week’s crises have persuaded Bush that everything is not fine and that he must make changes, both in policy and in personnel. The plan is to re-launch brand Bush in January, repackaged with a new style, new policy ideas, and new members of the team.

That sounds grand, but the product will still be the same guy who won’t read newspapers and who abuses staff members who bring him bad news. And the old team primarily was expert at surrounding Bush with a perpetual, carefully crafted pageant that made him seem presidential even as he avoided doing the job of president. I believe that “Team Bush” is less a staff than a tightly knit web of codependence. Without his enablers, can Bush still be Bush? If not, just who or what will he be?

And even if Karl Rove escapes further legal problems and regains some of his old standing in the White House, there’s still the messy matter of Scooter Libby and his eventual trial. Last week some were speculating that Bush would issue pardons, but now it appears Scooter Libby will be excommunicated from BushWorld. John Dickerson wrote in Slate,

Scooter who? You may remember how George Bush’s friendship with Enron chairman Ken Lay evaporated when the energy company came under investigation. That looks likely to happen with Scooter Libby. Libby has resigned. Vice President Cheney has vouched for his patriotism and talents. And now the White House will attempt to change the subject.

The problem is that the Plame-Libby story is going to be stirred up again, and again, by the eventual trial. Also, Dickerson points out, the Bush base will likely want to rally around Libby, not shun him.

But as Bush plays down the scandal, he may be undermined by the kind of conservatives who recently pulled down Harriet Miers, and who may try to lead a more assertive political response. Karl Rove would prefer they stay quiet. He’d like it to become accepted wisdom that since Fitzgerald didn’t indict him today, he’s in the clear. Rove and his allies would like Patrick Fitzgerald’s 22-month investigation to become known as the Scooter Libby affair. Cheney, whose natural instinct would be to lash out at the prosecutor, is extremely unlikely to do so, given that the criminal investigation centered around his office is ongoing.

But will conservatives who revere the vice president and the hawkish worldview Libby was promoting go along? Many are instinctively inclined to rally around Libby the way they did around Oliver North during the Iran-Contra affair. Instead of seeing the evidence of Libby’s perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements as efforts to protect his own skin, they’ll decry the “criminalization of politics,” and frame his actions in a patriotic narrative: Whatever lines Libby may have crossed, he was acting in the service of two noble goals. He was protecting his boss and defending the case for the war against Saddam Hussein. Supporters regard Libby’s obsession with refuting Joe Wilson as proper. They see him as merely fighting back against a partisan Democrat who lied about his mission and his findings.

Let’s face it; the extremist rightie “base” is bigger, stronger, and crazier than the Bush Administration. Bush’s position with the extreme Right is like that of a man gripping a venomous snake; if he loses control of the snake, it will bite. But it’s hard for other people to get chummy with a guy gripping a snake.

Also in Time–in his usual halfassed way, Joe Klein almost gets a clue:

Bush’s White House is a conundrum, a bastion of telegenic idealism and deep cynicism. The President has proposed vast, transformational policies—the remaking of the Middle East, of Social Security, of the federal bureaucracy. But he has done so in a haphazard way, with little attention to detail or consequences. There are grand pronouncements and, yes, crusades, punctuated with marching words like evil and moral and freedom. Beneath, though, is the cynical assumption that the public doesn’t care about the details—that results don’t matter, corners can be cut and special favors bestowed.

Klein, if you don’t know by now the idealism is an act, there’s no hope for you. Even though you write several good paragraphs later, such as:

Bush opposed a Department of Homeland Security, then supported it as a campaign ploy—and then allowed it to be slapped together carelessly, diminishing the effectiveness of the agencies involved.

The White House proposed a massive Medicare prescription-drug plan and then flat-out misrepresented the true costs (and quietly included a windfall for drug companies). Every bit of congressional vanity spending, every last tax cut, was approved. Reagan proved that “deficits don’t matter,” insisted Vice President Dick Cheney.

Like I wrote in the last post–Bushies are not serious about governing. And here Klein actually gets good–

Republicans seem better at campaigns, permanent and otherwise, than Democrats. It may be that conservatives just don’t take governance as seriously as liberals do, and therefore have more freedom to maneuver. Didn’t Reagan say government was “the problem, not the solution”? The very notion of planning for the common good, especially long-term planning, seems vaguely … socialist, doesn’t it? The Bush Administration is filled with hard-charging executives but bereft of meat-and-potatoes managers. Not much priority is placed on pedestrian things like delivering the ice to New Orleans or keeping the peace in Baghdad.

Klein goes on to describe the way everything about the Bush Administration, including war, is just part of their perpetual political campaign. It’s actually worth reading. This is Klein, of course, so he’ll be back to wanking in next week’s issue.

And finally–while you’re at Time, don’t miss their article on Patrick Fitzgerald. Makes me want to take the lad home and adopt him.

No Magic Bullet for Bush

As reported by The Observer, yesterday President Bush tried to deflect attention away from his many domestic problems by calling attention to his war in Iraq.

That’s how politically bankrupt he is.

Other presidential administrations have come back from low points and scandals and finished strong. But such a comeback requires attributes of character that I do not believe Bush possesses.

Dan Balz writes in today’s Washington Post:

Friday’s indictment of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby dealt another big blow to public confidence in the administration, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Bush’s approval rating fell to 39 percent — the lowest recorded by this poll in his presidency — and a majority of Americans said the charges signal broader ethical problems in the administration. By a ratio of 3 to 1, those surveyed said the level of honesty in government has declined during Bush’s tenure.

With its ability to command public attention and frame the national agenda, the presidency is a supremely resilient institution, and such recent occupants as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton have bounced back from adversity. But Bush faces such a complex set of problems — an unpopular war in Iraq, high energy prices, the costly challenge of rebuilding New Orleans, a fractured party, disaffected independent voters and little goodwill on Capitol Hill — that his prospects are particularly daunting.

Beyond that is the question of whether Bush needs to make fundamental adjustments to a governing and political style that has given him electoral success but also left the country deeply polarized. With his Republican base showing signs of discontent and independent voters more disaffected than ever, Bush faces a potential tradeoff on every important decision ahead of him that could cause him to lose as much ground with one part of the public as he gains with another.

Whether he can devise a strategy that successfully navigates between the right and the center may determine just how much he can achieve for himself and his party through the rest of his presidency.

This paragraph from the Balz article highlights Bush’s essential problem:

The president’s advisers recognize the reality in which they find themselves. “What the public wants is back-to-basics governance and decision making,” presidential counselor Dan Bartlett said yesterday. “This is not a situation in which it changes overnight or that there’s a ‘Hail Mary’ pass that changes the dynamic. . . . There’s not a magic bullet.”

The public wants back-to-basics governance and decision making, do they? Then they’ve got the wrong guy in the White House. The essential, terrible truth about the Bush White House is that the Bushies are not serious about governance. This has always been true, but not until the winds of Katrina blew away much of Bush’s facade have so many Americans understood this. Not only had Bush packed FEMA with political cronies instead of serious professionals, but he was so disinterested in the effects of a massive hurricane on the Gulf Coast that his staff had to do an intervention to get him to pay attention.

The Bushie attitude toward governing is exemplified by the famous episode in which Paul O’Neill, then secretary of the treasury, warned that another round of big tax cuts would cause budget deficits. Dick Cheney replied, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.” In other words, we don’t have to worry that deficits will hurt us politically, and we don’t give a bleep about the long-term effect of deficits on the nation’s economy.

Bush himself seems disconnected even from policies that interest him. He went all-out to sell Social Security “privatization” but doesn’t appear to have bothered his head about the details, like how to pay for it. As I’ve written before, Bush speaks of the passage of No Child Left Behind Act as a great achievement. Yet he’s shown no interest in fixing problems with the program to make it work as promised.

George W. Bush appears to be a “magic bullet” kind of guy. I have read that his oil businesses failed because he was determined to make a big strike rather than slowly and patiently build a business. “To George W. Bush, a Texan who revels in the myth of the wildcatter, running risks in pursuit of the big gusher is a quintessential part of the American character,” says this May 16, 2005 Business Week article. “But as the scion of an aristocratic Eastern dynasty, the budding young tycoon always had a network of family friends and relations to call on. Those golden connections bailed George W. out of his early forays into the oil business.”

As president, Bush struck a political bonanza in September 11. But his biggest gamble was the war in Iraq. See how he threw the dice–he (and his advisors) bet there would be WMDs in spite of flimsy evidence. He and his crew assumed no post-invasion planning would be required, since the happy Iraqis quickly would establish a democracy as soon as they were finished tossing flowers. And he and his crew seemed to believe that the mere removal of Saddam Hussein would be the magic bullet that would bring peace to the Middle East. Why bother with boring ol’ nation building when you’ve got a magic bullet?

Once he realized he’d taken a political hit from his inept response to Katrina, Bush worked hard–to find another “bullhorn moment.” One event after another was staged to show Bush in action. Yet FEMA and the rest the Department of Homeland Security still seem to be drifting. Bush has a rare gift for getting his picture taken with firemen, but whipping a drifting department of his administration into shape is beyond his skill.

After nearly four years of all-Republican rule, 68 percent of American adults are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, according to the Gallup “right track/wrong track” poll. This number was at 28 percent in December 2001, but has risen steadily as Bush’s 9/11 glow has faded. And now people are hungry for “back-to-basics governance” instead of big gambles and photo ops. And I don’t believe Bush can give them that. Even if he tried, which is unlikely, he couldn’t do it. He doesn’t have it in him.

Who Is a “White House Official”?

Following up the last post–per commenter copymark, President Reagan’s labor secretary, Raymond J. Donovan, was indicted in 1985 for grand larceny, later aquitted. So was he not an indicted “White House official”? I believe he doesn’t count because he didn’t work in the White House, but in the Department of Labor. He was part of Reagan’s administration but not part of his White House staff.

I believe the title of Most Guilty Sitting Cabinet Member should go to Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, who was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison plus a $100,000 fine for his involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal of 1922. I’ve found conflicting information about whether Fall resigned before or after charges of fraud and corruption were brought against him by the Senate, however. It’s possible he had already resigned before he was charged, but I don’t believe he had. (And speaking of pork–Fall’s middle name was Bacon.)

John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney general, also was convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury and sentenced to two and a half to eight years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. But John Mitchell had resigned as attorney general before he was indicted.