The President: Marching Alone

• Share

History has called us, George W. Bush likes to say, but what if history has already moved on? Perhaps no one in the nation was helped more by Sept. 11 than the 43rd President. His strange little presidency--which began with the slimmest electoral margin since 1876 and suspicions that he wasn't ready for the job--was lifted in the instant that so much else was crushed. In the days that followed, Bush found his voice and his purpose, because for once the simple moral clarity to which he reduces most questions was exactly what Americans needed to hear. But what if the rare, incandescent clarity of last fall, so perfectly tailored to his black-and-white way of thinking and speaking, has now come and gone? Bush has always preferred his poison straight up or down, good vs. bad, dead or alive, you're either with us or you're with the terrorists. That's a great way to frame things when you're launching a war. But when the moment ends and the world goes back to being gray, where does that leave him?

That is the question on the mind of many of the President's advisers and allies, people who have known him for 15 to 20 years, who watched with both surprise and respect as the lackadaisical Bush son found purpose, won the highest office in Texas and then in the land--all in the space of eight years. Most of the more than two dozen senior Republican Party operatives in pivotal states who spoke with Time--people who advise and support the President and talk regularly with him and his inner circle--say Bush underestimates the economic problems facing the country and that he is too narrowly focused on the terror war. Their worry seems well founded: in last week's TIME/CNN poll, only 30% of those surveyed said the war on terrorism would be "more important" than other issues in selecting a President in 2004. Sixty-one percent said other factors would rate higher. There is an innate reluctance in this group of advisers to criticize the President publicly, so the concerns are most often posed as questions. But these questions are sounding more and more alike. As an adviser gently put it, "Can Bush still define his presidency as leading the global war on terror? If the answer is no, does it leave him on ground that he is distinctly unable to command? That's a legitimate question."

It is tempting to believe that Bush rose to the occasion last September because flag and country demanded it. But with the passage of a year, and a chance to watch the President in action at home and overseas, it's harder to get away from the idea that Bush didn't rise to meet history but that history fell to meet him. In one horrifying two-hour period, the world shuddered and conformed to his way of thinking: there was good and there was evil, and it wasn't hard to tell the difference. If Bush didn't know much about foreign policy, that hardly mattered, and it may have helped him. Privately, Bush even talked of being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment, and perhaps he was. But it was also, as one of his advisers told TIME, "one of history's rare unnuanced days."