White House Fumbling

...Less than a year ago, Chairman Sam Nunn (D.-Ga...

...How badly the Bush Administration had lost its bearings seemed to be underlined by what happened on October 24 as the budget deal neared completion...

...They argued that a breakdown at this point could have a disastrous effect on the stock market and the economy, and that the Republicans were more likely to lose than gain on this issue...

...At the Northrop and Lockheed aerospace companies, I imagine, they popped champagne corks, toasting Saddam Hussein, the best friend a military-industrial complex ever had...

...At about the same time, Saudi King Fahd said that Saddam should not feel embarrassed about withdrawing from Kuwait, and his Defense Minister, Prince Sultan, spoke of "territorial brotherly concessions" to Iraq...

...John Hughes, the president of Stealth Condoms, Inc., acknowledged that the name was inspired by the plane...

...The time for decision appeared to be approaching near the end of October, as the Pentagon talked of further reinforcements for the Persian Gulf and Bush fended off various overtures suggesting a compromise with Iraq...

...July 31 was just two days before the invasion of Kuwait, which breathed new life into tottering programs...

...When he issued Persian Gulf communiques in August from a golf cart at Kennebunkport, that seemed intended to display serenity under pressure—in contrast with Jimmy Carter...

...Bush has been a very popular President in a good season...

...There was a flurry of antiwar demonstrations around the country...

...You should know, dummy, that the enemy of all Islam is Israel...

...Perhaps under the influence of that champagne, Northrop filed suit against a small family enterprise in Taylor, Texas, that is making contraceptives called " Stealth Condoms...

...One of those three Times columns on October 21 had been by James Reston, emerging from semiretirement to express wonderment about Bush's sending "the biggest U.S...

...That looked like a face-saving way of preparing Iraqis for the possibility of a deal involving some withdrawal from Kuwait...

...The compromise was to spare them all...

...In the shimmering heat of the desert it is easy to see something that isn't there...

...In that dream a whiterobed Prophet Mohammed told the Iraqi dictator that he had his missiles pointed in the wrong direction...

...Yet there had been too many recent peace feelers—to Iraq, from Iraq —to avoid the impression that some, particularly in the Arab world, were looking for a way out of the stalemate before hostilities erupted...

...He had become a genuine puzzlement...

...Nevertheless, the soft Saudi words were a far cry from many weeks of fire-eating demands to crush the Iraqi regime...

...A Current of Disquiet From worrying about President Bush and the budget, the country could now turn to worrying full-time about President Bush and the Persian Gulf...

...As it was, the Congressional Democrats scored political points over the President, if only because of the frenetic ineptitude he displayed in rising above principle and conviction, scrambling from one position to another and finally pretending that he was an uninvolved spectator to the summit negotiation he had summoned in the first place...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR White House Fumbling At the end of the great budget deficit debate, President George Bush and Congress collapsed into each other's arms like punch-drunk boxers, the fight gone out of them when they finally realized they were both being booed by the fans for a disgraceful performance...

...In his hyperactive chats with the press, he seemed to be determined to show himself as spontaneous, unstaged and untelepromptered—in contrast with Ronald you-know-who...

...Presidential approval ratings, while still respectable, were sinking at the end of October...

...It was his common sense, among other things, that now came into question as he oscillated on taxes, wisecracked while jogging about "readmyhips," and told a crowd in Omaha who could surely recognize a Washington insider when they saw one that he was an outsider, glad to be "where the real people are...

...Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, facing a hostage crisis of his own in several thousand Soviet citizens caught in Iraq, was under pressure from Baghdad to restrain the United States...

...Bush never claimed to be big on philosophical outlook—"that vision thing" —but he had presented himself as downto-earth, running a pragmatic shop...

...There were other complications...

...The President was dissuaded from that rash course, with how much difficulty I do not know, by the Republican leaders in Congress, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas and Representative Robert H. Michel of Illinois, and the White House negotiators budget Director Richard G. Darman, Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F.Brady...

...of the Senate committee made four major speeches on the need for a new defense posture, saying, "Each weapons system has to be gauged as to whether it's really needed...

...His top Middle East expert, Yevgeny M. Primakov (expected to be the next Foreign Minister when Eduard A. Shevardnadze is promoted), traveled between Baghdad and Washington, stopping at points along the way, looking for a chink in the stone wall of confrontation...

...That disquiet stemmed, in part, from an impression that Bush was guided too much by a desire to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors...

...France, having talked Saddam into letting its citizens go, also counseled caution and restraint...

...Maybe it was only a mirage of peace that caused a record five-dollar drop in oil prices on October 22...

...Although Congress came out ahead of the President politically, it did not appear to be reveling in its victory...

...The Sunday New York Times on October 21 carried three different columns trying to divine why the President was fumbling so badly...

...Vice President Dan Quayle and three Cabinet members—Robert A. Mosbacher of Commerce, Jack Kemp of Housing and Urban Development, and Edward J. Derwinski of Veterans Affairs—urged the President to call off the whole thing, to fight out the issue of taxing the rich in the November election and resume the negotiations in January with a new and presumably more sympathetic Congress...

...But being more knowledgeable than Reagan and less worried than Carter do not add up to a positive Presidential identity...

...emerged from the House committee to pronounce the B-2 dead, saying, "It is time to bring the defense budget into step with reality...

...As recently as July31 Chairman Les Aspin(D.-Wis...

...Some did not seem eager to go home and face the rage of the voters...

...He said, "We offer a heck of alotmoreprotection than the Stealth bomber at a lot less cost...

...Congress was renewing its demands to be consulted on military decisions...

...The Christian Science Monitor spoke of "a careening Presidency...

...All these seemed to reflect a current of disquiet concerning the judgment of a President facing fateful choices...

...The bombers, the missiles and the antimissile-missiles survive even more tenaciously and a lot lot more expensively than the grizzled veterans of our past wars...

...In fact, the slogan on the package reads, "They'll never see you coming...

...Saddam Hussein may or may not have a dream, but President Bush has a nightmare—trying to hold together an increasingly nervous alliance while contemplating the next step after sanctions...

...David Broder, in the Washington Post, said that Bush had not prepared the nation for hard choices on the budget or in the Persian Gulf...

...But they apparently had to learn the hard way that for each of them the public penalties for paralysis had come to outweigh any conceivable advantage to be derived from positioning themselves as the friend of this or that constituency of class or age...

...If leaving their campaigns to television commercials and videotape appearances from the Capitol raised the accusation of being out of touch with constituents, it may have been that they found this preferable to being in touch with constituents...

...Not since World War II had our legislators stayed in Washington so late before an election...

...Whatever the case, the long ordeal of trying to make a symbolic one-year dent of $40 billion in a deficit nearing $300 billion (not counting the Persian Gulf Deployment) concluded on a generally sour note...

...On the Home Front The lesson of the Pentagon budget is that new weapons are like old soldiers...

...Western embassies in Baghdad and an emigre Kuwaiti newspaper in Saudi Arabia reported that Iraqi intelligence was spreading the story that President Saddam Hussein had told associates of a strange dream...

...The politicians were chastened by the experience, but not necessarily purified or ennobled...

...The Senate Armed Services Committee had wanted to kill some and the House Armed Forces Committee had wanted to kill others...

...All the big-ticket programs have come through a Senate-House conference clinging to life—the 10-warhead MX missile and the single-warhead Midgetman, the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") and the B-2 Stealth bomber...

...And when Saddam asked which way they should point, the Prophet replied, "You know the direction and you should correct it...

...Americans wondered whether he would be a President for all seasons...

...Hughes has declared that he will fight to keep the name...

...Army since the last war into the desert, not wanting to use it, not knowing how to get it out...

...Their deal for raising revenues and reducing services could have been made at almost any time in the preceding 10 months, without the disruption of three stopgap spending bills and one government shutdown...

...It takes no skilled interpreter of Arabic or of dreams to provide a translation: "It may have been a mistake to invade Kuwait and confront Saudi Arabia...

...The next day Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, loudly denied any change in Riyadh's insistence on Iraq's unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait...