A two-pronged message from Bush
The president encourages fast action on bailout plan, and he lets the public know that he is still in charge.
WASHINGTON — At a moment when he would otherwise be focused almost entirely on influencing the nation's decision about who succeeds him, President Bush is suddenly focused instead on doing the job himself.
So there he was, addressing a prime-time television audience from the White House East Room for the first time in more than a year.
With his speech Wednesday night, he was sending two messages:
One, to Congress and the nation, about the need to act with unprecedented alacrity on the economic bailout proposal drawn up in his name -- though his hand has been barely seen in its development.
And a second, to the same audience, that the election 41 days away notwithstanding, the country has but one president at a time, and right now it is George W. Bush.
The White House is engaged in multiple skirmishes -- trying to fight the notion that the president has been AWOL in what it certainly hopes to be the final crisis of his tenure, while also seeking to win over a skeptical Congress and populace on a key point: that the extensive authority the legislation would grant the president's representatives and their successors is necessary.
When the White House began pressing to get action, "the critical thing was unleashing Paulson," Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, said of the high-profile role taken by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.
Once Paulson, at the urging of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, came to believe that major action -- rather than a step-by-step response -- was needed, "he took the lead, and has been running with it and telling Bush what he was doing," Mann said.
The president's original schedule for Wednesday had him flying to Florida to raise money for the Republican National Committee after spending 2½ days in New York attending the opening of the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.
The White House announced late Tuesday that he was instead passing up the fundraiser and returning to Washington. It was the second time in a week that presidential duties -- speed bumps on the road to Jan. 20 -- interfered with politics: He dispatched Vice President Dick Cheney to two fundraisers Thursday so that Bush himself could instead meet at the White House with senior advisors on the economy.
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- AT LATIMES.COM/OPINION Aug 29, 2008
