The Uniter vs. the Divider

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p> Iraq, by most accounts, continues to disintegrate. In the week before the U.S. election, an Iraqi national security aide to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi allowed that 5% of the recently trained Iraqi troops were probably terrorist infiltrators. "I love David Petraeus," a retired four-star general told me, referring to the U.S. officer in charge of training the Iraqi force. "But you can't train a soldier in six weeks. And you can't motivate a soldier who doesn't have a real government to fight for. It might change for the better if we can hold credible elections—a big if, with the emphasis on credible."

The fate of Iraq may be determined by the answer to a larger question: Will the President continue on the abrasive, unilateral path of his first term, or will he seek, as he implied to Kofi Annan, a more ameliorative approach now that he has been re-elected. A key may be the fate of Donald Rumsfeld. He wants to stay on at the Pentagon, but the President may decide that a fresh start requires the sacking of the man who presided over the Abu Ghraib abuses, the no-bid Halliburton contracts and the post-Saddam planning disaster. The "legacy" Republicans believe it is an absolute necessity for Bush to replace his current foreign-policy team, swapping the neoconservative idealists who provided the rationale for invading Iraq for more pragmatic, traditional conservatives. "But I don't think it's going to happen," a member of George H.W. Bush's Administration told me. "Not so long as Dick is Vice President."

In his first term the President came to be preoccupied with foreign policy—a tendency shared by most Presidents, even in peacetime. Domestic policy isn't much fun: there's a Congress and an army of interest groups to be tended. Bush was successful at first. He passed his tax cuts, his No Child Left Behind Act; he tilted the playing field toward the needs and desires of corporate America. He will have a tougher time getting his way in a second term because of the soaring budget and trade deficits—which, taken together, economists call the current-accounts deficit. "This is the trap door for the economy," says Robert Shapiro, a moderate Democratic economist. "We will soak up more than 80% of the world's savings to pay our deficits this year. That can't go on indefinitely."

But political realities may prove a greater obstruction to the President's domestic agenda than financial limits. Given the Democrats' enmity—and given their continued ability to block almost anything in the Senate—the President will face a battle on any initiative, and Armageddon when he nominates the next Supreme Court Justice. He will face conflicting pressures from his own party as well. The fierce supply-side and social conservatives who run the House are almost a different party from the fiscal conservatives and social moderates who populate the Senate. Fragmented Republicans plus pugnacious Democrats—plus no money—is a formula for legislative paralysis.

In the end, George W. Bush's greatest challenge is an existential one. The public square has become toxic. Rational political discourse may no longer be possible—a fact attributable, at least in part, to the Limbaughs and Drudges and Hannitys who proselytized for Bush during the endless election season. Those blatherers have their enlightened self-interest, which is to keep up the carnival assault on liberals. But contentiousness can no longer be in the President's interest if he wants to get anything done. His success now depends on his ability to maintain his principles, yes, but to do so in a way that seeks to heal the deep public wound we have suffered. His instinctive style defeated John Kerry's cerebral calculations. The question now is whether Bush's excellent political instincts lead him back to first things, the things he promised in 2000: to be a more compassionate conservative, to run a humble foreign policy, to be a uniter not a divider.