If You Break it, You Pay For It, Mr. President

By Joe Klein

I spent two days traveling with President Bush last week as he tried to rally his troops for the coming election. It was a dispiriting experience; the days were before-and-after snapshots of his Administration. The first day was what Bush probably expected his presidency would be when he was elected in 2001: a jaunt through North Carolina, visiting a magnet school and a wonderful camp for children with chronic diseases established by retired Nascar star Richard Petty, followed by the inevitable fund-raising dinner. That was George W. Bush as I had first known him, passionate and compassionate, a convincing advocate for the need to reauthorize his No Child Left Behind Act, which uses tests to make schools accountable for their performance. But when Bush visited a classroom--the kids were doing a project about thunderstorms--all I could think about was that other classroom, the one in Florida, where he was reading My Pet Goat when the news came on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

The second day, a gothic journey into the partisan excesses of American politics, was all about what the Bush Administration has become. The President chose to campaign for two of the more skeevy candidates offered by the Republicans this year, the adulterous Pennsylvania Congressman Don Sherwood and the macaca-stained Virginia Senator George Allen. One might legitimately ask, Why on earth would he do that? The answer, I suspect, is twofold. Bush, ever antsy, was desperate to campaign somewhere, hoping to replicate his stunning late-campaign successes on the stump in 2002 and 2004. But there aren't too many Republicans in the really hot races--that is, races that will be decided by moderate voters--who want to be seen with the President this year. Sherwood and, to a lesser extent, Allen need all the help they can get. The flip side of Bush's compassion--the adolescent petulance, the full-body defiance--was also on display. His support for those embarrassing candidates was similar to his unyielding support for the historic fiasco of the war in Iraq. He was stubbornly staying the course.

In Sherwood's case, the course was particularly tortuous. There were empty tables at the fund-raising lunch at Keystone College in La Plume, Pa. The audience response was appropriately tepid when the Congressman was introduced with his wife, who had previously refused to appear with him and now seemed to be keeping a safe distance. Sherwood, you may recall, was the fellow whose affair with a young Peruvian immigrant exploded when she locked herself in the bathroom of his Capitol Hill townhouse, called 911 and claimed the Congressman was trying to choke her. The Congressman, who said he was only giving a massage, made a quiet, out-of-court settlement with the woman last year. Bush announced that Sherwood was the "right man" to represent the district, which drew a big nothing from the crowd, and then quickly sought refuge in his stump speech.

The speech--all about taxes and terrorists--was classic Bush, a series of artfully constructed tautologies, the sort of speech that had worked brilliantly in previous campaigns but has come to seem stale and off-key. "The Democrats believe they can spend your money better than you can. We don't," he said yet again. That has been one of Bush's most cherished bits of antitax demagoguery, except now it's clear that his Republicans have been anything but prudent about spending "your" money. Worse, there is the stench of anti-Washington, know-nothingism to it--as if "your" money weren't being spent on necessities like national defense, environmental protection or health care for the old and needy. That Bush would continue to indulge in this argument during wartime is shameful.

And about that war: "We will stay on the offense," he said at the Allen fund raiser in Virginia. "We will keep the enemy on the run." This, on a day when Major General William B. Caldwell IV issued the starkest assessment of the carnage to date: that our Operation Together Forward--the half-baked attempt by Iraqi and U.S. forces to secure Baghdad--had failed. Privately, high-ranking military officials were saying that the situation on the ground in Iraq was now dire. Indeed, Bush's Iraq project and his Republican Party seemed to be spinning out of control simultaneously, with Shi'ites fighting Sunnis in the north (and rival Shi'ite militias fighting one another in the south) while, back home, neoconservatives fought supply-siders who, in turn, fought religious conservatives as the Democratic congressional insurgency appeared to gain strength.

Everything seemed to be going wrong for Bush last week, even the metaphors. On the way to the Allen fund raiser, we stopped for a photo op at a picturesque farm stand outside Richmond. There was a pile of pumpkins sitting on a flatbed truck, and both Allen and Bush tried to hoist an aesthetically pleasing pumpkin by the stem. Both stems snapped. "If you break it, you pay for it, Mr. President," said Richard Keil of Bloomberg News, echoing Colin Powell's famous rule at the outset of the Iraq war. Bush didn't seem to get the joke. "I suppose you're right," he said, and tried to buy the broken pumpkin.