Off the Record, Bush Wonders if She's Like Ike

Saturday, September 22, 2007

HANDING THE KEYS TO CLINTON?

Off the Record, Bush Wonders if She's Like Ike

Karl Rove may not think much of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's chances of winning the White House, but it sounds as though President Bush is less sanguine. At an off-the-record lunch a week ago, Bush expressed admiration for her tenacity in the campaign. And he left some in the room with the impression that he thinks she will win the election and has been thinking about how to turn over the country to her.

The topic came up when Bush invited a group of morning and evening news anchors and Sunday show hosts to join him in the executive mansion's family dining room a few hours before he delivered his nationally televised address on Iraq last week. Bush made no explicit election predictions, according to some in the room, but clearly thought Clinton would win the Democratic nomination and talked in a way that seemed to suggest he expects her to succeed him -- and will continue his Iraq policy if she does.

As Bush was describing his thinking about Iraq and the future, he indicated that he wants to use his final 16 months to stabilize Iraq enough and redefine the U.S. mission there so that the next president would feel politically able to keep a smaller but long-term presence in the country. The broadcasters were not allowed to directly quote the president, but they were allowed to allude to his thinking. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News later cited the analogy of Dwight D. Eisenhower essentially adopting President Harry S. Truman's foreign policy despite the Republican general's 1952 campaign statements.

"He had kind of a striking analogy," Stephanopoulos said of Bush on the air a few hours after the lunch. "He believes that whoever replaces him, like General Eisenhower when he replaced Harry Truman, may criticize the president's policy during the campaign but will likely continue much of it in office."

It is, in fact, a striking analogy, and of course Bush has been positioning himself as a latter-day Truman for a while, particularly in the sense that Truman was reviled by the public toward the end of his presidency but later earned historians' respect for his leadership at the beginning of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, Bush critics consider that wishful thinking.

Either way, even though he has repeatedly forsworn playing "prognosticator in chief," Bush offered the broadcasters some assessment of the race to succeed him. According to people in the room, he said Clinton is formidable and will raise a lot of money. He seemed particularly impressed that she has held up under enormous pressure on the campaign trail, noting that running for national office is extremely hard. Just as he had the advantage of having seen it up close during his father's four national campaigns, he noted that Clinton benefits from having been on the front lines of her husband's two presidential elections. Bush added that Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) is impressive in his own way, but the president seemed to doubt that the freshman senator could win, given his inexperience in high office and national campaigning.

On the Republican side, according to people in the room, Bush expressed surprise that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has managed to remain the front-runner despite his liberal positions on social and cultural issues normally critical to the party base. That's a sign of how important the terrorism issue is to Republican voters, Bush said. But he cautioned against ruling out John McCain, saying that the senator from Arizona had managed to get up off the mat after a campaign implosion earlier this year.

-- Peter Baker

THE UNION ARMY

AFL-CIO Mobilizes Effort To Elect Democrats

Looking past the battle for the Democratic nomination, the AFL-CIO announced plans yesterday for the biggest campaign mobilization of union workers in its history, committing $53 million to an effort aimed at electing a Democratic president and expanding Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

"Our members are building an army to make more calls, knock on more doors and turn out more voters than ever," Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. "We're going for the trifecta: the House, the Senate and the White House."

In addition to its focus on the White House, the union federation will target 23 priority states, including traditional presidential battlegrounds of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

By concentrating on districts with heavy concentrations of union workers and families, the AFL-CIO effort aims to enlarge the Democrats' Senate majority by three to six seats, while hoping to increase the party's House majority by five seats.

-- Dan Balz

FOCUS ON TEACHERS

Edwards's Education Plan Takes Emphasis off Testing

Unveiling his national education policy in Des Moines, former senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) said the No Child Left Behind law "has lost all credibility with the teachers and principals we need to make it work."

But Edwards, like most of the Democratic candidates, proposed only modest changes to it, such as improving the yearly tests that states give to students and shifting the way schools are measured to reduce the number that are labeled "failing" by the federal government.

Edwards would keep sanctions on schools where most students are failing but would limit sanctions for schools where only small groups of students are not doing well.

The biggest emphasis from Edwards was not on testing but on improving conditions for teachers. "Teachers, not tests, are the single most important factor in successful schools," Edwards said. But unlike Sen. Barack Obama, who has risked the ire of teachers by calling for increasing teacher pay based on how their students do on tests and in other measures, Edwards proposed giving every teacher in low-poverty schools that do well on tests $5,000 in bonus pay.

-- Perry Bacon Jr.