In this morning’s Washington Post, Peter Baker takes a look at recent history and asks whether George W. Bush can still make a comeback:
The president was in a funk. Morose from midterm elections that handed Congress to the opposition, he stewed in private, vented to friends, turned on aides and summoned self-help gurus to help him understand just what went wrong. He was left to argue with reporters that he was still “relevant.”
It took Bill Clinton months to get his feet planted again after the 1994 defeat. But he did recover and went on to win reelection two years later. So too did Ronald Reagan bounce back from the 1986 midterm elections, which cost his party the Senate. As President Bush struggles to recover from a similar thrashing, his advisers are studying the Clinton and Reagan models for lessons to revive his presidency.
Historical comparisons are always fraught with peril, since each president faces his own distinct challenges and brings unique faculties and flaws to the task. But veterans of past administrations see patterns that offer hope even to badly weakened presidents such as Bush. Adversaries who assume that Bush has been permanently crippled by the Democratic takeover of Congress, they say, misunderstand the opportunities still available to him.
Both Reagan and Clinton found that the power of the bully pulpit still gave them an advantage over a Congress controlled by the other party. Both Reagan and Clinton used a mix of cooperation and confrontation, moving to the middle on selected issues to pass legislation while standing firm on others that touched on core principles. Both pounced when the other side overreached.
There’s one big difference; George W. Bush is no Bill Clinton, and certainly no Ronald Reagan, when it comes to his ability persuade. Reagan and Clinton were able to comeback from seeming disaster because they were both, in their own ways, excellent communicators, who knew how to go over the heads of the Congressional leadership directly to the American people. Bush ? Not so much.
At the same time, though, Bush has made some moves since the elections that may indicate where things will go in the two years to come:
In the weeks since the Nov. 7 elections, Bush has already started down the paths forged by Reagan and Clinton. Just as Reagan fired Regan, Bush deferred to the Washington elite by ousting Rumsfeld and choosing Establishment favorite Robert M. Gates to replace him. He has left town to focus on foreign policy; he just got back from Asia and leaves today for Europe and the Middle East. By design or happenstance, he will have slept in the White House just 10 nights out of the first 25 after the elections.
Like Clinton, he has identified issues on which he thinks he can meet the opposition in the middle, including the minimum wage, education, immigration, energy and lobbying. But Bush has also signaled that he will fight over issues such as judicial nominations.
“Clinton had an imperative in ‘96 to get reelected,” said Steve Elmendorf, a top House Democratic strategist at the time. “Bush, his imperative is more about his legacy. That gives him more running room to move to the center if he wants to and leave his party behind, because he doesn’t have to run for reelection.”
Whether he’ll have either the courage or skill to do what needs to be done, though, is another question.
