The Austin American Statesman
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The first 100 days of the Bush administration

By Ken Herman
Sunday, April 29, 2001

At the 100-day milepost at which the first premature assessments of a new president traditionally are given, this much is clear:

If you backed George W. Bush on Election Day, you can see the formative stages of a great presidency. He is en route to signing a massive tax-cut bill. He navigated out of a dicey standoff with China. His team thinks that he is moving toward success on parts of his education package. Folks seem to like him.

"One of the reasons I've got Lincoln on the wall here is that the role of a president is to unite the nation," Bush told The Washington Post recently in the Oval Office. "And we're making progress toward doing that, which I think will then lead us to be able to say that there's a spirit of accomplishment, a culture of shared accomplishment in Washington."

But if you didn't like George W. Bush on Election Day -- and, among voters, that's a larger group than the folks who did like him -- you are ready to throw his campaign slogans back in his face.

Exactly where in "compassionate conservatism" does the appointment of traditional conservative John Ashcroft as attorney general fit? And why is a politician who billed himself as "a uniter, not a divider" running a Veg-o-Matic legislative strategy aimed at slicing and dicing his way to victories? Key to the strategy has been his penchant for hitting the road to put pressure on targeted Democrats in their home states.

"I've never seen an administration in all my years which is more intransigent, more unwilling to work with Democrats or across the aisle," said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. "It is breathtaking how remarkably unwilling they are to sit down and try to find common ground." Whatever you think of Bush, it is clear that he is moving forward as if he has a mandate, not like the presidential equivalent of a poker player who wins a hand with a pair of threes and withstands allegations that he cheated.

Bush, at times employing an affable, low-key style, at others playing old-fashioned hardball, has used the first 100 days to seize control of the legislative agenda in a game where control can be everything. Though the Bush team views the overall effort as a marathon, it has been focused on a fast start.

The checklist so far shows major progress on some of Bush's top priorities while others are heating up on a back burner. Though the Senate rejected Bush's $1.6 trillion tax cut over 10 years, it approved a $1.2 trillion package that will be the lower limit when House and Senate conferees go to work on a final version.

Bush and Democratic leaders have reached some preliminary agreements on his education plan, though he is getting nowhere with his call for vouchers, the public money parents of children in chronically failing schools could use to send their kids to private and parochial schools.

Social Security and Medicare reform have yet to get going in earnest. Bush's calls for a retooled military and a national energy policy also remain in the starting gate pending top-to-bottom reviews. Also at square one is Bush's faith-based initiative, which would give federal money to churches and other religious groups that deliver social services.

But overall, presidential scholar Martha Kumar sees a man in control.

"They have gotten off to a smooth start," she said of Bush and the band of Texans, family friends and hired hands running the show.

Polls indicate that the public agrees. Sixty-three percent of the respondents to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll said they are satisfied with Bush's performance so far. Questions on individual domestic policy areas produced less satisfaction among respondents.

And that leads to what could be the ultimate question for a president who fell short of persuading a majority of voters that he is some new breed of Republican.

If you are among that sizable segment of non-Texas America that never could quite decipher where Bush fit on the left-to-right continuum, the first 100 days have offered evidence that he is as ideologically conservative a president as America has had in a long time. His Texas record offered definitive hints about this, but a campaign that featured education reform and racial inclusion may have given some voters reason to believe that compassionate conservatism was code for conservative lite.

It is not, and it shows in Bush's early decisions, including his appointments, his stripping of the American Bar Association of its virtual veto power over judicial nominees, his ban on federal money to international family planning agencies that support abortion, his slow-growth budget and his opening of White House doors to conservative organizations such as The Federalist Society.

At the Brookings Institution, presidential scholar Stephen Hess says all of this was predictable. Candidate Bush made it clear that he was pro-business, suspicious of regulation and willing to blur the line between church and state. "When he gave his speech to the joint session, it should have surprised nobody. Every single thing in there was clearly stated in his campaign," said Hess.

And Bush, in chorus with his top aides, is saying it over and over again.

In public, the president has shown Washington a low-key style, a tone he thinks America wants in Washington. It has showed in his measured public assessments of congressional foes who have assailed his efforts. It also showed in his handling of the 11-day standoff with China, which held the crew of a U.S. reconnaissance plane captive after it collided with a Chinese jet.

"The value of all of this was, they didn't overheat the situation," Hess said in giving Bush high marks for his handling of the standoff.

U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, says the new tone is nice, but something important is missing.

"Being a good schmoozer may have been enough to be governor, but being president requires a level of substance and constructive action that we have yet to see," he said.

On the domestic front, Bush aides believe that he scored a major early win with a similar cool approach during the white-hot battle over the confirmation of Ashcroft.

Buoyed by advance vote-counting that showed them Ashcroft would be confirmed, the Bush forces were able to maintain the high ground with respectful, on-point response.

"I think it was the dog that didn't bark that was important during the John Ashcroft hearings," said Karl Rove, Bush's top strategist. It's a style Bush is looking to trademark.

But it's a style that can leave a president looking detached and disinterested. When rioting broke out in Cincinnati after police killed an unarmed African American man, Bush declined to weigh in beyond telling Ashcroft to check it out.

Similarly, Bush did not rush to Washington state to greet the surveillance plane crew members when they returned from China.

Mitch Daniels, Bush's director of the Office of Management and Budget, talks about a White House "utterly devoid of self-seekers."

Here's the mission statement as offered by Bush in a recent speech in Connecticut: "Less noise, less preening in front of cameras and more focus on getting things done on behalf of the American people."

In this White House, it's not the heat, it's the humility.

How it works

In the West Wing office where he quarterbacks the plays, Rove gives voice to the fine print associated with the "uniter, not a divider" brand of leadership. The Bush game plan is a happy-faced version of the oldest trick in the legislating book -- divide and conquer.

For all the public sweet talk about bipartisanship, Bush harbors no false illusions of bringing Democrats into the fold en masse.

"We have to recognize there is a pool of Democrats that, if we do our job right, are going to be willing to support the president on some issues," said Rove. "The fellow who votes with us on education may not vote with us on the tax cut. But there are Democrats who came here in order to achieve something, and I really sense there is a pent-up desire to achieve things."

Does that mean Rove et al. sometimes have to engage in some old-fashioned arm-twisting to help people "achieve things"?

"I do a little bit, but not much," he said.

Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a Republican who joined Democrats in approving a tax cut smaller than the one Bush wanted, has had an up-close look at how that works.

In early April, after the Senate approved the smaller tax-cut package, Chafee showed up at a news conference with other centrists -- Democrats and Republicans -- who voted against Bush.

"Senator Lincoln Chafee," his colleague John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat, said by way of introduction, "both arms still intact."

Breaux, once courted by Bush for a Cabinet slot, said the Senate vote was evidence of the failure of Bush's slice-and-dice approach. The 65-35 vote for a $1.2 trillion tax cut over 10 years ($400 billion less than what Bush wanted) produced victory claims from both sides as the battle moved toward a House-Senate conference committee.

"I think the White House understands it better than they did before, that they simply cannot take an approach that simply gets one person more than is necessary or try to create a tie and break it with the vice president. That concept cannot work in this Congress," said Breaux.

Democrats also said Bush tarnished his uniter image when he worked another age-old strategy: visits to the home states of wavering lawmakers.

"I think that the time would have been better spent with the meetings here in Washington," Breaux said after the Senate budget vote.

The White House rejects that talk, noting that Bush has met with almost 300 members of Congress since taking office.

The Bush team sees a pending victory in the tax battle, noting that the Senate vote guarantees a tax cut of at least $1.2 trillion, more than twice the Democratic starting point. Democrats, however, also were able to calculate a victory, something that astounds historian Hess.

"I'm fascinated by the fact that anyone in this town is stupid enough to believe the spin that his tax bill getting through Congress as far as it has by now was not a real victory (for Bush). When a guy asks for $1.6 trillion and gets $1.2 trillion in the Senate and the full thing in the House, that is a big victory. A year ago, the Democratic plan was $500 billion," he said. "I think it really is a stunning success."

First report card

In his upstairs West Wing office, Rove sounds like a kid eager to see the first report card. As he downplays the importance of the grades, Rove pulls out a red binder, neatly divided into sections by yellow tabs, entitled "First 100 Days."

The binder is both game plan and scorecard. And, by Rove's reckoning, Bush is winning, big time.

"The key thing was to begin the process by which the president could lay out the agenda," he said. "He wanted to be in a place where the moment he said `so help me God' that he could move then to the act of governing without going through a period of saying `What's next?' "

So week one was all about the education initiative. Week two was devoted to the faith-based initiative. Week three was for tax cuts. Week four was military modernization. Medicare and Social Security reform followed in the ensuing weeks.

And by then -- in six short weeks -- the heart and soul of what Bush wants to accomplish as president was on the table.

"Any one of these would be signature, hallmark accomplishments of a presidency," said Daniels, the budget director.

The road map, as offered in the binder in Rove's hands, is simple.

"The president understood that time is the most precious asset or most precious commodity here," said Rove, searching in the binder for the charts that prove his point by showing that recent presidents had a 75 percent chance of passing an initiative offered up in the first three months. The chances slipped -- down to 25 percent for initiatives offered by the end of September -- as the clock rolled.

The Democrats have their own binder chronicling the beginning of the Bush administration. Their version is black, and it's called "100 Days of Bush: A guide to what Bush has done, undone and not done in his first 100 days."

"There's a reason why we won that last election and got more votes than George Bush did, 'cause we were right on the issues," said Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, who ordered up 10,000 copies of his party's assessment of Bush.

Looking to 2004

In the perma-campaign mode of modern American politics, Bush is making sure to do the small things that can add up in a big way come re-election time.

He has worked on key constituencies among whom a relatively minor shift could make a big difference in a close election, courting Hispanics, Catholics and African Americans. Bush got only 9 percent of the black vote last year.

But he struggled in recent weeks to shed the anti-environment tag he picked up with earlier decisions, including a flip-flop that had him deciding not to slap federal regulation on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

On many environmental fronts, Bush had to deal with regulations enacted by Clinton in the closing days of his administration. Bush has upheld some and discarded others, including a reduction in the legal limit for arsenic in drinking water.

Democrats and environmental groups have zeroed in on Bush's decisions. "The people who voted for Al Gore last year realized that when it came to George W. Bush and the environment, the charm would quickly turn to harm. Now the rest of the country is realizing that, too," said McAuliffe.

Though Bush knows he has to move some numbers to guarantee that the 2004 election produces something more than last year's ugly win, the White House has adopted a don't-look-back approach to governing.

Newspaper recounts of the recounts continue, but the administration refuses to hinder itself with that kind of thinking. "Hail to the Thief" signs show up at Bush events on the road, but White House officials insist that they feel no hangover from the election from hell.

"No," said Daniels. "History."

The measure of the man

Presidential historian Hess gives Bush high grades at the 100-day point.

"This administration has done a lot better than some past administrations simply because it has been so focused," said Hess. "A lot of administrations are like that old Robert Redford movie `The Candidate.' They get elected and say 'What do we do now?' "

The administration, despite the truncated transition, got its Cabinet in place quickly. Filling the crucial next level of jobs has gone a bit slower. A Brookings Institution report found that "an alarmingly high number of senior positions in the Bush administration have yet to be filled."

Brookings scholars blame the process, not the president. Bush has announced 177 appointees, but many are bogged down in the maze of background checks.

The process threatens the quick start that Bush had been working on since last spring, when aide Clay Johnson was on the phone getting ready for transition. Presidential scholar Kumar of Towson University was among those asked for input more than a year ago.

Kumar is the rarest of academics, the kind on the front lines. As director of the White House 2001 Project, a long-term scholarly assessment of presidential transition, she shows up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. every day to watch a presidency unfold.

"People are always going to look at the first crisis and say, `How did the president do?' " she said. "The China crisis, I think, demonstrated that he did well. You could see some of his personal characteristics coming out in his leadership, his willingness to wait, to not be publicly personally involved. He has always been comfortable with having other people taking the credit or doing things once he's got the operation in motion and when he is comfortable with the way it is going."

And while some Democrats criticized Bush for heading to the hinterlands to push his tax plan, Hess sees a president with a valuable "sense of the permanent campaign."

Long way to go

From Hess' perch at Brookings, Bush remains a work in progress.

"These is still no question that he is not a very articulate fellow. There is more he can do to take advantage of the bully pulpit he has been given," he said.

From Kumar's perch at the White House, Bush shows the kind of improvement a professor likes to see.

"He is doing a good job of getting a sense of leadership, of how to use the podium. I think he has done a lot better," she said, recalling an early, uninspiring appearance in which Bush had to stick to a text to get through a 10-minute speech.

At 100 days, Hess sees a president for whom the planets might be aligning.

"We pray that our presidents are lucky, and so far there are signs this is a lucky man," said Hess. "Ronald Reagan was a lucky man. Jimmy Carter was a very unlucky man."

Lucky is a guy who comes along when even the opposition agrees that it's time for a massive tax cut. Lucky is a guy whose first international standoff is with a country that shares the goal of ending it peacefully.

Lucky, says historian Hess, is good.

Kumar sees something else at work.

"While some may think maybe he is just lucky, I don't think that is true," she said in the White House as Marine One landed on the South Lawn to bring the new president home. "It is a result of good planning."