Bush's Broken Political Antenna

By Joe Klein

We live in riotous times. The global and national supplies of rationality seem dangerously depleted. Two weeks ago, there was the media riot over Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident. Last week there was a bipartisan congressional riot over the Bush Administration's approval of a deal to transfer the management of six U.S. ports from a British company to one owned by the United Arab Emirates. And then there is the constant, combustible throb of Islamic unrest, most recently the intramural explosion of Iraq's Sunnis and Shi'ites, which has devastated the possibility that civil order will arrive in that benighted country anytime soon.

The response of President Bush to all this has been surreal. Public support for his policies is dwindling; his own party is abandoning him; he seems naked, defenseless in the public square. Yet he has spent most of the past few weeks traveling the country, selling the vaporous "policies" he proposed in his State of the Union address. As the Dubai debate went nuclear, Bush was off trying to convince people that he was serious about developing alternative energy sources. (He isn't, really. His proposed budget increases for such projects run in the millions; a single tax break for oil companies proposed in the Interior Department's budget--a reduction in the rent they pay to drill on public land--will cost an estimated $7 billion.) Then three days after the terrorist attack on Iraq's Golden Mosque, Bush gave another of his "freedom's on the march in the Middle East" speeches to a subdued American Legion audience in Washington. A paragraph condemning the mosque attack was added, but the President's address was both stale and fantastic. The news from the Middle East--Iran, Iraq, Palestine--has been nonstop awful, and Bush is beginning to sound as airy and out of touch as Woodrow Wilson must have in 1919, when that President tried to sell the futile dream of a League of Nations.

The President has made one small but significant rhetorical concession to political reality: a vague and unconvincing warning about "isolationism" and "protectionism," by which he means the growing public impatience with foreign military adventures, foreign economic competition and illegal foreign immigrants. Bush sees this, rightly, as a national turn toward pessimism. "We shouldn't fear the future," he said at a Republican fund raiser last week, "because we intend to shape the future."

Good luck, fella! Shaping the present seems hard enough for the Bush Administration. The abrupt Republican skedaddle away from Bush on the Dubai ports issue was a vivid demonstration of the populist fever rising in America--a make-the-world-go-away attitude that seems likely to spill over from Dubai to the war in Iraq. The best rationale for a continuing U.S. military presence--that the troops are preventing a civil war--began to evaporate with the internecine chaos last week. Indeed, the Dubai controversy may have opened the door for the ultimate apostasy: Bush could rapidly lose Republican support for the war, especially as the 2006 congressional elections grow closer.

And so the President finds himself in an exceedingly odd position for a post-Reagan Republican. He is acting like a Democrat, standing for abstract principles and high-minded long-term projects in the face of a public demanding easy answers and immediate results. His Middle East-democracy campaign is Wilsonian. His support for the Dubai ports deal is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter's support for relinquishing control of the Panama Canal--difficult to explain politically but in the nation's best long-term interests. Does anyone actually believe that the management suits in Dubai would run those ports any differently from the suits in Britain? Wouldn't the new Arab owners be even more conscious of security, since they wouldn't want their newly bought assets destroyed by terrorists? Several intelligence experts told me last week that Dubai has been our most reliable Arab ally since Sept. 11. Even Richard Clarke, the former Bill Clinton and Bush counterterrorism specialist, who rarely has a kind word for this Administration, said, "The President is right on this one. Dubai has done everything we've asked of them. They tightened their banking system to prevent money laundering after 9/11. They've handed over al-Qaeda suspects."

When Democrats succeed at being high-minded--as Bill Clinton did when he bet the future of his Administration on the abstract principle of fiscal responsibility--they do so only because they pay close attention to the realities of governance. Bush has been notoriously bad at that. His Administration has not only been arrogant and secretive toward the Democrats and the press; it has also demanded reflexive loyalty from Republicans on some very difficult issues without adequately explaining its case. "The media are wondering what ever happened to the Bushies' political antennae," a prominent Republican told me. "They don't have antennae. They just have a transmitter--and the party is beginning to tune them out."