We'll start with the obvious: There is only one president, and it is George W. Bush. Until noon on Jan. 20, 2009, he will hold the full range of legal powers of the nation's chief executive.
But one need only look a few feet from the Oval Office this afternoon for evidence that almost four months from the inauguration of his successor, his political authority is being diluted.
To be sure, the president is busy with the duties of his office. Just consider his schedule today:
By early afternoon, he had already met with the president of Lebanon...
and the president of the Palestinian Authority...
He met with the leadership of the Orthodox Union, a 110-year-old Jewish group...
He signed one of the major bills to come out of the final days of the current congressional session --amendments to the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, which was one of the major domestic policy achievements of his father, President George H. W. Bush (far left in the photo below)...
And later in the day he is meeting with the prime minister of India.
And right now, to push forward the tentative agreement on his proposal to bail out Wall Street to the tune of $700 billion -- and, he argues, to improve the financial picture on Main Street -- he is meeting with House and Senate Democratic and Republican leaders.
And two others are joining the conference in the Cabinet Room, next door to the Oval Office: Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain.
Had the economic crisis occurred perhaps three months ago, there is little chance they'd have found seats at the polished oblong table.
But their presence today is a recognition of the ebbing of Bush's political clout -- and the fact that if they are on board, whatever agreement emerges will have a far better chance of passage.
The presidential campaign, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said at her daily news briefing today, "was starting to seep into the debate."
"The thought was that bringing these two candidates together would actually help finalize the framework that we were closing in on, and we think that that's all for the better."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photos: President Bush with President Michel Suleiman of Lebanon and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. Credit: Matthew Cavanaugh / EPA. President Bush with leaders of the Orthodox Union and signing the amendments to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Credit: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press.
Critics say the regulation is a back-door effort by the Bush administration, as it winds down its tenure, to restrict access to birth control. Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, put it this way:
This Bush proposal has the potential to undermine state laws that guarantee rape survivors' access to contraception in the emergency room or require insurance companies to cover prescription birth control in the same way they pay for Viagra...This is yet another example of just how out of touch Bush is with the country's priorities -- and we will not give up in our fight to keep him from doing more damage as he prepares to leave the White House.
Supporters counter that the new regulation would simply enforce an old federal "conscience" provision that allows healthcare professionals to opt out of doing abortions or providing contraceptives if that violates their own beliefs.
This proposed regulation is about the legal right of a healthcare professional to practice according to their conscience. Doctors and other healthcare providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience. Freedom of expression and action should not be surrendered upon the issuance of a healthcare degree.
Either way, the deadline for public comments is at midnight today, and department spokesman Kevin Schweers reports a "higher than average" volume of comments. He said the comments mirror those posted on Leavitt's blog.
This week Leavitt met with two of the regulation's biggest critics -- Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Patty Murray of Washington -- and if body language is any indication, the reg will probably be finalized soon.
Murray, saying she appreciated Leavitt's time, noted that the two senators "received no guarantee that women's access to contraceptives will be protected if these rules move forward."
Clinton said they had a "very frank conversation about how this rule could create a slippery slope leading to patients being denied access to contraception." While she urged Leavitt to "take these concerns into consideration," she did not sound optimistic, saying:
With the public comment period coming to a close, everyone who cares about women having access to the health care they need must make their voices heard.
President Bush announced tonight that in a spirit of bipartisanship, he has invited Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain to join congressional leaders at the White House tomorrow to talk about a $700 billion rescue plan for Wall Street.
In any event, the Obama campaign said the meeting at the White House is no reason to postpone Friday night's scheduled debate at the University of Mississippi. As Obama said earlier, presidents have to juggle more than one thing at once. And as Obama spokesman Bill Burton put it:
A few moments ago, President Bush called Sen. Obama and asked him to attend a meeting in Washington tomorrow, which he agreed to do. Sen. Obama has been working all week with leaders in Congress, Secretary Paulsen, and Chairman Bernanke to improve this proposal, and he has said that he will continue to work in a bipartisan spirit and do whatever is necessary to come up with a final solution. He strongly believes the debate should go forward on Friday so that the American people can hear from their next President about how he will lead America forward at this defining moment for our country.
Vice President Dick Cheney trudged up to Capitol Hill today to try to convince skeptical Republican congressman that spending $700 billion to bailout Wall Street for its bad gambling habits at taxpayer expense was a good idea.
It was a tough sell.
A large number of House Republicans remained skeptical, even after a two-hour meeting with Cheney at the Cannon House Office Building.
"I don't know anyone who's sold on this rescue plan,'' said Rep. Wally Herger (R-Chico). "There's a lot of concerns. The general feeling is we have to do something, we have to be decisive. But there's concern about a bill that could be loaded up, and there's concern about whether this is the right way to go."
Some blame President Bush for not selling the idea better.
"I think they still need to make the case,'' said Rep. George Radanovich (R-Mariposa) "Is the president going to help us with our constituents and make them realize that it's not about Wall Street, that it's about every American? That case still needs to be made.''
A number of lawmakers said they didn't like the idea of rushing through a proposal they only received days ago.
Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), saying the House is now "very divided," urged a slowdown. "If Congress said, 'We're going to do something, we're not sure what, but help's on the way ... I think you can actually send Wall Street a good signal, get a little sanity injected into this."
The last time Cheney, a former congressman, played this same role in corralling support on Capitol Hill was for the war resolution that sent troops to Iraq. This time, he took with him officials from the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget who warned of dire consequences if the package is not passed this week. Still, the doubters dominated. And some of the doubts stemmed from the Iraq war.
Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) said Republicans are wary of giving one man -- Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- so much power, especially after the administration's failed response to Hurricane Katrina and its false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
-- Richard Simon and Johanna Neuman
Photo credit: Lauren Victoria Burke/Associated Press
When he looks at the $700-billion Wall Street bailout, Newt Gingrich sees ... Goldman Sachs, inside the White House.
I think you have a Goldman Sachs chief of staff to the president and the Goldman Sachs secretary of the Treasury. And they convinced the president that the American people ought to send $700 billion to Wall Street.
That's Gingrich, the Republican and former House speaker, talking on National Public Radio this evening about White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.
Bolten was executive director in charge of legal and government affairs for Goldman Sachs International in London before he began working for George W. Bush's election campaign in 1999, andPaulson was the firm's CEO before moving to Treasury.
It is all, Gingrich said, a "very, very bad idea," he said, and "very un-Republican."
Except that it is coming, of course, from a Republican administration.
It wouldn't fly, he wrote Sunday on the National Review's website, if the Democrats were in charge, and he urged Congress to "ask a lot of questions."
"If this were a Democratic administration the Republicans in the House and Senate would be demanding answers and would be organizing for a 'no' vote," he wrote.
If a Democratic administration were proposing this plan, Republicans would realize that having Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Dodd (the largest recipient of political funds from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) as chairman of the Banking Committee guarantees that the Obama-Reid-Pelosi-Paulson plan that will emerge will be much worse as legislation than it started out as the Paulson proposal.
But because Republicans are behind "this gigantic power shift to Washington and this avalanche of taxpayer money," Gingrich wrote, "the normal conservative voices have been silent or confused."
No, the First Nail Ceremony is not a reference the nail polish that might be worn to match the lipstick of any number of the participants.
Rather, the First Nail Ceremony marks the start of construction on the inaugural platform where the 44th President of the United States will be sworn in. A similar ceremony was held to prep the platform for the 43rd POTUS in 2000, as evident above from the hammers of Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
During Wednesday's kickoff ceremony, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the committee, and the acting architect of the Capitol will, according to the press release, "hammer nails into a plank on the site of the platform that when completed will hold approximately 1,600 people," including members of the Senate and House, Cabinet members and nominees, Supreme Court justices, former presidents and the president- and vice president-elect and their families.
With that load of heavyweights, they might want to reinforce the wood with steel.
It is the central charge against the Bush White House, that the administration lied its way into a war in Iraq.
For years, left-wing pundits and groups like MoveOn.org beat the drums with this accusation. The White House response: We were just acting on the same intelligence everyone else had -- evidence, which turned out to be faulty, that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction.
Now comes Dick Armey, once House Majority Leader, who described a classified one-on-one briefing in the vice president's hideaway office in the U.S. Capitol where he says Vice President Dick Cheney went beyond that into outright deception.
According to a new book on Cheney called "Angler," by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, Armey, a Texas Republican, had spoken out against the war. Cheney was trying to change his mind. So the vice president told him the threat from Iraq was actually "more imminent than we want to portray to the public at large." In Armey's account, Cheney told him:
Iraq's "ability to miniaturize weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear," had been "substantially refined since the first Gulf War," and would soon result in "packages that could be moved even by ground personnel....We now know they have the ability to develop these weapons in a very portable fashion, and they have a delivery system in their relationship with organizations such as Al Qaeda."
"Did Dick Cheney ... purposely tell me things he knew to be untrue?" Armey said. "I seriously feel that may be the case...Had I known or believed then what I believe now, I would have publicly opposed [the war] resolution right to the bitter end, and I believe I might have stopped it from happening."
The House Natural Resources Committee has just announced hearings next week into the latest scandal to grip a federal agency under the Bush administration. Turns out an Interior Department agency in charge of collecting oil and natural gas royalties was compromised for years, investigators said, alleging that employees improperly accepted gifts from oil companies, handed out sweetheart deals, had sex with subordinates and used illegal drugs.
As the Los Angeles Times described it, investigators spent two years examining the cozy relationship between the energy industry and the Minerals Management Service, an obscure Interior Department agency that issues lucrative drilling leases to energy companies and then collects royalties from leases of the land, which is owned by taxpayers.
* Government employees routinely socialized with industry representatives, having drinks and meals and attending golf outings, a ski trip, a Toby Keith concert and other excursions.
* Two employees engaged in "brief sexual relationships" with customers but didn't recuse themselves from handling work involving those companies and officials. One employee said she didn't disclose the contact or consider it improper because "she did not consider a 'one-night stand' to be a personal relationship."
* A former program director with Denver-based Royalty in Kind received more than $30,000 from an industry consulting firm in return for marketing the company to various oil and gas companies doing business with the government agency.
* Royalty in Kind employees routinely allowed energy companies to revise their bids for oil or natural gas after the sale had been awarded to the company. Of 121 amendments reviewed, only three favored the government. The amendments favoring industry were worth about $4.4 million.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said he was "outraged by the immoral behavior, illegal activities and appalling misconduct" and promised "swift action to restore the public trust."
Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, called for the hearings. He called the employees' reported actions "so outlandish that this whole IG report reads like a script from a television miniseries -- and one that cannot air during family viewing time."
Here we go: Who is responsible for the "tone" in Washington these days?
President Bush campaigned for the White House eight years ago promising, like others, to change that oft-maligned "tone."
In an interview recounted in Bob Woodward's latest inspection of the Bush administration, "The War Within," the president acknowledges that it didn't happen, to some extent a result of the debate over the war in Iraq.
He said, as recounted by Mike Allen, writing for Politico.com:
… [T]his war has created a lot of really harsh emotion, out of which comes a lot of harsh rhetoric. And you know, one of my failures has been to change the tone in Washington. And it's the failures of others as well.
Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, expanded on the president's thinking today, telling reporters at the daily White House press briefing:
... [T]he president takes a lot of -- takes responsibility for it, but I don't know if he -- all the blame belongs at his feet. I've been a spokesperson for the president for many years. I have never once had to apologize on his behalf for any personal attacks or demeaning thing he has said about any one individual.
She added, however: "I see on a daily basis members of Congress from the Democrats who say very demeaning things about him, and it's not constructive at all."
Figuring she may have had Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) in mind, Countdown to Crawford passed along her comments to their offices.
From Jim Manley, Reid's spokesman, came this response to the request for comment:
President Bush presides over an administration and party that slanders war heroes as unpatriotic, outs [a]CIA agent and is generally hostile toward anyone that disagrees with his stubborn ideology. And after the disgraceful display of personal attacks and name calling at last week's Republican convention, it is safe to say that not only did President Bush not change the tone, he's made it worse.
Brendan Daly, Pelosi's spokesman, said it was ironic to be considering the issue when Republicans were expressing "phony outrage ... over this ridiculous 'lipstick on a pig' controversy.
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo of President Bush with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani in the Oval Office today: Dennnis Brack Bloomberg News
Congress returns next week after an August recess filled with political conventions and the sights and sounds of Republican rebels extolling the virtues of offshore oil drilling from a darkened House floor.
They're in town for a three-week session before adjourning to go back home to campaign. All 435 members of Congress and a third of the Senate are up for reelection Nov. 4.
With gas still pumping at around $4 a gallon, President Bush predicted today that if Democrats don't lift the ban on offshore oil drilling during the upcoming session, they will lose. In his weekly radio address, Bush said:
This Congress has earned a reputation as one of the least productive in history. Throughout this year, Democratic leaders have ignored the public's demand for relief from high energy prices. This is their final chance to take action before the November elections. If members of Congress do not support he American people at the gas pump, then they should not expect the American people to support them at the ballot box.
Bush also called on congressional leaders to expand access to oil shale -- "a domestic resource that could produce the equivalent of more than a century's worth of imports at current levels." And he urged tax credits for alternative sources of energy such as wind and solar.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has signaled that she would consider allowing limited expansion of offshore drilling as part of a comprehensive energy package. In the Democratic radio response, Rep. John Larson of Connecticut put it this way:
We will consider responsibly opening portions of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling while demanding that big oil companies use the leases they have already been issued or return them to the public.
And, like the White House, Democrats said they want alternatives. "We need to address our future energy needs with a federal renewable electricity standard consisting of alternative forms of energy, including natural gas, solar power, wind, biomass and geothermal power and fuel cells."
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
