Usually, when their breakfast meeting is through, the leaders make comments in the driveway right outside the West Wing. That’s where reporters “stake out” White House visitors. It has a less entrepreneurial feel than you’d think: a bank of cameras wait on tripods for politicians to make a beeline to them–often with no coaxing at all. But this week, the Senate majority leader took a pass.
Why were the leaders being “unusually shy?” reporters asked Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in the daily briefing. “It’s unlike them,” another reporter opined. Fleischer refused to speculate. “They had votes to cast,” one White House aide offered. But there was more to it: Daschle felt bad about speaking out of school last week. In the World According To Bush, there is one sure way to get on the president’s nerves: repeat private conversations you’ve had with him to the press. Until recently, Daschle’s been pretty careful. But last week, Bush expressly asked the leaders not to discuss the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty until he had had a chance to break the news to Russian President Vladimir Putin. But when reporters asked Daschle about it on the Hill later that day, he spilled the beans. Bush was not pleased.
The president still longs for the days when his conversations with Texas lawmakers (often just informal pull-asides in the State House) never saw klieg lights. The breakfast club was Bush’s attempt to get back some of the informal working dynamic he had in Austin. He thought that if they talked over a meal it would be more familiar, less stilted. The only other person who sits in on the meeting besides the five politicians is Nick Calio, Bush’s legislative director.
At first, the meetings dealt almost exclusively with the war–and they went exactly as Bush had hoped. Everybody rolled up their sleeves and worked together. But now that the focus is returning to domestic concerns, the meetings are less collaborative, even “testy,” as one White House aide described last week’s breakfast. This week, the leaders got downgraded to a midmorning coffee (both sides say it was simply because of scheduling problems).
Partisanship, of course, never really went away after September 11. Even during the week of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, I had one New York lawmaker complain to me that the seating arrangement for a meeting at the White House was too political: Republicans at the table, Democrats on the periphery. Today, the president went to the Hill and end-ran Daschle by proposing his own compromise stimulus package.
The White House message machine is going full throttle. The main talking point: diss Daschle. It feels like a campaign year. (Retiring Republican Dick Armey even speculated this week that Daschle is already running for president.) Interest groups friendly to the White House have been running anti-Daschle ads in his home state of South Dakota. Vice President Cheney called the Senate leader an “obstructionist” to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press.” Counselor Karen Hughes has made similar sounds.
Fleischer has used his last three press briefings to harangue the Senate inaction. He has taken particular aim at Daschle on the stalled nominations of Eugene Scalia (son of Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice reviled by liberals) for Labor Department solicitor and Otto Reich to head up Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department. The White House is threatening to give them temporary appointments during the congressional recess starting next week. “Everyone will get a fair hearing,” Fleischer quoted Daschle as saying on June 17. The implication, another pet peeve of Bush’s, is saying one thing and does another.
There are, of course, some valid reasons to oppose appointments like Reich’s. Reich ran something called the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America during the Reagan era. It was a covert, pro-contra propaganda tool during the waning days of the cold war in Nicaragua. To those who called the contras “freedom fighters,” Reich is a hero. But Latin American interest groups fear that with his background, Reich will be perceived as a dishonest broker by leftists rebel groups like Colombia’s FARC. Liberals just think he personifies bad policy during the Reagan years. “This is about payback for the 1980s,” says one senior administration official.
As for the economic stimulus package, Daschle’s people say they are negotiating, not obstructing. They object to the characterization of last week’s meeting as “testy.” They say they have all been polite, even when they have disagreed. “This is a smear campaign to muddy the issues,” says one Democratic leadership aide. “They come in on their high horse and talk about changing the tone, not playing the blame game. But this is a concerted effort at the highest levels to play partisan politics.” It is clearly a game that both sides know how to play very well. A game we’ll see more of when Congress–and I-return in mid–January.
