It was billed as a major policy speech on energy policy, a way for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a novice on the national stage, to showcase her expertise.
And there was a lot of that. Speaking at a solar energy company in Toledo, Ohio, Republican vice presidential candidate Palin talked about her fight against the big oil company monopoly in Alaska and her progress on a nearly $40-billion natural gas pipeline that she said would help nurture U.S. energy independence.
We've shaken things up in Juneau. Whatever the good ol' boys are running these days, it's not the state of Alaska. And that's the kind of serious reform that we need in Washington, because the stakes for our country could not be higher.
But then she pivoted, and blamed the Bush administration in part for the oil crisis, saying that "Americans blame Washington for doing next to nothing about our energy problems, and they are right."
Arguing that "three decades of partisan paralysis on energy is enough," she made no mention of the Bush family connections to Saudi Arabia. But she sure took aim at the results, saying:
By relying upon oil from the Middle East, we not only provide wealth to the sponsors of terror, we provide high-value targets to the terrorists themselves. Across the world are pipelines, refineries, transit routes and terminals for oil we rely on. And Al Qaeda terrorists know where they are.
Palin also took a shot at her counterpart, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden. Noting his opposition to coal mining, she parodied the McCain campaign's signature "Joe the Plumber" line. "With or without the green light from Joe the Six-Term Senator," she said, "we will make clean coal a reality."
President Bush achieved one of the key foreign policy goals of his second term today: He signed legislation paving the way to a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with India.
That may sound uncontroversial. But it turns upside down three decades of U.S. efforts to restrict nuclear work in India after it exploded a nuclear weapon. On the other hand, the legislation opens up the prospect of American access to a multibillion-dollar nuclear business in India.
Bush's success in squeezing the legislation out of Congress in its final days reflected, once again, the ability of a lame-duck president with approval ratings below 30% and facing a hostile House and Senate to nonetheless achieve some top priorities.
Yes, elections are supposed to be about the future. But what to make of the ongoing role that President Bush is playing in the current race for his job?
He attends no rallies. He speaks not a word about the candidates in public. And to the extent he takes any apparent role in the campaign, it is still behind closed doors, raising money for the Republican Party.
Still, he's a central figure, as noted by a number of observers in the aftermath of the second presidential debate.
CNN's associate political editor Rebecca Sinderbrand noted moments after the debate ended in Nashville on Tuesday night that John McCain mentioned Bush three times, "to highlight the policies where he parted ways with the president."
Barack Obama mentioned Bush twice as much, Sinderbrand noted. And you can be sure it wasn't in an adulatory manner.
WashPost's Dan Froomkin singled out some of McCain and Obama's unfriendly references to the president, including this one: "[There] was an energy bill on the floor of the Senate loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies, and it was sponsored by Bush and Cheney."
The speaker? Republican McCain. He voted against the bill, he noted, and Obama supported it.
Any surprise the president isn't out there doing big rallies?
If you were watching only the polls, Wall Street or Afghanistan over the last several months, you could be forgiven for thinking President Bush had been having a rough go of it, what with a job-approval rating rivaling that of Richard M. Nixon at his lowest, the tumbling Dow and the resurgent Taliban.
But you'd be wrong. It really hasn't been an entirely bad closing act for Bush. Indeed, he's on a roll. At least that's how the White House sees it.
Consider:
Last Monday, he suffered a legislative wipeout when the House rejected the $700-billion plan Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. hatched to deal with the credit crisis. By Friday, the president had signed an only slightly revised package into law. No other legislative issue carries greater importance for the president as his time in office wanes.
On Wednesday, he will sign a civilian nuclear agreement with India that won congressional approval last week. Apart from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been one of the most important -- and troublesome -- foreign policy issues on Bush's agenda for several years.
Remember the chant "drill, baby, drill" at the Republican National Convention last month? Congress heard it. After balking for years -- decades, really -- at relaxing rules against offshore exploration for oil and gas, it went along with the president's own initiative to ease government obstacles. The measure doesn't open up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to be sure, but it is nonetheless one of Bush's top energy priorities.
Not bad for a lame-duck president and one of the least popular at that.
But wait, there may be more.
Speaking with reporters after a closed-door forum with small-business people at the Olmos Pharmacy in San Antonio, the president said he was looking forward to moving back to Texas, "but in the meantime, it looks like I'm going to have a lot of work to do, between today and when the new president takes office."
As Dan Eggen, writing in the Washington Post, noted today, White House officials see such victories as underscoring "a year in which Bush has repeatedly pushed through major legislation on Capitol Hill regardless of troubles in the polls or the overwhelming focus on the presidential race."
For the White House transcript of the president's remarks to reporters this morning, click on "Read full story" ...
Tough news for Vice President Dick Cheney from the federal court in Washington.
No, it has nothing to do with his signature issues -- anti-terrorism intelligence and energy.
This one deals with potential recreational pursuits back home in Wyoming. He is, after all, about to retire.
Well before the surge of interest in snowmobiles, President Richard M. Nixon and then President Jimmy Carter imposed limits on the use of off-road vehicles in the national parks.
In its last days in office, the Bill Clinton administration moved to phase out snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, but the Bush administration reversed that decision and instead moved to expand their access.
The Grand Teton mountains tower above Jackson Hole, where Cheney maintains a secluded home deep in a heavily forested spread.
Sullivan ruled that the park services "failed to articulate why a plan that will admittedly worsen air quality complies" with federal conservation rules.
The plan developed by the Bush administration "is arbitrary and capricious, unsupported by the record, and contrary to law," said Sullivan, who was nominated to the federal court by President Clinton, after serving in District of Columbia superior and appeals courts to which he was named by Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
He ruled that "in contravention" of the 1916 Organic Act that created the National Park Service, the snowmobile plan:
... clearly elevates use over conservation of park resources and values and fails to articulate why the Plan’s 'major adverse impacts' are 'necessary and appropriate to fulfill the purposes of the park.'
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."
Fortunately, Hurricane Gustav lacked the punch that forecasters had feared.
True, water overtopped levees, and some homes were damaged. But it looks as if oil refineries were largely spared. People too.
This morning, at a Cabinet meeting, President Bush said early signs were encouraging and that it was "a little early right now to come up with a solid assessment" of the damage Gustav did to the country's energy infrastructure.
But that didn't stop him from lobbying Congress to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling. Without mentioning opponent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by name -- nor the merry band of Republican rebels who spent weeks debating the issue in the dark without the benefit of C-SPAN cameras or even lights -- Bush said:
I know the Congress has been on recess for a while, but this issue hasn't gone away. And this storm should not cause the members of Congress to say, 'Well, we don't need to address our energy independence.' It ought to cause the Congress to step up their need to address our dependence on foreign oil. And one place to do so is to give us a chance to explore in environmentally friendly ways on the outer continental shelf.
It became the mantra of President Bush's conduct of foreign policy.
Now, the United States' relationship with Russia looks much as it did just before the Cold War ended and the president's father was campaigning for the White House two decades ago. The Saudis continue to go their own way when it comes to pumping oil. And China took over the world stage during the Summer Olympics just concluded — without yielding on its strong-arm human rights practices.
Never mind the tete-a-tetes that Bush conducted at his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Maine, with Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin, the Saudi royalty visit to the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, and the distance Bush traveled to demonstrate a friendship with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Michael Abramowitz, writing in today's Washington Post, took a look at the president's reliance on stepping beyond the bounds of formal diplomacy and found that it didn't quite accomplish as much as Bush may have hoped.
He writes: "Many Russia experts say Bush did not understand the true intentions and character of the Russian leader."
But, he notes, White House officials present Bush as being "aggressive but realistic" in how he approaches world leaders.
He quotes Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council, who said:
While there are often policy issues that don't exactly go the way we want them to, the situation on the other hand could be much worse if the president did not have a decent working relationship with some of these leaders.
— James Gerstenzang
Photo: Former U.S. President Bush poses with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and current U.S. President Bush. Credit: Sergei Chirikov / EPA
From his post in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, F. Chase Hutto III has had his hands in a variety of issues.
There was the debate over clean air and global warming. By all accounts, he helped scuttle the course favored by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency for stronger regulations intended to fight emissions of greenhouse gases, as Countdown to Crawford reported a month ago.
There was the time the administration was considering greater restrictions on smog-forming ozone; he opposed them. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rule to protect North Atlantic right whales? The Bush administration is reportedly about to scale it back. Hutto was in deep on that one, too.
His role was tracked by the Washington Post, which reports today that the administration has a new job in mind for him: He will be promoted, the Post reports, from his staff position in Cheney's office to assistant secretary of energy.
The result: One of the most ardent opponents of government regulation within the government would be put in a key decision-making position where global warming policies are set.
Said Jason K. Burnett, who as a deputy associate administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency tangled with Hutto over global warming until leaving the government: "I can't think of a case where Chase advocated more environmental or health protections."
As for placing Hutto in the Energy Department at this late date, the Post, quoting Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes: "In coming months, Hutto could make policy decisions that the next administration would find difficult to reverse quickly."
Tea-leaf reading may be an ancient Chinese art, but some of its most accomplished practitioners work from congressional offices in Washington, D.C.
Today they are parsing the speaker's words, trying to figure out whether Nancy Pelosi, in an interview last night with CNN's Larry King, opened the door to consideration of President Bush's proposal to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling.
Asked whether she would approve a package that included drilling, Pelosi at first said, "I would not." But then she added, "It depends how that is proposed, if the safeguards are there." To draw your own conclusion, read the transcript below.
Republicans who have been clamoring for an up-or-down vote on the issue -- protesting without benefit of lights or cameras on a deserted House floor while their colleagues are on vacation -- are wary.
"It is time for the book-selling speaker and her vacationing Democrat Congress to stop steeping the tea leaves and drinking the Kool-Aid," said Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee. His recommendation: "immediately reconvene Congress and have a real vote on unleashing American energy for Americans."
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.
