by Peter Baker
Now, Gaddis argued, was a time for Bush “to think like Wilson, Roosevelt and Reagan.” So he proposed that the president set the following goal: “that it will be the objective of the United States, working with the United Nations and all other states who will join in this cause, to ensure that by the year 2030—a quarter century from now—there will be no tyrants left, anywhere in the world.”
The Bush team invited Gaddis and others to join them at the White House to talk through possible themes for the second term on January 10, 2005. Joining Gerson were Karl Rove, who was taking on a new title as deputy chief of staff; Dan Bartlett, who was moving up to counselor; and Peter Wehner, the strategic initiatives director. In addition to Gaddis, the outsiders included the conservative scholars and writers Victor Davis Hanson, Charles Krauthammer, Fouad Ajami, and Eliot Cohen. The conversation meandered for a while until there was a pause and Gaddis jumped in.
“Well, I think there ought to be a big idea,” said Gaddis, echoing his memo. “I think the president should call for ending tyranny in our time.”
No one said anything at first, which Gaddis took as disapproval. Krauthammer thought the idea was “utterly utopian.” Cohen considered it “boffo” and wondered why not abolish evil as long as they were at it. But Gerson liked the idea and jotted it down on his notepad.
Bush had talked about freedom and democracy before but never set it out in such striking terms. As Gaddis saw it, to win wider appeal for the notion, the goal should be ending tyranny, not spreading democracy, because spreading democracy smacked of telling people how to live their lives. “Nobody likes tyrants, but not everybody necessarily likes democracy,” he said later.
Gerson did not make such a distinction. When he sat down with McConnell, he had a thorough outline with a strong intellectual construct that married Sharansky’s notion of promoting democracy with Gaddis’s goal of ending tyranny, though without a target date. McConnell thought the outline was really good, and the two writers then managed to script out the entire address in just two or three days. The words “terrorism” and “Iraq” never appeared anywhere in it, nor did Bush want to directly refer to Sep-tember 11. Instead, the president suggested a metaphor, a “prairie fire.” The writers thought that was a little too Texas, so it became “a day of fire.” Karen Hughes expressed worry that a fire could become a conflagration, but the rest of the team liked the phrase and it stayed in. When it was done, they were pleased. “John Kennedy could have delivered the same speech,” McConnell thought. “Word for word.”
SUCH SWEEPING RHETORIC might have generated objections from the professional diplomats at the State Department, whose job was to sweat over how foreign governments react to presidential declarations. “That’s why you don’t show them the speech,” Bartlett said.
The speech was kept secret even from top advisers until the end. Colin Powell saw it only a day or so before the inauguration and thought “it was over the top in terms of the democracy piece of it” but “it was already a done deal and nobody was going to listen to a thing I said anyway.” On this, as it happened, he and Rumsfeld actually agreed. Rumsfeld suggested Bush focus on the word “freedom,” not “democracy,” mindful that America had taken two centuries to get as far as it had in building a democratic system. “I worried that it would be counterproductive to talk about imposing democracy, our kind of democracy, on others,” he said.
Condoleezza Rice had her reservations as well. She kept thinking about the operational implications. How would you implement that? What would that look like?
“You know,” she told Bush gently, “that is kind of a big goal there, end tyranny as we know it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But what I really mean, of course, is we have to start toward getting everybody pulling toward this goal of the freedom agenda.”
Andy Card was also struck by the idealism of the address. “This is not a speech Dick Cheney would give,” he observed.
That much was true. Cheney thought pushing for democracy was fine, but for him it should be in service of the larger goal of securing the United States. Bush thought spreading freedom was the larger goal and believed that it would by definition make America more secure. Cheney was not so sure. If the theory was that repression led to extremism and therefore freedom would make America safer, then, he asked, what would explain all the Pakistani youth willing to blow themselves or others up in the United Kingdom, a country with as much freedom as America? Cheney was skeptical that they were properly diagnosing the drivers behind terrorism. Inside his household, Liz Cheney, still working at the State Department, was a passionate believer in the cause, and she was having an impact on her father. He teased her about being his “left-wing daughter,” but thanks in part to her influence he was more open to the president’s ideas than, for instance, his friend Rumsfeld.
Either way, Cheney played no real role in framing the second inaugural address, arguably the most important speech of the presidency and the foundational document for their remaining four years in office. As central as Cheney had been in setting the agenda for the first term, he was essentially uninvolved in laying out the road map for the second. He had never been much involved in presidential speeches. They were distributed to his office, and he understood they were important, but in the end they were words. He was more focused on the mechanics of governance.
Besides, he knew that Bush cared about them and did not need his help. “Unless there were some reason, I didn’t pay a lot of attention to them,” Cheney said. “There wasn’t a lot I could contribute in that area, so I didn’t spend a lot of time on it.” But in this case, the words would lay down an important marker for the remainder of the Bush presidency, and in absenting himself from the process, Cheney had essentially sidelined himself.
As the day approached, speech rehearsals in the family theater were unusually free from stress. Bush was feeling good about the coming ceremony. The speech was short, and there were no policy elements to haggle over. Last-minute issues were minor. Dan Bartlett, for instance, wanted to take out the word “subsistence” because he thought Bush might stumble over it.
Bush laughed and needled him. “Dan, subsistence, subsistence, subsistence,” he repeated, mantra-like.
He brushed off the concern. “You watch. I will nail it.”
ON JANUARY 20, 2005, the day they would take office for the second and final time, Bush and Cheney awoke to a capital covered by a thin layer of snow and swathed in security the likes of which it had never seen. It was the first wartime inauguration in more than three decades. A hundred square blocks of Washington were closed to traffic as black-clad sharpshooters watched from rooftops, fighter jets and helicopters patrolled overhead, bomb-sniffing dogs searched vehicles, and thirteen thousand soldiers and police officers manned the parade route and other key locations. Bush was surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents so tight that he joked he was surprised his Texas friends “were able to penetrate security.”
Bush, now fifty-eight years old, and Cheney, just ten days from his sixty-fourth birthday, were a little grayer and a little heavier, weathered by four years of tumult. Cheney was sworn in by his friend Speaker Dennis Hastert. Then, four minutes before the constitutionally prescribed noon hour, Bush again put his hand on the family Bible and took his oath from Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was leaning on a cane and sounding hoarse in his first public appearance since disclosing that he was battling thyroid cancer.
The twenty-one-minute speech that Michael Gerson and John McConnell had crafted dominated the event, perhaps even more than Bush anticipated. His clarion call for spreading democracy and human rights around the world, while echoing the most memorable words of his predecessors, seemed to go further than any president before in linking principles with policy. No longer was the ideal of democratic aspiration simply the moral cause of the United States. Now it was intrinsically tied to the nation’s security.
“We have seen our vulnerability and we have seen its deepest source,�
� Bush declared as Cheney watched. “For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny—prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder—violence will gather and multiply in destructive power and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.” He went on, “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
It was a bold and sweeping statement, just as Bush had wanted, but the caveats would later be lost alongside the simple declarative nature of his promise. Democratic change, he said, “is not primarily the task of arms,” nor did he harbor the illusion that it would happen swiftly; indeed, he said, “the great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations.” But he vowed to predicate relations with countries around the world on their treatment of their own people. “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation—the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.” To the people of the world he said, “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”
The ceremony was barely over when Gerson, walking back from the Capitol to sit in the White House parade stands, received a call from Stephen Hadley. Already, he told Gerson, there were countries calling to see what this would mean. It was a good question.
Bush didn’t care if the foreign policy priesthood was in a dither.
“Don’t back down one bit,” he told Hadley.
PART FOUR
21
“Who do they think they are? I was reelected too”
Just ten days into his new term, President Bush was already sweating out another election. He worried about turnout, weighed the prospects of different parties, and anticipated policies that might come from a new administration. Most important, he hoped no one would get blown up.
The voters on Bush’s mind that January 30 were six thousand miles away in Iraq, which was holding its first national elections since the invasion to install an interim government to transition the country to a constitutional democracy. Bush was anxious. Shortly after waking up, he picked up the phone and asked for the duty officer in the Situation Room to get an update. It was 5:51 a.m. in Washington but eight hours later in Baghdad. Turnout was high, he was told.
The election was a gamble, perhaps the biggest since the invasion itself. The disaffected Sunni minority that dominated Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s days had threatened to stay home, and Shiites and Kurds feared violent retaliation if they turned out. For weeks, Bush had been told that holding an election in a war zone without any meaningful reconciliation among the sects could be a disaster. Images of voters being killed at polling places, or the reality of a lopsided Shiite-dominated government, could easily fuel the insurgency. Gloomy CIA warnings had gotten on his nerves so much that at one final briefing Bush clapped his hands sharply, slammed his briefing book shut, and declared defiantly, “We’ll see who’s right.”
Now that the day had arrived, it looked as if it might have been him. Television carried pictures of eager Iraqi voters holding up fingers stained with purple ink indicating they had voted. Lines at polling places stretched out the doors. Eight million people showed up. For the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, wrote Anthony Shadid, the Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent for the Washington Post, “the haggard capital and other parts of Iraq took on the veneer of a festival, as crowds danced, chanted and played soccer in streets secured by thousands of Iraqi and American forces.” The day was hardly perfect; the military recorded 299 attacks killing about forty-five people, including an American marine. Just as troubling for the long term, Sunnis largely stayed home. But the spirit of the moment, defying months of relentless violence and centuries of ruthless autocracy, was infectious. For one day at least, something extraordinary seemed to be happening, the most audacious experiment in democracy in the history of the Arab world.
Bush was excited as he picked up the phone. Condoleezza Rice was on the line.
“You have to turn on the TV,” she said. “You just have to see this.”
“Is it good?” he asked. “Is it a good outcome?”
“It’s really amazing. It’s amazing to see what those Iraqis are doing.”
Bush hoped this would turn the naysayers around, both in Washington and in Baghdad. Pressure had been building as the war dragged on. Just days before the election, Senator Ted Kennedy, the president’s erstwhile ally on education, had called for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Kennedy had opposed the war from the start, but the last thing Bush or Cheney wanted was for more Democrats to pick up the refrain about pulling out.
In Iraq, the election was to be the first step in undercutting the insurgency by bringing to power a government with popular support. The interim government to be formed out of the elections would oversee Iraq while a commission wrote a new constitution by August 15. Voters would return to the polls on October 15 to ratify the constitution and then again on December 15 to pick a full-fledged government under the terms of the new national charter.
BUSH’S OPTIMISM ON Iraq fed into a strategic calculation about how to frame his second term and spend that political capital he talked about. In those heady winter days shortly after his inauguration, the president felt he was turning a corner in the war and could use his election victory to return to some of the priorities that had animated his run for the White House in the first place. He set four domestic goals for 2005: remaking Social Security, rewriting the tax code, liberalizing immigration laws, and limiting excessive litigation.
He and Karl Rove decided to hold off on immigration and tort reform for now and named a commission headed by the former senators John Breaux, a Democrat, and Connie Mack, a Republican, to craft a tax code overhaul. So they would start with Social Security. Ever since his failed run for Congress in 1978, Bush had talked about restructuring the retirement program so taxpayers could invest some of their payroll taxes in the markets, giving them as he saw it more control over their own futures. Now he and Rove thought it would be the defining domestic legacy of his second term.
The decision was presented without a real debate among his staff, some of whom, like Dan Bartlett, thought it was a mistake. Bush argued he had a mandate on Social Security, but skeptics on his team worried he was misinterpreting the election. He won, they thought, because voters felt safer with him during dangerous times than with John Kerry. Yet Bush had convinced himself that because he mentioned Social Security in, say, minute forty-nine of a fifty-two-minute speech—after spending the previous forty-eight minutes talking about killing terrorists—that meant the public favored changing the storied entitlement program. Others warned Bush and his advisers. Candida Wolff, now his top lobbyist, told Andy Card that the president had never laid out enough of a detailed plan to claim public support. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a key conservative ally, told a Bush aide they could never get enough Democrats to overcome a Senate filibuster. And Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican whip whose wife, Elaine Chao, served in Bush’s cabinet as labor secretary, likewise warned Al Hubbard, the president’s economics adviser, it might not get done.
Bush dismissed the warnings, confident he could assert his will over Washington. After all, despite similar pessimism, he pushed through tax cuts, education reform, and Medicare prescription drug coverage during his first term. Now he faced what he thought was an opportunity to refashion the liberal New D
eal and Great Society into his conservative Ownership Society. “For the first time in six decades,” Peter Wehner, his strategic initiatives director, wrote in a memo, “the Social Security battle is one we can win—and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country.” A theme was emerging to define the second term, promoting liberty at home and abroad.
Bush and his advisers decided they needed to “create a crisis mentality” about Social Security, as Scott McClellan later put it, to convince the public to go along. Bush would warn of looming fiscal catastrophe as Americans lived longer and stayed on Social Security longer. To be sure, there was an imbalance in the system. While nearly seventeen workers contributed taxes into the system for every retiree benefiting from it in 1950, there were now just three workers per retiree. By 2018, the system would be paying out more in benefits than it was taking in through payroll taxes every year, and by 2042 it would use up the IOUs it had accumulated over time as presidents and Congresses diverted its surpluses to offset deficit spending.
But Medicare actually faced worse financial problems than Social Security; just that year, its hospital insurance expenditures had overtaken revenues, and were projected to exhaust the program’s trust funds by 2019, more than two decades sooner than Social Security would. Moreover, the idea of investing some Social Security payroll taxes in stocks and bonds might plausibly produce more retirement benefits for recipients if all worked as planned, but it would do nothing to shore up the overall health of the program. Indeed, in the short term, it would cost at least $700 billion over ten years in transition costs to keep paying current beneficiaries without the money that would be diverted to personal investment accounts for future beneficiaries.
