WASHINGTON — Four years ago, following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, President Bush won the admiration of most Americans -- including many who disagreed with his policies -- for resolute leadership in the face of a foreign threat.
That profile of Bush as a strong leader became the central selling point of the president's reelection campaign last year.
"I love taking on big issues, because I think that's my job," he said in 2004. "I think that's why the people of the country put me in office. They expect a president to lead."
By this week, after the federal government's confused response to Hurricane Katrina, most Americans were no longer sure they had made the right decision. One poll found that 43% rated Bush as a strong leader, down from 73% after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Bush's address to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday evening, his first full-scale speech on the disaster since Katrina swept the Gulf Coast 18 days ago, was Step 1 of the president's hurricane recovery plan.
The speech, delivered before the improbably pristine and well-lighted facade of St. Louis Cathedral, included all the necessary elements of a post-disaster address: compassion for the victims, praise for their rescuers, a call on the nation to pull together, a promise that "we will do what it takes" to bounce back -- and a brief acknowledgment that federal preparations had fallen short.
More important over the long run, though, was how Bush said he planned to restore the Gulf Coast to human habitation and even economic health: massive federal spending, including direct government aid to the tens of thousands of evacuees and federally financed reconstruction of roads and schools, and an ambitious list of new programs bearing the stamp of what he has called the "ownership society" -- federal money helping individual job-seekers and entrepreneurs.
"It is entrepreneurship that creates jobs and opportunity," Bush said, "and we will take the side of entrepreneurs as they lead the economic revival of the gulf region."
The president and his aides refused to put even a rough price tag on their proposals, apparently in hopes of minimizing opposition from increasingly alarmed budget-cutters in their party. Budget experts guessed that the cost, already mounting by an estimated $2 billion a day, could eventually approach $200 billion -- a price in the same ballpark as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
