First Impressions of a President

Dec. 14, 2000, Washington: Al Gore had tried to stir voters by presenting two scenarios for the morning after the election. Either the sun shines on a Gore victory, or:

“You wake up early . . . with a headache and look out the window and there’s a cold, driving rain with sleet and hail mixed into it rapping on your window. The clouds have blackened out the dawn and you get out of bed slowly and painfully and walk toward the door . . . The newspaper is soaked through and through and stuck to the front stoop. And you peel it off and hold it up to the light in the gloomy darkness, and through that light you barely make out a headline that says, ‘Bush Wins.’ ”

Last night the election finally ended. Gore’s proverbial sleet and ice are the reality. The trees across the capital are coated. The power lines are iced. So, too, the phone lines. The power went out during the night. Clocks need to be reset, and so does the mind-set of Washington. Just what will a George W. Bush presidency be?

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Dec. 19: I spy Bush at the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s residence. He has come to see Gore. To let bygones be bygones? I’m not sure. Gore smiles. His greeting is gracious. But the meeting lasts 17 minutes. It can be described only as frosty. Gore apparently gives Bush a rerun of the concession speech. Gore is nothing if not disciplined. Look what it got him.

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Dec. 21, Austin, Texas: I encounter W several times. Reporters are at the governor’s mansion listening to statements on education from Bush, House and Senate Republicans and Democrats whom he invited to Texas. Bush is not scheduled to take questions, but a reporter shouts one, asking the president-elect why he is talking down the economy. Bush pivots back to the podium to say: “One of my responsibilities is to anticipate problems and be prepared to act should they occur. I, in all due respect, have said that there are some warning signs on the horizon. I think people are going to find out that when I’m sworn in as the president, I’ll be a realist.”

Bush is nothing if not programmed. But his impromptu reaction shows a steely confidence. If I may use a metaphor from his past life, perhaps he will step up to the plate.

During a meeting at Stephen F. Austin High School, one man invites Bush back to a town he visited in California where 90% of the population is Latino. Bush says: “Have them fire up the nachos.” So, he remembers the town--or just what he ate?

Later, he is in the state Senate chamber for the inauguration of Rick Perry, who is succeeding Bush as governor. I’m in an anteroom. Suddenly I realize Bush is there, too. He entered and just stood, awaiting instructions. Sense of presence? At the moment, none. He is all former and about-to-be. His expression seems to say: OK, now what do I do?

Reagan and Clinton exuded presence and charisma from Day One. That’s not Bush. Will he grow into the office--or change the demands of the job?

Dec. 22: What is it about the boy-Republicans who work for Bush? There’s a look: Short hair but no buzz or brush cuts or shaved heads--that would attract attention. Suits are pinstripes. They look as though they are wearing their father’s clothes. None seems to need a razor more than a couple of times a week--but they probably shave twice a day, just in case someone thinks they look scruffy and mistakes them for Democrats.

Bush is in the ballroom of the Driskill Hotel in Austin. A blue drape forms the backdrop. He announces the nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general. Hours later, in the same room, he announces that Christie Todd Whitman is his choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The blue drape has disappeared, revealing a landscape painted on the wall some time ago: an idyllic scene of a river cutting through cliffs and distant hills.

This team learned well from Mike Deaver and the Reagan photo oppers. They’ve done a lot of this sort of thing already. They’re better than Dad’s team, perhaps even Clinton’s.

Maybe it’s the announcements, or the stepped-up Secret Service presence. But occasionally I find myself thinking of Bush as the president.

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Jan. 13, 2001, Washington: For all the polite talk about how the Clinton administration will accept the transition to Bush, the tenor here is one of edginess. The Clinton folks are trying hard to look at their successes over the past eight years, but the denouement of the election battle makes it difficult. A couple of days earlier, Clinton had questioned the Florida results. Bush’s response, in so many words: Yeah, well who’s going to be sworn in on Jan. 20? But the actual quote is softer, presidential diplo-speak: “When they counted the ballots in the state of Florida, I won. And he can say what he wants to say, but January the 20th I’ll be honored to be sworn in as president.” He’s learning.

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Jan. 18: Bush has arrived in Washington. He attends three fund-raising dinners. The third is at the Washington Hilton: 2,500 people who paid $2,500 each. The money goes for the inaugural festivities. There’s Chuck Norris and Kelsey Grammer and Gerald McRaney. Gerald McRaney? We haven’t heard of him since Bush-the-elder was here. “I suspect there are a few Texans at this hotel,” Bush-the-son says. “Management better check the silverware.” He thanks them for supporting “what I like to call the people’s inauguration--inauguration for everybody.” Mink is everywhere.

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Jan. 19: Clinton’s last full day as president. White House Press Secretary Jake Siewert gives next week’s schedule for the former POTUS (White House term for President of the United States), who is moving to New York.

Sunday, Jan. 21, 1 p.m.: Set up new e-mail account: waspotus@aol.com.

Monday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.: Await the arrival of the Westchester County cable guy.

Tuesday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.: Await the arrival of the Westchester County cable guy.

Wednesday: Pitch DreamWorks on movie treatment: “Lithuanian terrorists capture Air Force One; president ends hostage situation by negotiating $3.2-billion debt-forgiveness package and micro-credit loan guarantees for Lithuania.”

Thursday, 1 p.m.: Depart for Mount Kisco, N.Y., Pep Boys to purchase timing belt and spark plugs for 1968 Mustang. Pool press coverage--hopefully, if anyone still cares then.

Saturday, 10:10 a.m.: Deliver the Democratic response to President Bush’s radio address.

Incoming White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer begs forgiveness for the chaos. “People are literally moving into their apartments,” he says. He presents the schedule for Bush’s first week. It’s a precise script. It lays out his priorities. It pays heed to the diverse power centers of the capital. George W. Bush, it screams, is POTUS.

Monday: Swear in White House staff, lunch with Republican House and Senate leaders, meet with “successful reading providers,” receive House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert at the White House.

Tuesday: Coffee at the White House with Republican and Democratic members of Congress who specialize in education issues, submit education legislative package to Congress, meet with members of Congress in the afternoon, visit at the White House with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

Wednesday: Meet with House and Senate leaders, visit the Department of Education, meet with Sen. John McCain.

Thursday: Attend events on education, reading and Head Start; meet with members of Congress from the education committees.

Friday: Lunch with freshmen members of Congress, meet on education with state governors.

Saturday: Attend annual dinner of the Alfalfa Club, one of the oldest, most exclusive Washington gatherings.

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Jan. 20, Inauguration Day: On the Metro train from Bethesda to downtown, a protester carrying a bullhorn wears a beatific smile. A 40-something woman is draped in a black fur. Her silver necklace looks very heavy. She’s with a man wearing a dark suit and an expensive-looking red tie. He’s carrying a Leica R4 camera. Another man, in tuxedo pants and carrying a garment bag, sees my White House press tag and wants to know where he should get off to reach the White House. He started working as a steward at the White House mess in 1997, but there was no way he’d be able to park there today, so he opted for public transportation. He smiles when I say he’ll be meeting a lot of new faces today.

The White House Web site is nearly empty. Eventually, the text of Bush’s inaugural address is posted. So are biographies of the new president, vice president and their wives. And so is this message: “Insert something meaningful here.” The line later disappears.

In the West Wing, pictures of the Clintons are stripped from the walls. Televisions in empty offices show the inauguration on the Capitol steps. In the Oval Office, the dominant colors of cherry red and royal blue are replaced with peach tones. Over the scant seven hours between the 42nd president’s departure and the 43rd president’s arrival in the office, workers change the desk, armchairs, drapes, rug and sofas. A vase of peach-yellow roses awaits.

The rest of the West Wing is in decorator hell. Mayhem reigns. Chairs fill corridors. Painters scurry. Computer installers warn them not to trip on cables. Phones go unanswered. But the needs of the Oval Office are being met on schedule.

At 5:39 p.m. President Bush tries out the desk and chair in the office that was once his father’s. The father is there, a familiar, slightly crooked grin creasing his face, every bit the old man enjoying the scene with his boy.

The new president and first lady attend nine inaugural balls. This is how long they dance with each other at each party:

1st: 29 seconds; 2nd: 46 seconds; 3rd: 56 seconds; 4th: 67 seconds; 5th: 50 seconds; 6th: 48 seconds; 7th: 38 seconds; 8th: 50 seconds; 9th: 49 seconds.

They return to the White House at 11:37 p.m., more than an hour ahead of schedule. Bush is to discipline what Clinton is to impulse. For Clinton, a presidential schedule was a humorous suggestion. For Bush, it is the bible.

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Jan. 22: George Walker Bush arrives at the Oval Office at 7:28 a.m. on the first business day of his administration. Within hours, he’s in a jam. The plan for Day One was to focus the nation’s attention on education, while sending a secondary message to his political right by reinstating a gag rule on overseas abortion clinics. The rule prohibits overseas organizations--family planning clinics, for example--that receive U.S. government assistance from giving their clients any information about abortions. Reagan had imposed the rule, George Herbert Walker Bush continued it and Clinton threw it out. At the daily press briefing, reporters skip past education to make abortion the lead story.

Fleischer later totals up the number of questions from reporters about the rule change: about 40, compared with the seven asked eight years earlier when Clinton reversed the rule. Liberal media? That’s the implication.

In scattered offices around the West Wing and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door, Bush aides reporting for work discover a single key missing from their computer keyboards. Goodbye, W. Asked later for a comment, Fleischer quips: “It would have been WOW, but the W was removed, so now it’s just O.”

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Jan. 26: The president attends the 50th birthday party of a friend, David Schwarz. Bush leaves the White House five minutes earlier than scheduled, spends 59 minutes at the party and returns home at 8:19 p.m.

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Jan. 29: For the first time in nearly a quarter century, a president is trying to control photo sessions. Since the days of Jimmy Carter, picture-taking sessions have verged on free-form news conferences. The president, posing with some visiting dignitary, is peppered with questions of the day. Banning such opportunities would provoke an outcry from the press. Bush is being more subtle. He’s discouraging questions, or failing to answer. At the end of a photo session, he tells a reporter who gamely tried to engage him: “I’ll catch you tomorrow. You missed your chance.”

With a touch of the wise guy and a healthy dollop of self-confidence, Bush is gaining the upper hand in these dances by holding mini news conferences on his schedule.

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Jan. 30: Image, image, image. Gordon Johndroe, a press office aide who shepherds journalists as they travel with the president, suggests that the rules are changing. Photographers have shot Bush walking from his limousine to the Oval Office after a speech, and Johndroe urges them: “I want the picture to be of the event, not of the president walking into the office.”

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Feb. 1: The president begins the day at the National Prayer Breakfast. “I am under no illusion that civility will triumph in this city all at once,” he says. “Old habits die hard--and sometimes they never die at all.” In Texas, Bush charmed Democrats in the Legislature. In Washington, Democrats have been trooping to the White House, willing objects of his civility offensive. Someone cracks that every day is “Hug-A-Democrat” day. Bush invites Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and just about every relative of the late President John F. Kennedy whom he can track down to a White House screening of “Thirteen Days,” which depicts the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

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Feb. 5: To illustrate how his tax plan would reduce taxes, Bush invites three Virginia families to the White House. They represent the three lowest of the four tax brackets his plan would create. He is asked who represents the highest, which would get the greatest return in dollars. “Well, I beg your pardon, I’m representing--I got a little pay raise coming to Washington. I’ll be in the top bracket,” he says. His salary is $400,000 a year.

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Feb. 6, McLean, Va.: The president visits Tree Top Toys, where photographers are invited in for pictures with toys in the background. When Bush meets later with the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, White House handlers exclude photographers.

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Feb. 7, Washington: Andy Card, Bush’s chief of staff, says the White House will shut down the Office of National AIDS Policy, established by Clinton. It is the first public gaffe by the new White House. The public outcry is enormous. Within hours, Card says that he made a mistake, the decision was wrong and the office will remain. Later, a reporter asks the president about the AIDS office. His response: “We’re going to have a-- we’re concerned about AIDS inside our White House, make no mistake about it.”

At about 11:30 a.m., a Secret Service officer shoots an armed man outside the White House. Where were the president and vice president? “The president was working out in the residence at the time,” Fleischer says. “The vice president was working in his West Wing office.”

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Feb. 8: Bush sends his tax proposal to Congress. His rationale for the cut has shifted to include its potential to revive the sputtering economy. Lawrence Lindsey, the president’s chief economic advisor, briefs reporters and is asked to explain how the tax cut would help the economy.

“I’d rather focus just on the mechanics of what the president sent up today,” he says.

Reporters persist. “When you offer a plan, make the case for it,” one says. “You’re assuming behavior based on the plan. That’s kind of important in assessing whether the plan works. So, what kind of assumptions are you making?”

Lindsey responds with considerable exasperation: “I might refer you to your economics textbook from freshman year for the answer.”

Talking about taxes again, Bush welcomes members of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to the Rose Garden, “such a beautiful, beautiful part of our national--really, our national park system, my guess is you would want to call it.” Bush shows up for the event one minute early, at 10:14 a.m. By my math, if he holds three public events a day, five days a week and arrives one minute early to each, he saves 15 minutes a week. Multiply that by 50 weeks a year (give him two weeks’ vacation), and he runs 12 1/2 hours ahead of schedule by next Jan. 20. Multiply that over four years and he’ll finish his term two days early, at 10 a.m. on Jan. 18, 2005.

Fleischer is having fun with a stunt by Democrats. They brought a Lexus to Capitol Hill and argued that under Bush’s tax plan, rich people would save enough to buy a luxury car, while everyone else could afford only a muffler. “What the Democrats are proposing is to collect almost $1 trillion in higher taxes than President Bush has proposed,” Fleischer says. “That way, they can spend the money on bigger government. The fair argument is that there are some tax-and-spend Democrats who, every time they see a car, start thinking about building a toll booth.”

It is Bush’s 20th day in office, but the public remains fixated with Clinton: his pardons, his silverware, even his furniture. For better or worse, the new White House is drawing relatively little public attention.

It’s becoming clear: Regardless of the light in which Clinton is cast, he can’t step lightly into the shadows. Bush seems almost reluctant to step out of them.

A Republican who has worked for Bush and is now a lobbyist for a major trade association evaluates the first three weeks and sees parallels to Bush’s governorship: he concentrates on a few things, wins enough to declare victory, doesn’t try to influence what he doesn’t care about and thus saves his political capital. He does what matters to his political base. He stays above the partisan fray.

Then the lobbyist totes up Bush’s early scorecard: winning on taxes, winning on education, winning on his faith-based initiative. He can walk away from vouchers--or find a way to do it without using that word.

They’ll find a way to break the teachers’ union without anyone finding out they did it, he says. They’ll go after the heart of the Democratic Party: trial lawyers, unions (particularly teachers and public employees), blacks, gays, professional women’s groups. Each has a stranglehold on something the Bush team wants desperately to reform: affirmative action, public schools, public bureaucracy. But, he says, they’ll nail them in a very nice way.

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Feb. 13: The president is talking with reporters in their aft cabin on Air Force One. He is asked whether the furor over the pardons that Clinton issued has been a distraction. “Not at all,” he says. “I will tell you one thing, just in terms of the former president. All the allegations that they took stuff off of Air Force One is simply not true, for example.”

Visiting with sailors in Norfolk, Va., Bush is given a framed painting that represents his family’s military history. It shows Bush’s father and the Avenger torpedo bomber in which he was shot down during World War II. It also portrays the new president’s Vietnam-era service, when he piloted an F-102 fighter jet in the Air Force Reserves, seeing duty largely in Texas. Army Gen. William F. Kernan, the supreme allied commander in Norfolk, introduces the commander in chief to the sailors: “He’s flown fighter jets, defending our country at the height of the Cold War.”

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Feb. 14: First Lady Laura Bush is at the ranch near Crawford, Texas. The president sends his wife a dozen roses for Valentine’s Day. She sends him a heart-shaped coconut cream pie.

Margaret LaMontagne, the president’s chief domestic policy advisor and a frank-speaking Texan, visits The Times’ Washington bureau for breakfast. After three weeks on the job, she reflects on the ways of the White House:

“It’s like you joined the Army, and when you get in, it’s not like you can pop down to Starbucks. You eat there. You come in the dark and you leave in the dark. People say do you have a bad commute? Well, the commute’s not bad, but when you get there, you go through about three checkpoints. And dogs sniff your car, and guards open your trunk every day, and you turn off your car, then you go to another checkpoint after the dogs. You go down to the White House mess and you want a Diet Coke. That’s free, but Diet Sprite, that’s a charge. You have to pay for your own business cards. The phones and the faxes are first generation. And your new favorite accessory that goes with just about everything is the badge that you just cannot be seen without. We’re supposed to be changing the tone in Washington and all that, and I hope at some point that means we won’t be working 17 hours a day, because it’s insanity. How can you get any rest, be a human being, be a mother?

“I’m going to tell a story, and I hope I won’t burst into tears. I’m a single mother of a 13-year-old and an 8-year-old. My children are back in Austin and I’m trying to commute as best I can, and it’s just horrible. These jobs are just a huge sacrifice for everybody who does them, no matter what your situation is. He wants mothers in his administration, and I think it’s healthy. When he talks about people with credit card debt and single moms and the hardest job in America and parents who want to know where their kids are with respect to achievement every year, he’s talking about me.”

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Feb. 15: Reporters are invited to the Oval Office to hear Bush call Nancy Reagan. He’ll report that he has signed a congressional resolution commemorating Ronald Reagan’s 90th birthday, which was Feb. 6. Karl Rove, senior advisor to the president, makes faces at reporters through a window.

The president visits the State Department, where Ruth Davis, director of the Foreign Service Institute, begins the introductions. “You remind me of my mother,” Bush tells her.

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Feb. 20, Columbus, Ohio: The message of the day is on reading. In a courtyard of Sullivant Elementary School, the president talks to several hundred students. “How many of you read more than you watch TV?” About one-third of the children raise their hands. “Very good. Congratulations,” the president says. At Moline Elementary School in St. Louis, the same question, followed by presidential advice: “When you get to be a really good reader, you can learn anything you want.”

Aboard Air Force One, en route from Columbus, Ohio, to St. Louis. The president reads a for-the-camera statement on the arrest of an FBI agent charged with spying for Russia. Bush is seated at a desk in his office aboard the jet. When he is finished, reporters try to ask questions, but are encouraged by a press aide to scram because the plane is descending to land. “We timed it so you wouldn’t be able to ask questions,” the president calls after the departing throng.

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Feb. 21, Townsend, Tenn.: Bush speaks to parents, educators and Tennessee political leaders at an elementary school. “You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test,” he says. Like father, like son. Poppy Bush mangled sentences too. It was cute. Somehow it let us know what was on his mind. Certainly Clinton’s ease of language, so soothing to supporters, was no more pleasing than fingernails down a blackboard to conservative opponents, who thought he tried to spin his way out of everything. In Bush, conservatives have someone whose plain-spoken demeanor, down to his everyday talk and Midland twang, whispers to them: “I’m one of you.”

The president announces that he will seek an 11.5% increase in spending for the Department of Education.

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Feb. 23: Bush has met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Camp David and is asked what common ground they found. “Well, we both use Colgate toothpaste,” he replies.

Mick Jagger’s lyric comes to mind: He can’t be a man ‘cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.

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Feb. 28: The president leaves the White House at 7:35 a.m. for stops in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas. During the trip, a major earthquake hits Seattle.

Q: Do you have a message for the people of Washington?

Bush: “Well, God bless, obviously. Anything we can do to help, we will do so.”

He speaks in Omaha: “Thirdly, ours is a philosophy that says we know government’s role is not to create wealth, but to create an environment in which entrepreneurs and small businesses can realize their dreams in America. Fifthly, we understand the marriage penalty is unfair and we better do something about it. And those of us who have spent some time in the agricultural sector and in the heartland understand how unfair the death penalty is--the death tax is, and we need to get rid of it. I don’t want to get rid of the death penalty--just the death tax.”

Skipped “fourthly.”

In the evening, he works out on a treadmill in his hotel room in Little Rock, Ark. He summons dinner: Mexican food, ordered off an in-room menu from a local restaurant.

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March 1: The Washington Post reports that 39.8 million viewers tuned in to the president’s first speech to Congress three days earlier. When Bill Clinton delivered his first speech to Congress, 67 million watched.

In Atlanta, Bush speaks about tax cuts. In the crowd is Lindsey Mobley, 36. After the speech, Mobley says: “Sixteen-hundred dollars can help a lot of people in rural Georgia. He’s giving the money to them, instead of letting the big bureaucrats decide what to do with it.” Mobley gets Bush to sign his admission ticket. Mobley hands it to his 16-year-old son, Lindsey Jr., with the instruction: “Keep this, son.”

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March 4, Langley Air Force Base, Va.: The presidential limousine is on the apron at Langley, waiting to take Bush to the Newport News shipyard for the christening of aircraft carrier CVN-76: The USS Ronald Reagan. The limo has a new license plate. Clinton had the Secret Service put on a D.C. plate bearing the slogan “Taxation Without Representation.” It signaled support of the district’s pitch for voting representation in Congress. The Bushmobile carries the old D.C. license plate tourism slogan: “Celebrate & Discover.”

As president, Bush’s father was known in Secret Service code as Timberwolf, and his son as Tumbler. The son has a new moniker now, one that is more politically pleasing. When the limousine reaches the shipyard, word goes out over Secret Service radios: “Trailblazer arrive.”

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March 5: It has been disclosed that a tunnel for spying was built beneath the new Russian embassy in Washington.

Q: Are you going to apologize to the Russians for digging under their embassy?

Bush: “You need to talk to the appropriate folks involved with that.”

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March 10, Crawford, Texas: It has been said that Reagan joked that no one ever died from hard work, but why take the chance. Bush doesn’t brag about taking it easy, but he likes his time off. He has been to Camp David twice--albeit taking briefing books with him. This is his second presidential trip to the 1,600-acre ranch. This Monday-to-Friday president is leaving Washington at every chance. Here he chops away at the water-gulping cedar that threaten other vegetation. As he can in the glorious privacy of Camp David, he jogs--three miles this day. It’s better than the treadmill at the White House.

On vacation, George H.W. Bush would race from golf course to cigarette boat to tennis court. And then he’d have lunch. Clinton would talk late into the evening at a Martha’s Vineyard party. And then he’d invite aides in for a game of hearts. George W. Bush enjoys his privacy and, we are told, an early bedtime.

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March 12, Panama City, Fla.: The president visits Florida for the first time since taking office. It is the 18th state he has visited as president. He is in the Panhandle, geographically and politically far from the state’s southern coast on the Atlantic, and the brouhaha over the election. He speaks about taxes and the military budget to several thousand people at the Marina Civic Center. He says not a word about the Florida vote count.