Inside The Mind Of George W. Bush

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Former Texas Governor Ann Richards, whom Bush defeated, had warned Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle that Bush's friendliness was just a show. Bush, she claimed, would do anything to get his way. A former Air Force intelligence officer, Daschle is plenty tough as well. He was called the Velvet Hammer for moving softly behind the scenes to enforce discipline within his party. By fall the battle lines had been drawn--and then, in an instant, everything changed. Two days after 9/11, Daschle stood at a rare bipartisan lunch. "We're not Democrats here, and we're not Republicans," Daschle told the group. "We're Americans. So let's do the right thing." On Sept. 21, when Bush walked down the aisle of the House to deliver an address to Congress, he stopped before Daschle, and the two men had a warm embrace. Suddenly Bush had become the frictionless leader of a united country; virtually no one was arguing with him now. A month later, the USA Patriot Act passed by a vote of 98 to 1 in the Senate.

That mood barely lasted another week. In November at a small breakfast that included the four top congressional leaders and Bush and Cheney, the President asked Daschle to move quickly on some controversial judicial nominees. Nothing doing, Daschle said. After the breakfast meeting broke up, Lott pulled Bush and Cheney aside and said, "That's the real Tom Daschle you just saw." Daschle felt he had also seen the real George Bush when the President insisted on pushing through another tax cut, with or without the Democrats on board. Soon Cheney went on TV denouncing Daschle and the Democrats as obstructionists in perilous times. While Bush was characteristically careful not to say a disparaging word, the rest of his team fired away. Hate mail began pouring into Daschle's office, and his security had to be increased.

Daschle concluded that the White House, even after 9/11, had never stopped running every decision through a political filter. Bush's team was able to take the issue of creating the Department of Homeland Security, which the President initially opposed, and ultimately use it against Democrats in the 2002 midterm elections by suggesting the party cared more about protecting its labor supporters than protecting the country. "This is an ideological Administration that's different from Reagan and Bush One, which were very conservative but principled," Kennedy argues. "They wanted to win, but this Administration wants to destroy the opposition."

But Bush wasn't fighting just the Democrats. At times he was fighting the entire Congress. Representative democracy is a messy business, and a CEO White House doesn't like a legislature of second-guessers and time wasters. Bush and Cheney shared a view that they had a mission to restore power to the presidency. They felt justified in bypassing Congress altogether on a variety of moves--making energy policy in secret, creating military tribunals by executive order, withholding budget information about the true cost of Medicare reform, resisting congressional investigations into intelligence failures and providing only the vaguest estimates of the future costs of the war on terrorism.