Bush's Information Brownout

...In political terms, it is irrelevant that Bush has since signed a version of the bill very different from the one the Republican ads promoted...

...But I don't believe in the halo effect...

...If the President sees genuine Congressional bipartisanship as vital to his desire to topple Iraq's Saddam Hussein, he has been quite slow to show it...

...Senator John McCain, the maverick Arizona Republican who earned his combat spurs in Vietnam, declares: "Congress has a right to ask questions and should ask questions...

...But the President has yet to end a broad information brownout, leaving his spending priorities vulnerable in both the Democratic-controlled Senate and the more conservative House...

...Despite signs of an economic recovery, the surpluses that kept the Treasury from dipping into bond markets for a while remain a mirage...

...The winner of the Democratic primaries then, who is likely to be known by midMarch, will almost certainly have to rely on Federal matching dollars to get his message across...

...I don't take questions for his whole family...

...In fairness, Bush is hardly the first President to give Congress curt treatment...

...Administration officials seem not to want to let anything out for fear that it will be controversial and cause them problems" The White House appears conditioned to dismiss such criticism as the kind of endemic partisan sniping that was only briefly stilled after 9/11...

...McCain notes that in "every [military] conflict there's a tug of war between the Congress and the Administration as to who controls the flow of information and how, and it was exacerbated by the Vietnam War obviously, and we've never completely gotten over that...

...In any event, since bonding with the blue-collar heroes at Ground Zero in New York and pitching a perfect strike during the World Series at Yankee Stadium, Bush has rarely faltered from a public relations standpoint in managing his man-with-amission persona...

...At that point, with another Presidential campaign in the wings, Congress will be portrayed as the heavy spender and George W. will skip off to play the political wild cards handed him by the terrorists...

...In addition, the projected shortfalls reflect the cost of popular programs that Congress is not prepared to sacrifice...

...As with the war, on the Enron front the President is pleased to talk about some things and not about others...

...By contrast, Lyndon B. Johnson, a former Senate majority leader from Texas, knew how to press the correct levers...

...The measure also includes tax incentives for firms to invest in plant and equipment, but it excludes the longer-term concessions to business the White House had sought...

...The cause of bipartisanship was not advanced either when Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, blandly maintained that the ads "merely say the same things that the President has said repeatedly, which is it's important to pass a stimulus plan to get the economy going again and to help workers find jobs...

...I take questions for the President," he huffed...

...If legislative concerns were raised at all— and it is not clear they were—they got short shrift...

...Will the President's current war-driven popularity benefit conservative candidates in the midterm balloting this November...

...Accordingly, they say, there will be no teams of lawyers organizing massive document dumps or showering reporters with paper aimed at leeching surprises out of Congressional hearings...

...Even Chief Executives with prior Hill experience —Harry S. Truman and Richard M. Nixon come to mind—at times struck an imperious tone in ignoring or overriding legislative prerogatives...

...Andrew J. Glass, a longtime contributor forte NL, is a senior editor of The Hill...

...He pays scant attention to the fact that the Founding Fathers placed "all legislative powers" in the Congress before getting around, in Article II of the Constitution, to vesting the "executive power" in the President...

...Once the spate of unrealistic cuts are restored, the fiscal 2003 deficit could easily exceed $50 billion...

...predictably, he did not...

...Overall, the legislation makes it tougher for House Republicans to pursue their goal of a balanced budget, let alone a surplus...

...There is no evidence, however, that he has abandoned his inherently conservative domestic views...

...It extends the regular 26-week unemployment benefits by 13 weeks, and permits further automatic extensions in states with high jobless rates...

...Yet barring some unforeseen stumble, if he can continue to define his Presidency as a sword and shield against America's new rogues' gallery of enemies, he seems likely to keep his job...

...That is the kind of bipartisanship that Daschle skirted when he said that Bush's now-famous Axis of Evil phrase "conjures up the notion that we have a single-minded, unilateral policy affecting all three countries [Iraq, Iran and North Korea] identically, and I don't think that's the case...

...In part, that is because of the unanticipated military spending...

...That is the real reason compromises on several important bills, like a Federal budget for the coming fiscal year, have failed to fall into place...

...Bush now sees himself as a wartime President who should be free to govern without getting bogged down in the nittygritty of domestic legislation...

...This seems equally unacceptable to the Daschle-led Senate Democrats, who want to spend more, and to conservatives in both chambers, who want to try to balance the budget by spending less...

...It is projected to add S51 billion this year, $43 billion next year and $29 billion in 2004 to the Federal budget...

...But even some Republican Senators privately believe the President must do a better job of keeping Congress informed about his post-Afghan war plans, and pay closer attention to pressing domestic matters...

...Giving Congress Short Shrift Bush's Information Brownout By Andrew J. Glass Washington The brouhaha over why key legislators were long kept in the dark about the "shadow government" has pointed up a deeper problem: a lack of respect for the Congress at the highest levels of the Bush Administration...

...Indeed, in areas where Bush has supposedly undergone a political epiphany there is room for doubt too...

...This, plus an obsession with secrecy, has created tensions between President George W. Bush and such top Democrats as Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri...

...On March 8, Bush was obliged to swallow his pride and accept the largely Democratic version of his economic stimulus package...

...Of course, there is nothing in the Constitution about a shadow government of the sort Bush activated after September 11 without informing most Congressional leaders...

...That leaves him free to periodically fly below the political radar, as he did in February when he approved a partisan ad campaign aimed at vulnerable Senate Democratic incumbents who opposed his economic priorities...

...For example, though more Beltway Democrats than Republicans supported campaign finance reform legislation, the President knew he would be the biggest beneficiary of reform in 2004...

...Once the ads began to run, the Democrats urged him to pull them off the air...

...Belated Bush apologies to pivotal figures gave the impression of easing the situation...

...Connecticut Governor John G. Rowland, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, recently offered a more realistic assessment than most of his fellow GOP politicos when he said: "Clearly, we are pretty excited about this President performing above anyone's expectations...

...The paucity of information provided to him and to other Senators about the war on terrorism, he says, has kept them from doing their jobs properly: "We do have to have basic knowledge to make decisions...

...Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the mild-mannered chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, is hardly alone in holding that something is seriously amiss...

...That means severe limits on campaign outlays during the critical preconvention period...

...He was duly rewarded—before being swamped by Vietnam—with a cornucopia of legislative accomplishments...

...After he told of his mother-in-law losing $8,000 on Enron stock, reporters asked Fleischer if other Bush relatives owned shares of the failed energy company...

...Instead, their focus was almost totally on the continuity of Executive functions...

...The new crowd has hardly earned any bragging rights for candor—given Bush's shadow government and his stealth-like budget with its major cutbacks that Congress plans to take off the table...

...I really don't believe in the transfer of so-called popularity...

...Aside from the $5 billion Bush says is needed to beef up homeland security, he wants to hold down increases for all other domestic programs to about 2 per cent, or somewhat below the current inflation rate...

...But it hasn't escaped the attention of Capitol Hill that the President and his doomsday planning team gave little thought to constitutional imperatives...

...In playing up the policy implications of Enron's collapse, White House officials claim they have rejected the calculated way the Clintonites handled the press...

...Still, at this juncture Bush himself appears politically immune...

...Bush, on the other hand, can opt out of the system—which he did in the 2000 primaries—and raise an unlimited amount of "hard" dollars...

...It is ironic that as the next phase of the struggle in the Middle East unfolds, former Vice President Albert Gore is the one who stands closest to him on the need for a final reckoning with Saddam...