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."
Increased ethanol in U.S. gasoline has been blamed for a wide swath of global ills -- not the least of them global warming and escalating food prices. Efforts to lower the amount of ethanol blended into the fuel supply brought the conservative Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry, and several environmental groups into the same camp as they tried to persuade the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency to relax the ethanol-to-gasoline ratio.
That effort came to naught today. The EPA announced that it would not lower the so-called Renewable Fuel Standard, despite concerns about emissions and food prices.
Perry, who succeeded President Bush as governor of Texas, had asked the environmental agency in April to waive a requirement that 9 million gallons of ethanol and other renewable fuels be blended into gasoline this year. He said that by putting increasing demands on the supply of corn, the mandate was pushing up the cost of food and animal feed.
He was responding to a requirement imposed last December by Congress in an effort to lower fuel costs and make the United States less dependent on foreign oil.
But EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson said this afternoon: "After reviewing the facts, it was clear this request did not meet the criteria in the law."
Perry had sought a 50% cut in the amount of ethanol to be blended into the gasoline supply.
The EPA said this couldn't be done in time to have an impact this year on corn, food or fuel prices.
Response to the decision fell along predictable lines:
The Environmental Working Group's director of government affairs, Sandra Schubert, called the mandate "misguided" and said it was "forcing farmers to plow up marginal land and wildlife habitat while increasing global warming and dumping toxic fertilizers and pesticides into our precious water sources."
"America should be focusing on viable clean energy solutions like conservation, solar and wind," she said.
The president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, Jim Greenwood, said the decision sent "a strong message that we must continue moving forward toward sustainable production of advanced biofuels" to cut dependence on important oil and to increase biofuel production from non-food sources.
His organization represents biotech companies, among others involved in expanding the use of biofuels.
To listen today to Barack Obama, it's all Dick Cheney's fault.
An "economy in turmoil." An energy policy developed by the vice president. Add it up and the all-but-certain Democratic presidential nominee has a combo of issues he is pushing to the top of his agenda today, and making the connection to John McCain, his Republican opposition.
"McCain has taken a page out of the Cheney playbook," Obama said in Youngstown, Ohio, a Democratic stronghold in a perennial battleground state.
Indeed, Cheney, who interrupted his government service to work in the oil business in Texas in the 1990s, has long been seen as the bete noir in the Bush administration energy policy -- and his role drew even more attention as gasoline prices climbed dramatically in recent months.
With that policy now under attack, it's no surprise that Obama sought to connect McCain to Cheney.
Here's how he did it, his words relayed to Countdown to Crawford by the Times' Peter Nicholas, who is traveling with Obama:
You won't hear me say this often but I actually agree with what McCain said a few weeks ago. Our dangerous dependence on foreign oil was 30 years in the making.... What he neglected to mention was that he was there 26 of those 30 years. He was there. Unless all the bad stuff was done in the four years that he wasn't there. During those years he voted against renewable sources of energy, against biofuels, solar and wind power. And unfortunately in this election McCain has proposed an energy plan that is the same.
Obama continued:
Cheney met with renewable energy once and oil companies 40 times. He has offered a gas tax holiday that at best would give you 30 cents a day for three months but assuming that the gas company would pass that on to you. McCain is offering $4 billion more in tax breaks to the biggest companies in America -- ExxonMobil, that just announced the largest profits in history. You are paying nearly $3.70 a gallon in gas. Two and a half what it cost when George Bush took office. They had a plan. The problem was that it was the oil company plan and it wasn't a people plan and we need a people plan. And that is why I am running for president.
It all reflects an effort to tie McCain to the oil industry, the Associated Press' Tom Raum noted. Problem is, he adds, McCain has no direct links to the industry, unlike Cheney and President Bush himself.
Obama is also using a new ad to draw attention to what he says is Big Oil's $2-million in campaign contributions to McCain.
He doesn't mention the $400,000 from oil company executives that, according to the McCain campaign, have helped the Obama effort.
In a "let's-do-the-math" look at Al Gore's proposal that the next president set the nation on course to produce every last bit of its electricity through "wind, sun and other Earth-friendly energy" within the decade, U.S. News & World Report's James Pethokoukis decided the plan was "almost unfathomably pricey."
It makes sense, he said, "only if you think that not doing so almost immediately would result in an uninhabitable planet."
Pethokoukis came up with this estimate for Gore's challenge: $5 trillion.
He reached that figure by playing out an estimate provided by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens for a plan to generate 20% of America's electricity by harnessing the power of the wind and building the infrastructure to transmit the electricity: $1.2 trillion.
What does this have to do with a blog named "Countdown to Crawford?" Only this: The proposal is something for the current president to think about -- and get started on, if he chooses to accept the challenge in his final months in office.
And, if only 269 votes had shifted in Florida eight years ago from Bush to the man from a small town in Tennessee, the blog you may well have been reading would have been "Countdown to Carthage."
Appearing relaxed, even subdued, President Bush spent approximately 45 minutes in the White House press briefing room this morning at his first full-fledged news conference since late April, seeking to reassure Americans that the economy is rebounding, that the housing mortgage market will stabilize, and that in the short term the market will help control rising energy prices.
With Sen. Barack Obama contemplating a trip to Iraq, the president advised him -- or other politicians heading there -- to heed the reports of Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Gen. David Petraeus and Iraqi leaders.
"I would ask him to listen carefully," Bush said, making a rare foray into the campaign to replace him and urging those proposing approaches in Iraq to ignore the temptation of adjusting proposals to meet the demands of politics at home and the pressure of such groups as MoveOn.Org, which Bush mentioned by name as "banging on the candidates."
Bush sought to assure Americans that their bank deposits were safe.
He said they should "take a deep breath and realize their deposits are protected by the federal government," up to $100,000.
He acknowledged that his oil proposals will do little to quickly bring new supplies to the market and thus lower prices, but he said that new offshore exploration for oil could "change the psychology," and convince the markets that supplies would increase -- a factor, he said, in setting prices.
Asked why he wasn't specifically asking for greater personal efforts by Americans to save energy, he said "they're smart enough to figure out whether they're going to drive less.... Americans are plenty smart people."
As for a second economic stimulus package, he said he wanted to see how the first one was working, but added: "We're always open-minded."
For the transcript of the press conference, read the full story...
President Bush made it official today, signing the memorandum lifting the executive ban on off-shore drilling. His move has no direct effect: Congress still has a ban imposed on drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.
But what the president's decision does is this: It puts new pressure on Congress to act in the face of gasoline costing more than $4 a gallon.
The president took to the Rose Garden and made his message clear:
I have issued a memorandum to lift the executive prohibition on oil exploration in the OCS. With this action, the executive branch's restrictions on this exploration have been cleared away. This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress.
"Now the ball is squarely in Congress' court," he added.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), had this to say, in a written statement: "Once again, the oilman in the White House is echoing the demands of Big Oil."
She said:
The Bush plan is a hoax. It will neither reduce gas prices nor increase energy independence. It just gives millions more acres to the same companies that are sitting on nearly 68 million acres of public lands and coastal areas.
She added that if Bush wanted to bring down oil prices, he should allow the use of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
For the president's memorandum, keep reading on the jump...
Even before the White House could make official the plan to lift an executive ban on offshore drilling, angry responses came pouring in.
"One of the two safety nets that protect our most treasured coastal areas, as of today, is gone,'' said Richard Charter, a consultant to Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.
He added:
But it is now clear that the fate of the California coast and these other sensitive areas absolutely will be determined by the presidential election. This punts the whole decision about drilling in these protected areas directly into the presidential election.
Still, there were signs of a shifting mood in Congress.
Rep. John Campbell (R-Newport Beach), who voted in 2006 against relaxing the moratorium, said in a recent interview, "I am becoming more flexible on the issue, which is clearly a function of the crisis in which we find ourselves.''
It will have no immediate effect on the availability of oil or, probably, the price of gasoline. But President Bush is planning to announce in the Rose Garden this afternoon that he is lifting an executive ban on drilling for oil along the outer continental shelf.
A congressional ban remains in effect, meaning that no such drilling will be possible.
Nevertheless, Bush's move puts pressure on Congress to act, Times staffer Richard Simon reports.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino announced Bush's plans during the morning news gaggle for reporters here at the White House.
In addition to congressional action, drilling decisions would have to be made by coastal states -- on whether to drill, on how far offshore drilling can take place, on sharing of revenue, Perino said.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney left the White House together today for a meeting with several Cabinet members and other top government advisors.
Each traveled in the customary armored limousine. Each was accompanied by the customary spare/decoy limo. And multiple very large SUVs carrying Secret Service agents. And a truck-like communications vehicle. And an ambulance. And other vehicles carrying staff members. And police vehicles. And two vans carrying reporters and camera crews.
All told, 21 vehicles were in their joint motorcade. They traveled about 2.2 miles round trip from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. to 1000 Independence Ave. S.W. and back.
Their destination: the U.S. Department of Energy.
At the top of their agenda: the effects of high fuel prices on the economy.
Anyone care to estimate the fuel used?
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: President Bush in a limousine in May. Credit: Gali Tibbon AFP/Getty Images
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.
