A Defining Moments For His Presidency

By Ken Fireman | WASHINGTON BUREAU

September 16, 2001

In one horrific morning, the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon transformed not only the nation but the presidency of George W. Bush.

Instantly, the debates over the budget and the economy that had been preoccupying Washington were swept away. Bush, who had ascended to the White House amid bitter controversy and spent the first seven months of his administration enmeshed in partisan duels, had become a wartime president.

The responsibilities of that new role will test Bush to the utmost in many areas: his sometimes indifferent communications skills, his ability to assemble and maintain a global coalition in support of American goals, and his judgment in crafting a military strategy that deals effectively with the threat of terrorism but does not further inflame the Muslim world and thus feed the very fires of Islamic radicalism that U.S. policy seeks to extinguish.

Yet along with those stern challenges comes an opportunity: to shed once and for all the onus of uncertain legitimacy and competence that has clung stubbornly to Bush ever since the hotly disputed conclusion of the presidential election.

"We now have to talk about the first and second stages of the Bush presidency," said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "The second stage began on Tuesday. It provides President Bush with a huge responsibility, but also an opportunity to start fresh, to engage the public in a way he hasn't heretofore, to alter some of the impressions that have taken root in his first eight months in office."

The first of Bush's challenges in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was to use the formidable communications resources of the modern presidency to reassure a reeling public and give voice to its sorrow and anger.

After what some considered an uncertain beginning - a day in which Bush zigzagged around the country and delayed returning to Washington for many hours - he has seemed to grow more sure-footed, reaching a crescendo Friday with his emotional visit to New York City.

During that visit, Bush offered up one of those unscripted moments that can sometimes define the moment when a leader makes a fresh connection with both his immediate constituency and the larger one of historical understanding. Climbing atop the wreckage of a fire truck amid the monumental rubble of the ruined trade towers, Bush grabbed a bullhorn and began speaking to a group of emergency workers.

"I can't hear you," one worker shouted.

"I can hear you," Bush answered. "The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

The American public, unsurprisingly, has responded to the crisis by rallying around Bush. His approval rating, bumping along in the mid-50 percent range in pre-attack polls, soared into the high 80s in several surveys taken late last week. The percentages who approved of Bush's handling of the terror attacks were even higher.

Presidential popularity almost invariably increases in the first stages of a national crisis. Sometimes, the gains are permanent; Bill Clinton's presidency was in difficult straits just before the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, but he won widespread plaudits for his response to the tragedy, reaped a bonanza of increased public support and never surrendered it.

The history of two of Bush's recent predecessors, however, offers a cautionary tale.

Jimmy Carter enjoyed a surge of new public support when American citizens were taken hostage in Iran in the fall of 1979. But as the crisis dragged on without resolution and a rescue mission ended in disastrous failure, Carter's support slowly ebbed, and he was turned out of office a year later.

And there is Bush's father, whose approval rating reached an unheard-of 90 percent in the immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War in early 1991. By the following year, the war seemed a distant memory and Bush, too, was denied re-election.

Over time, President George W. Bush's greatest challenge in maintaining public support may be to manage the expectations he has created by his choice of rhetoric in recent days. He has talked in explicitly martial terms, speaking of waging a global war with extremely ambitious goals: ridding the world not only of the perpetrators of last week's terror attacks but of all who organize or support terrorism in any form. In a homily Bush delivered at an extraordinary memorial service at Washington National Cathedral, he declared that America's responsibility to history was to "rid the world of evil."

Unquestionably, such language matches the tenor of public sentiment and serves in the short run to buttress Bush's leadership, but achieving those goals may prove problematic, given the shadowy nature of the enemy, the geographic isolation of its sanctuaries and the unpredictable political crosscurrents in that part of the world.

"Bush is using the rhetoric of war, talking about a war against terrorism," said Bruce Buchanan, a scholar at the University of Texas who specializes in the presidency and has also observed Bush for many years during his tenure as governor of that state. "He's implying that there will be a war . . . against other nations. I'm not sure we're ready for that yet. There has to be a thinking through of the consequences of the choices we make."

At a minimum, Buchanan said, Bush will "have to manage those expectations that have been created. He will need to stay in control of the setting of time frames."

Buchanan credits Bush for including counsels of patience in his public statements. He believes that Bush has some time to sort through options before the public begins to demand results, and that the citizenry may well respond favorably if Bush eventually reins in the goals of the campaign out of strategic necessity. "People may realize later on that some of the rhetoric must be thought through," he said.