Can He Fix It?

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When the President does decide to take a swing, he swings hard. By delivering his reform package with a presidential seal and a prime-time flourish, Bush hopes to propel it through Congress quickly. Last Tuesday morning he met with his aides in the Oval Office to discuss his speech to the nation. Card told him that "here in Washington, this is going to be a huge story." Bush relished the thought of rattling the cages of Washington's institutional bureaucracies; he told the aides that as long as he was announcing something, he wanted it to be dramatic. Said Bush: "As a friend from West Texas used to say, 'If you're gonna borrow $100 million, you might as well ask for $150 million.'"

5 RUN THE NUMBERS

While Bush likes to advertise his grounding in the rules of business, he is a political animal. His advisers have been studying polls that indicate that Americans aren't fully focused on the war against terror or inclined to back an independent commission to study intelligence failures. And last week the Administration nervously monitored the reaction to Bush's plan from his conservative base, which is allergic to any hint of expanded government powers.

The limits of Bush's management style will ultimately be determined by the demands of leadership. Some aspects of his style--such as his penchant for secrecy--reflect the weaknesses that made the country vulnerable on Sept. 11. And his aversion to risk has made him cool to proposals to revamp the FBI and CIA. Richard Shelby, top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says, "If a lot of information from the FBI, CIA, NSA and Immigration had been put together at a central place, they may have thwarted the attack of Sept. 11." Bush may have to rethink parts of his own management style to keep the system from breaking down again.

--With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, Andrew Goldstein, Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf/Washington