Bush: "I'll be dead when they get it right"

NY Daily News | December 11, 2006
THOMAS M. DEFRANK

WASHINGTON - For a wounded President locked in a lethal downward spiral ever since his reelection, it was the cruelest week of all.
Not since Bill Clinton forlornly insisted that "the President is still relevant" after being trounced in the 1994 mid-term elections has a President struggled so hard to salvage his political traction.

In 72 hours last week, a bipartisan commission harshly repudiated Bush's Iraq policy. Incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told senators the U.S. isn't winning the war. Then a British journalist snarkily asked at a White House press conference if Bush weren't "in denial" about Iraq.

For good measure, a new poll found only 27% of Americans back his Iraq policy, a new low. And a moderate GOP senator termed the policy "absurd" and possibly criminal.

"He'll be fine but he can't be doing very good," said a well-placed Bush source who talks with the President often. "It's been a terrible year, and it keeps getting worse."

Yet Bush is described by another recent visitor as still resolutely defiant, convinced history will ultimately vindicate him.

"I'll be dead when they get it right," he said during an Oval Office meeting last week.

Another Bush confidant, however, says the President reluctantly understands an Iraq course correction is mandatory:

"He is determined not to let Iraq go up in smoke and start a slaughter. But he knows something's got to give here. It just has to. We're going to start a pullout. The only question is when."

Despite the Democratic takeover of Capitol Hill and the steady cavalcade of grim news from Iraq, White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and political guru Karl Rove are busily overseeing Bush's State of the Union address, scheduled for Jan. 23.

Outside Republican sources report that except for isolated pockets of realism, the West Wing bunker hasn't yet absorbed Bush's diminished power.

"The White House is totally constipated," a former aide complained. "There's not enough adult leadership, and the 30-year-olds still think it's 2000 and they're riding high."

One White House assistant insisted to a friend last week that the election was merely a repudiation of Bush's execution, not his policies.

"They don't get it," a GOP mandarin snapped. "The Iraq report was their brass ring to pivot and salvage the last two years, and they didn't grab it."

Even if the chaos in Iraq subsides, prospects for other Bush accomplishments in the twilight of his term are difficult at best.

"Short of doing something on Iraq, there's not much good he can do anymore," a key Bush adviser conceded.

A senior Republican official who enjoys excellent relations with the White House was even more downbeat.

"We will get an immigration bill, and the President will make a valiant but doomed attempt at entitlement reform," he said. "But we are looking at two frustrating years of gridlock and several foreign policy failures."

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