posted November 04, 2004 10:33 PM            

By Susan Page and Bill Nichols, USA TODAY

(Nov. 4) -- His margin of victory in the Electoral College was close enough that for a while it seemed possible Ohio's provisional ballots could change the outcome. He won with a strategy that did little to heal the nation's bitter political divide.

But President Bush will begin his second term with a clearer and more commanding mandate than he held for the first. He not only won a majority of the popular vote - the first president since his father who didn't have to settle for a plurality - but also will be submitting legislative proposals to a friendlier, more Republican Congress.

The cloud over his presidency - the complaint that he won in 2000 only with the help of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision and a disputed count in a state where, by the way, his brother was governor - was beginning to disperse Wednesday in a warm autumn sun.

The concession speech by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts wasn't delivered on election night. But it did come on Wednesday, when Kerry stood at Boston's Faneuil Hall. He congratulated the president and told his tearful, cheering supporters, "In the days ahead, we must find common cause."

Bush offered similarly conciliatory words when he spoke an hour or so later to his supporters in Washington. "A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation," he told them.

The president now will be in a better position to pursue his agenda, including items on his to-do list that he rarely mentioned in the campaign. He is expected in short order to seek $70 billion in additional funding for the war in Iraq, to push to make permanent the tax cuts enacted in his first term, even to undertake a fundamental overhaul of Social Security by adding individual investment accounts to the system.

If Chief Justice William Rehnquist's battle with thyroid cancer prompts him to retire, Bush will be better able to win confirmation for a Supreme Court justice of his choosing. That appointment, too, would be a major part of his presidential legacy.

"He is in a much stronger position, as is the Republican Party - expanded Senate margin, expanded House margin and more Republicans showed up to the polls yesterday than ever before," Matthew Dowd, chief strategist of the president's campaign, says.

If Bush has greater electoral credibility than he did when he won his first term, however, he also faces a knottier set of issues. Then, the nation was at peace and the budget was in surplus. Now, the deficit is the biggest in history. There are 140,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq.

And there are limits to his new authority. The Republican majority in the Senate expanded to 55 - enough that party mavericks like Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island could safely stray, but not enough to be filibuster-proof. Bush is still the most polarizing president since Richard Nixon. One in four voters said in surveys taken as they left polling places Tuesday that they felt not just dissatisfied but "angry" about his administration.

Still, Bush has never seemed to worry much what critics think about him. Democrats, disappointed and in disarray, will have to regroup if they are to effectively challenge him. Grover Norquist, leader of Americans for Tax Reform and a key White House ally, noted the defeat of Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota as particularly sweet.

Daschle's political demise will prompt a half-dozen other Democratic senators from Republican-leaning states to think twice before defying the president, Norquist says: "When Achilles died, the Greeks were in trouble."

One of the few certainties of political life is that second-term presidents, constitutionally barred from running again, see their political capital quickly dwindle. Of the seven presidents elected to second terms in the 20th century, none registered historic successes. One had to resign under fire. Another was impeached.

The congressional elections that come midway through a second term are usually disastrous for the party in power. And jockeying for the presidential nomination the next time around will have begun in earnest before the president and Laura Bush finish the last dance at the inaugural balls in January.

"Any look back on second terms of presidents, historically, has to produce a sort of cautionary tale," says Tom Mann, a political and governmental analyst at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.

Bush met with his Cabinet today, and in a call Wednesday morning to congratulate Jim DeMint, the newly elected Republican senator from South Carolina, Bush talked about his agenda.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan related his words: "He talked about - and this is a quote from the president - 'Now is the time to get it done.' "

'Buckle Our Seat Belts'

Bush will interpret the election returns as a clear mandate, especially for the muscular approach to foreign policy that he already has used in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during his first term, predicts Ted Galen Carpenter, a foreign policy expert at the Cato Institute. "That means we may be in for a very exciting time," Carpenter says. "And we should all probably buckle our seat belts."

Ahead in Iraq: The battle for Fallujah. U.S. troops have been preparing for a major assault on entrenched insurgent forces there. Taming the insurgency is seen as critical before elections take place in January.

Bush repeatedly pledged in the final weeks of the campaign that the elections would take place, despite security concerns that so far have made it difficult to begin the political process. By the end of January, Iraq is supposed to elect a 275-member parliament that would draft a permanent constitution for post-war Iraq. Administration officials see a credible election as crucial to building momentum for Bush's second-term foreign policy and for the future of a stable Iraq.


"Get through that election and the Iraqi people have spoken and nobody can say it is an illegitimate government or it is something that's just there at the whim of the United States and the (U.N.) Security Council," Secretary of State Colin Powell said last month in an interview with USA TODAY. "It is there because a transnational assembly put the government in place. And I think it has far better legitimacy."

The president's position on Iraq has been strengthened by the election, but he doesn't have a free hand there. A 53% majority of voters said they didn't think the war in Iraq had made the United States safer over the long term - Bush's fundamental justification for the war. In the short term, a similar majority, 52%, said things were going badly in Iraq.

Even some Republicans - especially those who do plan to run again - are anxious that U.S. forces not become enmeshed in a Vietnam-style quagmire there. They would like to see U.S. deployments at least reduced before the next election nears.

Ahead: Iran's Nuclear Challenge

The administration also faces a potential confrontation later this month with Iran. The issue is the Tehran regime's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. U.S. officials have called on Iran to agree to give up all uranium enrichment activities, the process to produce bomb-ready uranium, before the meeting on Nov. 25 of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog group. Otherwise, Washington will ask the U.N. Security Council to take up the issue, paving the way for sanctions.

"By January, we should know if this is going to be a problem that we can solve diplomatically or if we're at a potentially dangerous impasse," Carpenter says.

Iran, like Iraq, is an issue on which key allies in Europe would prefer a more nuanced, diplomatic approach - coaxing the Iranian regime into shutting down its suspected nuclear weapons program. Bush's approach may be the first clue whether he is willing to take a more accommodating tone in his foreign policy.

"I hope that a re-elected President Bush would use the chance offered by his re-election for a new beginning in European-American and German-American relations," said Karsten Voigt, the German Foreign Ministry's top official for relations with Washington.

He told German television Wednesday that Bush would do well to "approach the Europeans ... and say, 'let us sit down and talk about where we have common interests.' "

Then there are issues closer to home, with deadlines of their own. The debt ceiling has to be raised when Congress returns to Washington for its own lame-duck session. Last month, the Treasury Department delayed contributing to a federal employees pension system to avoid running out of cash until the election was past. That issue didn't get raised by either candidate.



"It's been a little bit like having elephants in the bedroom," says Pete Peterson, a Commerce secretary in the Nixon administration. "We pretend we don't see them and hope no one else points them out to us." That approach won't be possible much longer, he says.

And the federal budget for the next fiscal year is required by law by the first Monday in February. Bush has promised to cut the $413 billion deficit in half, as a percentage of the gross domestic product, during the next five years. He promises to do that through economic growth and spending control.

But he also has promised to make permanent the tax cuts totaling $1.7 trillion over 10 years that he pushed through in his first term. Democrats, and a few Republican deficit hawks, say the loss in revenue will collide with his promise to reduce the deficit.

Proposals to limit medical liability will be a priority for the administration, Republicans say. The measure died in the Senate this year. They could be an early demonstration of the GOP's new muscle there. On health care, Bush also has said he will move to expand health-care coverage through tax incentives and give individuals more insurance choices.

Then there's Social Security. Bush has backed adding individual investment accounts to Social Security since his first presidential campaign. But he discussed the issue mostly in passing during this bid, and he hasn't outlined the details. Other Republicans, particularly those running for Congress, warned that the issue was too controversial and the proposal too complicated to broach in a campaign. It also would cost a lot to finance the transition to the new system, perhaps $2 trillion over 10 years. Where that money might come from isn't clear.

Bush is determined to move ahead on the issue, advisers say. "Social Security reform is his legacy issue," Norquist says. "It is what he will be remembered for."

A generation of policymakers has come and gone - worked and then retired to collect Social Security themselves - with warnings of the coming crisis for the nation's programs for older Americans, Social Security retirement payments and Medicare health coverage. Now the threatened crush of baby boomers will begin to retire on Bush's watch. On New Year's Day 2008, the first members of that generation will celebrate their 62nd birthdays and be eligible to apply for early Social Security benefits.

There are 77 million baby boomers in all. Within a decade, the system will go into deficit, actuaries predict. By 2035, the proportion of Americans over retirement age will have doubled.

A "slow fuse" has been lit, says Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and former director of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. "We're closer to the day of reckoning."

Peterson, who likened the deficit to an elephant in the bedroom, cites a different animal in offering a modest defense of the candidates in not addressing these problems during the campaign.

"I was brought up in Nebraska, and when we hunted turkeys, the poor turkey who stuck up its neck got shot," he says. "In partisan politics, if somebody proposes something that requires somebody to give up something, his opponent will shoot his head off."

With the campaign over, Peterson urges the president to appoint bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to come up with a plan. "The president himself is going to have to be very bold," he says.

It also would help if he was lucky.

Bush told supporters in September that he realized the imperative of acting fast before lame-duck status takes hold. "I'm going to come out strong after my swearing-in," he said, according to an account in The New York Times Sunday magazine. "After that, I'll be quacking like a duck."

11/04/2004

posted November 04, 2004 10:48 PM            

By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY

As the winner in the most rancorous, divisive presidential campaign in memory, what is George W. Bush's obligation: to reach out to the vanquished Democratic minority, or to press the agenda of his victorious Republican majority?

In an election that exit polls said amounted to a referendum on moral values, slightly more than half the voters won, and slightly fewer than half lost. The latter now control neither the White House nor the Senate nor the House, and face diminished influence on the Supreme Court.

That left some questioning their place in their own country.

"I'm in a depression," said Zakia Sumter, 29, a paralegal and John Kerry voter who stopped in at a Starbucks in Philadelphia. "Seeing that map of blue and red this morning shows me how divided we are."

David Loebsack, a Democratic precinct captain in Mount Vernon, Iowa, said the nation was "on the razor's edge."

"We're staring at some kind of political abyss here, in terms of the divisions in this country."

For many Democrats, the loss was as bitter as in 2000, but this time there was no procedural problem to blame. "There's an air of legitimacy about this one," said Jim Shea, 44, an American government teacher at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Mass.

Many Republicans, on the other hand, didn't see a problem. Mary Anne Fluney, 46, of Palm Beach, Calif., wasn't gloating - "it's not good to throw it in other people's faces" - but she said Bush didn't need to compromise to placate Democrats.

"People vote for him because of what he believes in," she said. "People just have to get used to the idea that he is a Republican, and that's really all there is to it."

Even so, some Republicans voiced concerns about the chasm between parties, regions and philosophies.

Howard Dewey, 37, an Atlanta financial adviser, said Democratic and Republican leaders must "work on an even keel in the Senate and the Congress. In the last four years, any kind of conversation or discussion, it usually ends up in a yelling, screaming, name-calling match." Bush, he said, must address the divisions: "He's got the upper hand. ... He needs to do everything he can to at least listen to opposing views."

Asked Wednesday whether they thought Bush would do more to unite the country or divide it, 57% of respondents to a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll said the president would unite; 39% said Bush would do more to divide the nation.

The poll also asked voters what Bush should emphasize in his second term. Because the election was so close, 63% said the president should emphasize programs that both parties support. But 30% said that, because he won a majority of votes, Bush had a mandate to advance the Republican agenda.

Lincoln or Jefferson?

Will Bush be like Lincoln in 1864, who promised "malice toward none ... charity for all" and shaped a conciliatory post-Civil War policy toward the South? Or like Jefferson after the election of 1800, who paid lip service to national unity ("We are all Federalists. We are all Republicans.") but went on to govern like the candidate who won?

If his first term is any guide, Bush will be like Jefferson - and move more toward his goals than his opponents'.

"Take moderate stands in order to not irritate people?" said George Edwards, a Texas A&M University political scientist. "There's not any chance he's going to do anything like that. ... That's not his style. He may make centrist speeches, but that doesn't have a lot of staying power."

Democrats weren't expecting conciliation.

O'Daniel Outlaw, 56, a Conyers, Ga., accountant, said that although Bush should reach out to Democrats, "I saw nothing in the campaign to make me think he would."

Kathy Parker, 38, of Denver, said the election "will make him even more single-minded in imposing his specific agendas, which are pretty radical."

Many Republicans said conciliation wasn't necessary.

Angela Lutz, 33, a Bush voter from Waterville, Wash., said she understands the divisions the campaign opened. Kerry signs in her town were torn down several times. She said "it would be nice if everyone could just get along."

But how to do that? "It would be nice if some people could just change their minds," she said.

'New opportunity'

On Wednesday, Bush called his second term "a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation," including Kerry voters. But his emphasis was on what he called "the work ahead" - everything from changes to the tax code to Social Security to education.

Presidents who have held out the olive branch to the other party generally have done so out of necessity. For example, Republican Richard Nixon, facing a Democratic-controlled Congress, introduced surprisingly liberal social initiatives, including environmental protection laws and a guaranteed annual income for the poor.

Bush doesn't have that problem. And he reached out rhetorically in 2000. "I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation," he said after Al Gore's concession. "The president of the United States is the president of every single American, of every race and every background." The result was hardly a love fest.

To find common ground with Democrats, Bush could appoint relative moderates to the Supreme Court, name Democrats to Cabinet posts, and include Democratic legislators in policy discussions.

Dave Roederer, chairman of Bush's campaign in Iowa, said the president "must realize we as a country are philosophically divided. So he cannot approach governing as 'OK, our team won and your team lost.' He's got to be very, very sensitive to the fact that some people are not happy with our involvement in Iraq and the direction that's going."

But few observers expect Bush to seriously alter his course. "People who have power want to exercise it," said Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian. "He can do pretty much what he wants."

In fact, some viewed the Democrats' Wednesday blues, and all the talk of division, merely as inevitable byproducts of politics.

"Polarization," said Michael Yell, 54, a middle school history teacher in Hudson, Wis. "That's part of what our democracy is."

Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Des Moines, said that in Iowa, "there are some raw feelings, and it's going to take some time to get past that. It's been a civil division for the most part. Did this race really threaten that civility? No. Did it push it? Yeah."

11/04/2004 07:07