Marching Alone

By MICHAEL DUFFY

History has called us, George W. Bush likes to say, but what if history has already moved on? Perhaps no one in the nation was helped more by Sept. 11 than the 43rd President. His strange little presidency--which began with the slimmest electoral margin since 1876 and suspicions that he wasn't ready for the job--was lifted in the instant that so much else was crushed. In the days that followed, Bush found his voice and his purpose, because for once the simple moral clarity to which he reduces most questions was exactly what Americans needed to hear. But what if the rare, incandescent clarity of last fall, so perfectly tailored to his black-and-white way of thinking and speaking, has now come and gone? Bush has always preferred his poison straight up or down, good vs. bad, dead or alive, you're either with us or you're with the terrorists. That's a great way to frame things when you're launching a war. But when the moment ends and the world goes back to being gray, where does that leave him?

That is the question on the mind of many of the President's advisers and allies, people who have known him for 15 to 20 years, who watched with both surprise and respect as the lackadaisical Bush son found purpose, won the highest office in Texas and then in the land--all in the space of eight years. Most of the more than two dozen senior Republican Party operatives in pivotal states who spoke with Time--people who advise and support the President and talk regularly with him and his inner circle--say Bush underestimates the economic problems facing the country and that he is too narrowly focused on the terror war. Their worry seems well founded: in last week's TIME/CNN poll, only 30% of those surveyed said the war on terrorism would be "more important" than other issues in selecting a President in 2004. Sixty-one percent said other factors would rate higher. There is an innate reluctance in this group of advisers to criticize the President publicly, so the concerns are most often posed as questions. But these questions are sounding more and more alike. As an adviser gently put it, "Can Bush still define his presidency as leading the global war on terror? If the answer is no, does it leave him on ground that he is distinctly unable to command? That's a legitimate question."

It is tempting to believe that Bush rose to the occasion last September because flag and country demanded it. But with the passage of a year, and a chance to watch the President in action at home and overseas, it's harder to get away from the idea that Bush didn't rise to meet history but that history fell to meet him. In one horrifying two-hour period, the world shuddered and conformed to his way of thinking: there was good and there was evil, and it wasn't hard to tell the difference. If Bush didn't know much about foreign policy, that hardly mattered, and it may have helped him. Privately, Bush even talked of being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment, and perhaps he was. But it was also, as one of his advisers told TIME, "one of history's rare unnuanced days."

There is now a growing sense in the Republican Party that it is time for Bush to move on--and a growing apprehension that he cannot find the ways and means and words to do so. On one level, much of the worrying comes down to Iraq and whether it has become his white whale. Even among those who know Bush well there is remarkable disagreement and uncertainty about his state of mind on the subject of regime change. Some of these advisers say he is merely looking for a graceful way out of a commitment he should not have made so dramatically in the first place during the campaign when he threatened to "take out" Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Others fear that he risks losing control of his presidency unless he gets control of the widening public debate--and confusion--about his Administration's plan to oust the Iraqi leader. In private comments that appear to reflect the President's own thinking, several stated flatly that Bush knows he is juggling too many balls both at home and abroad to launch a war, much less a pre-emptive one, anytime soon. "They cannot bite off any more big goals," says an adviser who speaks regularly to the Vice President.

There is a deeper worry within the party too: that after 20 months in office, Bush relies too heavily on moral certainty to make decisions overseas and not enough on the same kind of forceful, black-and-white distinctions when making decisions at home. Bush's experience as a businessman should give him a persuasive voice on economic problems, but thus far it hasn't. Yet overseas, where Bush's experience is more limited and his advisers are divided, he is running greater risks and relying on a moral code that almost everyone believes will be difficult to maintain. The Republican stalwarts who spoke to Time were quick to say they did not want Bush to abandon his preference for the stark choice; they just argued that he should do less of it abroad and more of it at home. Failing to do so, they warned, could endanger his chances at a second term.

More than most presidential candidates, Bush promised during his campaign to look heavenward for guidance if elected. In nearly every speech he talked about putting his hand on the Bible and told voters he didn't need polls to know what to do, so help him God. And yet campaign promises are not the only reason--nor the most important reason--that moral certitude plays such a crucial role in Bush's decisions overseas. He came to office largely ignorant of foreign affairs. His team split immediately--and deeply--after his Inauguration into two fiercely divided camps, and is already scarred by the pitched battles between the conservative wing, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, and the pragmatists under Secretary of State Colin Powell. Lacking his father's deep reservoir of experience to draw upon, how does Bush resolve his advisers' titanic disagreements? He goes with his gut. He relies on an instinctive sense of who is good and who is bad overseas--and then he sticks at all costs with the call he has made. His confidence in this process has grown with his success in Afghanistan. He took to heart the lesson that he should trust his moral sense and have faith in what a former Clinton aide, not without admiration, calls "rising dominoes"--the sense that if Bush unfurls a big bright flag and marches toward the mountains, the world will follow.

But when the world doesn't follow, Bush often just keeps marching. His defenders like to point out that the President's foreign policy has had no serious failures caused by allies' rebelling against him. That proves, they say, that raw power determines international politics. As a senior Bush adviser bluntly declared earlier this year: "The way to win international acceptance is to win. That's called diplomacy: winning." If other countries get restive, U.S. officials say, who cares? Even ganged up, they will be weaker than the U.S. alone. The President summed up his lead-a-lonely-but-moral-crusade approach to foreign policy in April when he was asked whether he understood that Palestinians consider the Israeli occupation to be a form of terrorism. The context for his statement was a brief period in which Bush suspended his pro-Israel tilt and tried to act as an honest broker between both sides in the conflict, calling on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to halt Israel's incursion into the West Bank. That's when he said, "Look, my job isn't to try to nuance. I think moral clarity is important, if you believe in freedom. And people can make all kinds of excuses, but there are some truths involved. And one of the truths is, they're sending suicide killers in because they hate Israel. That's a truth. I know people don't like it when I say there's evil, this is evil versus good. But that's not going to stop me from saying what I think is right."

Moral certainty is potent stuff, and it comes with some nifty fringe benefits. Bush's conservative flank finds it deeply appealing; the current crop of Democratic leaders are rendered virtually speechless by it. But moral certainty "without trying to nuance," as Bush put it, is a dangerous luxury for a President. If you operate as though Arafat is a terrorist and Israel a victim, you isolate the U.S. from moderate Arab states, who see their region in shades of gray. That could limit your options--and your allies--after you have told everyone that Saddam Hussein can no longer be contained and that you need to take him down. Announcing a crusade marks you as someone who thinks that all other matters are at best secondary (and no one in the Middle East sees Israel-Palestine as secondary). And crusades are hard to call off once your friends peel away. But the President, at least so far, has not even invited his friends to join him in the fight against Iraq.

Bush's approach might at least be bracing if there were not so many instances in which his initial instincts have proved to be the wrong ones. He initially dismissed Russian President Vladimir Putin with a glib quip: "Once a KGB man, always a KGB man." But as he learned more about the Russian, largely at the prodding of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he changed his mind, saying he had "had a sense of [Putin's] soul."

A presidency based on moral principles requires consistency, and Bush has not always displayed it. He calls for democracy in Iraq and Palestine--but not in such U.S.-friendly autocracies as Saudi Arabia. He is an avowed free-trader, but he has boosted domestic farm subsidies and protectionist tariffs on foreign steel. He has had to abandon many foreign policy campaign pronouncements in favor of policies closer to the allies'. He at first opposed international peacekeepers for Afghanistan but then agreed; at first opposed extending their mandate but then agreed; at first barred U.S. troops from joining the peacekeepers but now has Green Berets guarding Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and the State Department's security service will take over this month. Bush came to power deeply skeptical of foreign aid, then backed the biggest increase in history. "The great thing about the U.S. is that it always does the right thing in the end," a senior adviser to Tony Blair deadpanned before the Bush-Blair summit last spring. "It's too bad that it sometimes takes until the end."

If Bush's critics around the world are concerned about the wisdom of his approach, his G.O.P. allies at home are worried more about the politics of it. They acknowledge that the overall goal of fighting terror is vital, dovetails nicely with Bush's way of thinking and keeps the Democrats off balance. But they fear that his real challenge is growing at home, where the prospect of a double-dip recession looms. Many of these Republicans were surprised in January when Bush's strategist Karl Rove said the G.O.P. will make the President's "handling of the war on terrorism the centerpiece" of its plan to win back the Senate and keep the House in November.

Some advisers worry that Bush may try to sustain that approach for two more years; they don't believe it will work. As a West Coast ally of Bush's put it last month, "Outside of Washington and New York, the terror thing is over. It is an episode that has passed. It just won't carry him. The more they try it, the more they risk their standing with the voters. Voters are increasingly asking, 'Hey, what about me?'" This adviser believes that Bush and his team "need to rejigger the purpose of his presidency for the next two years. I get the sense that they don't know what they want to do."

Bush is not a lifelong pol, and like a lot of people who found their calling relatively late, he thinks and acts instinctively. A longtime colleague says Bush's desire to find moral clarity on many issues is a reaction to his father's tendency to see the good in everybody and everything: "The old man thought he could make everybody happy. George doesn't care about making people happy. He likes to have clear choices. He wants to make clean decisions. He is very disciplined about that."

Another argues that Bush arranges everything and everyone in tidy boxes of good or bad because he came from a place--West Texas--where that's just the way people think. "It's about results. You judge people on their essential nature. I think he was doing it before 9/11, but I don't think people saw it until then." But a third adviser, someone who has known Bush well for 15 years, dismisses all that and says he believes Bush's tendency to reduce everything to clear-cut choices stems from his decision to quit drinking in 1986, when he woke up one day and realized that drinking was undisciplined and bad and that not drinking was disciplined and good. Few choices in life are so clear, so difficult, but the hardest thing he ever did also worked for him. This ally suggests that Bush's decision to render his own life into a fundamental choice feeds his tendency to apply a similarly rigid template to other difficult calls.

All that makes Bush people wonder: If he sees the world in such terms, why hasn't he brought the same focus to bear on economics this summer?

In private, Bush is said by dozens of friends to be table-pounding furious about the damage a handful of CEOs have done to Americans' confidence in the economy, not to mention the billions of dollars they stole from shareholders. But when Bush speaks in public, his comments about the economy have had their own anemic quality and have often been halting or confusing. When he tried to take the volume up, he compared the CEOs to the terrorists, which wasn't quite right either. At one point he implied the corporate problems were not as important as the simple matter of loving your neighbor. "We can't pass a law that says you'll love your neighbor like yourself," Bush said. "And we can't pass a law that says you will be honest." This has struck his oldest allies as odd. "The whole corporate-finance scandal plays to his sense of right and wrong," says one. "But how come I can't see it?"

The answer is that Bush doesn't really see the problems of 2002 in the same stark terms as he does the problems of 2001. Asked in July about the accounting procedures at Harken Energy, a Texas oil company on whose board he once served, Bush said, "In the corporate world, sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures." It may be that this is where you can see and hear the workings of Bush's mental circuitry: where he has experience and knowledge and a sense of the players and the pressures they live with, he can accept the grays, forgive the weaknesses and stop short of applying his moral code. But where his background is not as deep, and those skills are in shorter supply, he is quicker to invoke absolute judgments and stick with them come what may.

No man who lost the popular vote can ignore his re-election for very long; none of the Republicans who spoke to TIME believed that the economic measures Bush has called for thus far will be enough to meet voters' growing concern about home-front affairs. Through memos, e-mails and quiet counsel, the advisers are pushing behind the scenes for new proposals on, among other things, tax cuts, health care, immigration, corporate crime and retirement security. They also say Bush's strong showing in the polls means now is the time to move--not later when his numbers may weaken. Bush has an opportunity this month to convince Americans that he can be as strong willed at home as he is overseas, but as a California Republican put it, "If he isn't on offense at home by November, the people will let him know it." For almost everyone in this group, Bush's predicament is eerily like the one faced by his father, who ignored domestic for foreign affairs and bowed out of politics ahead of schedule. "I hate to say it, but it's all about the economy now," says an adviser who has worked for both father and son. "They need a stronger message, stronger team, stronger everything."

If Bush is distracted by the debate going on all around him, he doesn't show it. If the debate is swirling inside his mind, he doesn't show that either. He has struck old allies in recent weeks as calmer than they expected, given the challenges ahead, and several said he was more relaxed than they had seen him since the summer of 1998, when he was first being mentioned as a candidate for the g.o.p. nomination. But he is clearly aware of the intense conversation that is sweeping his party this summer. As one of his allies says, "He understands it instinctively." --With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/London

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/London