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View the transcript for the John Kerry session 

October 21, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

8:45 a.m.	Registration
9:00	Panelists:	Thomas E. Mann, Brookings Institution
		Carla Robbins, Wall Street Journal
		Alexis Simendinger, National Journal
	Moderator:	John C. Fortier, AEI
10:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:
MR. FORTIER:  This is a session on how [inaudible] govern in a second term.  It is part of a larger series that we are undertaking here, have been undertaking, looking at both of the candidates, John Kerry and George Bush as to how they would actually govern, looking ahead.

The next session, the final session is tomorrow, that's on John Kerry, here, again, at the American Enterprise Institute at 10:15, a different time than today.  So we welcome you there as well.

Just to give you a little bit of history and what we're up to, we think that there's an important element on the campaign that is not given attention.  There's certainly a lot of coverage of the day to day ups and downs of the candidate, where they are on the campaign trail, their flubs and missteps, there's a lot of information, good information about the candidates' issue positions on everything, going down to a very low level.

But I don't think we got the "meat" of how much a candidate will--what sort of obstacles a candidate will face, what sort of challenges are ahead in the next four years.

What we can learn from past experience, what we can learn from a Bush first term about a second term, what we can learn from John Kerry's time in Massachusetts and politics, but especially in the Senate, that could tell us about a Kerry presidency.

So our goal here is to break ground a little bit on this issue but also to encourage those in the media out there to go do their own reporting on this, some of which has already been done, but the more the better.

We began this effort in 2000, with a look at both Bush and Gore.  Those transcripts are still available on the AEI Web site at www.aei.org., looking extensively at Bush's governorship and projecting forward.

I think this time, we're trying to focus less on that path than on the first term, but this session, this year, we've also conducted a number of events at both the Republican and Democratic conventions, at the first debate in Miami, and then here, again, in Washington, for a couple of events.

Again those transcripts can be found on the Web site and we, for this project, we thank very much the Knight Foundation who has founded our efforts, really encouraging journalists and the journalism community to go ahead and look at these governing issues.

We have today a panel which is well-versed in both domestic and foreign policy, able to talk about various aspects of a potential Bush presidency.

Let me introduce them, starting on my far right, Tom Mann is always far right of me.  Tom Mann is the Averell Harriman chair and senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.  These panels are jointly run by AEI and the Brookings Institution, and Tom has been a part of our effort from the very beginning in 2000 and in 2004 as well.

He is a former director of governmental studies at Brookings, has been executive director of the America Political Science Association, and is the author of a number of books including Vital Statistics on Congress: A Question of Balance, the President, the Congress and Foreign Policy, and the Permanent Campaign and Its Future.

Next on the panel, Carla Robbins.  Carla Robbins is the chief diplomatic correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.  Since 1999 she's been the lead writer on diplomatic and national security issues.  She is also a regular on our panels.  We had her--I'm trying to count the number of times--but two or three, four times in 2000, someone we were happy to invite back and I could have pulled out some of her predictions from 2000 and quoted today, but I will refrain from doing that, and really want to look at the future.

She has won the 2003 Edward Weintal Prize for diplomatic coverage.  She's also shared in two Pulitzer prizes at the Journal and is the winner of the Overseas Press Club Award as well.

She is both a journalist and a PhD, political science, I think, from Berkeley.  Yes.  So that makes three of us who've spent a lot of time in graduate school.  She's also been a Neiman Fellow at Harvard University.

Alexis Simendinger has been a White House reporter for National Journal since 1997.  Prior to that, she also covered the White House for the Bureau of National Affairs.  She also covered Congress, the Supreme Court.  She has covered George H. W. Bush also as well as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and she has a little bit of a preview today of an article coming out in tomorrow's National Journal, tomorrow's Friday, and we are looking ahead at personnel, what sort of Cabinet or other personnel change we might expect in a second George W. Bush presidency, if he were to win.

There's also in the same issue a similar article on Kerry's potential Cabinet.  So look for that tomorrow.

The way we're going to proceed is we're not going to have long opening statements, we're going to have some back and forth.  I'm going to start with some general questions and we will leave time as well for audience questions.

First, let me pose a question to Tom, but others should feel free to jump in, a very broad question.

George W. Bush is an incumbent, has spent four years in office.  Maybe we could set the landscape by talking about second terms, in general, looking back at other presidents, the challenges they faced, what the general problems and opportunities a second term poses for any president.

Tom.

MR. MANN:  Thank you, John.  Delighted to be here.  This is an important set of questions and I've been interested to know in the last week or so, an increasing number of reporters that turn to this very set of questions, I think a number of the weekly magazines and weekend editions of daily newspapers are going to be focusing on "What next?"  what really are the possibilities and constraints of governing, whether it be John Kerry or George Bush in the White House?

I don't want to open on a downer, but any look-back on second terms of presidents, historically, has to produce a sort of cautionary tale.

David Gergen who has served, I think, in four White Houses, reflected on this question at one of our earlier events, and as together we went through the second Clinton term, the second Reagan term, second Nixon term, if you consider Johnson to have had a second term [inaudible] Eisenhower, Truman, of course [inaudible] elected term--thank you.  [Microphone turned on.]

FDA, Woodrow Wilson, a couple of patterns emerge, perhaps broken in part by FDR but not entirely so.

One, there's a risk of hubris.  By God, we won!  They lost!  We've reclaimed the White House.  It's kind of validation of everything we did in the first term, and so it's full speed ahead.  That is, there tends to be a dangerous of suspending one's normal, more realistic judgment about what lies ahead and saying, "By God, the world is ours."

That's not necessary but it's certainly a possibility.

Secondly, there is that six-year midterm election, which typically, although not always, as we saw in 1998 with Bill Clinton, produces a loss for the president's party, sometimes undoing a majority in one house or the other, or even both.  But it tends to take some of the wind out of the sails of a president in his second term.

Third, there has been this tendency, not, we hope, to be repeated, if there is a second Bush term, of the administration falling pretty to scandal of one sort or another with--of course Bill Clinton began early with the charges of scandal in his first term but it certainly was the Monica Lewinsky scandal that constrained, greatly, his aspirations in his second term.

Ronald Reagan has Iran-contra which took a good deal of life out of the administration for quite a period of time.  Richard Nixon had Watergate.  LBJ's wasn't a scandal but it was a war that caused difficulties.

Eisenhower had some minor scandals but some fairly substantial obstacles along the way.  The same for Truman.  And remember, FDR ran into his own problems in that second term, in the court packing, and as for Woodrow Wilson it was a difficult period.

MR. FORTIER:  You were there, Tom.  Could you tell us--

MR. MANN:  I was there.  I can give you a firsthand account.

Finally, there is the matter of flagging energy.  My impression is--Carla, Alexis, maybe you'll support this--people are exhausted in the White House right now.  They're exhausted in other parts of the government.  But part of that can be altered by an infusion of new people, new blood, but you do begin to run down, from the president on down, and that has been a factor.

So it seems to me these are patterns that we've seen in the past, they've not guaranteed to occur by any means, but it strikes me that someone coming into, returning to the White House for a second term, ought to be aware of what has transpired in other terms.

Mind you, we have had significant legislative achievements in second terms.  We've had significant developments in foreign policy for good as well as for ill.  People who say nothing ever happens in an election year are wrong.  We've seen major legislation passed.

I don't, in any way, mean to suggest that second terms are doomed to failure.  But there are these patterns and problems and any wise president, returned to office, would begin with a level of, certainly a focus and clarity about his objectives, but modesty with respect to the constraints that exist, and I would end my response, John, to your question, by sort of laying out, just mentioning three sort of broad clusters of constraints that George Bush is going to have to wrestle with.

By the way, as John Kerry will have to wrestle with, if he's elected.

One, there is a policy inheritance.  The world in which George Bush would operate in a second term, at home and abroad, is fundamentally different than it was when he came to office, partly as a consequence of steps he has taken himself.

Secondly, while the makeup of the Congress may not change much in terms--if Bush is reelected, he will almost certainly have a Republican House and Senate, the margins will be narrow, it will not be filibuster-proof in the Senate, and there is restiveness among some Republicans on grounds domestic and foreign.

Third is the political environment.  George Bush, in 2000, could plausibly campaign as a uniter, not a divider, but he has proven himself a divider.  We are as bitterly polarized as I have seen Washington in over 30 years, and that's an environment that he begins with and has to be factored in.

MR. FORTIER:  I'd be happy to have Carla and Alexis chime in on this question but let me ask a further question, and if you want to add to what Tom said, take it in that answer.

Let me pick up on Tom's question of policy inheritance.  We don't begin a second Bush term from a clean slate.  We have significant commitments abroad, significant number of troops in Iraq, and especially, let's talk about the large doctrine of preemption that the president has put forward, something that we've clearly seen in Iraq but have the steps we've taken in Iraq made that something of an academic thesis, not something that the president could actually act on.

Are there other Iraqs out there?  Are there other places where the preemption doctrine can take place?  Or are we going to be constrained very much by the fact that we have heavy troop commitments in Iraq and other steps that we've taken that are going to limit us in the future?

MS. ROBBINS:  [inaudible] not mentioning my description of what I thought a first Bush term was going to look like.  I saw him as sort of a moderate, you know, internationalist, continuation of his father.  One of the great things about being a journalist is that you get to rewrite it every day, so thank you, John, for not mentioning this.  And he would have been that way had it not been for September 11th.

You know, the policy inheritance is reality.  I mean, this is going to be "axis of evil" all the time, basically it's 24 hours a day, seven days a week, "axis of evil" for the second Bush term.  Whether or not they want it to be that way it's an immutable reality, because, first of all, you've got Iraq, and it's really interesting, you hear people talking sort of quietly about, you know, Who's going to try to get out of Iraq faster, Bush or Kerry?

Is Kerry going to be more forced to stay because it's going to look like he's "cutting and running" and you can't rely on Democrats?  Is Bush going to declare victory and go home? because you see they've been scaling back their expectations.

But it's going to take a while to get out, no matter what, and that is really going to limit what the United States can do anywhere.

First of all, any president who comes in is going to have to pay another big bill in the first few months, they're going to have to go back for another major supplemental.  There's a lot of money that they're going to have to ask for, that's going to really limit their ability to do things internationally, military transformation, all sorts of things that are going to be cut back, because Iraq is really, really expensive.

And the other thing is that we just don't have a lot of troops and that's probably the most frightening lesson of Iraq at this point, is that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, can't "walk and chew gum" at the same time.  We can basically do one major war and this is really the major war we were talking about, it's a reasonably midlevel war, and it's really strained our abilities, strained our ability to recruiting, a lot of people don't want to sign up, the "stop loss" has infuriated people.  Really, a lot of problems, a lot of challenges of manpower.

So the notion that we're going to have another adventure, by choice, I consider highly unlikely.  The problem is we may not have a choice because we have the other two parts of the axis of evil out there waiting, and the realities there is that, in many ways, they're much more frightening than Iraq was going, looking into this.

And you're looking at North Korea which potentially has enough plutonium for six to eight nuclear weapons and if we don't do something to stop them, they could get into a real bomb factory business at this point, and what's so frustrating and frightening about North Korea is that there's almost no military option there.

On the other hand, this is a very frightening regime, it could create enormous numbers of weapons for itself to threaten its neighbors, or it could get into the business of selling it, because we already know they're really good at selling ballistic missiles.

So that's a big problem that's out there, that the administration has basically not been able to handle for four years because they've been focused on Iraq and because they haven't been able to agree internally about what policy they want to do.

I don't see Kerry having a better plan for dealing with it but this is one of those realities out there, that even though they may not want another adventure or another preemption, they've got a big problem with that one, and then of course you've got Iran, somewhat easier because at least we know where the stuff is, and they haven't produced any stuff yet.  They've the equipment to do it.

But those are going to be the three challenges of a Bush two term, and people talk about personnel and I'm dying to hear--please [inaudible].  You can talk about the other big question which is what has the president learned from his experience in the last four years? and there's been enormous debate within the administration among his own people about how much he's learned and how much he himself wants to change in a second term, and you're going to look very closely at personnel choices as an indicator of what the learning curve has been.

But the realities out there of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are so strong, that they really, I think, are going to define the next four years.

MR. FORTIER:  Good.  Let me follow up with Carla, one more on foreign policy, and we'll go back a little between domestic and foreign policy.

I'm going to treat you as a witness who's brought up an issue, that now I can explore your earlier characterizations of Bush, especially the statement that Bush would have been more of a moderate, internationalist president, had September 11th not happened.

I guess how I want to get into the question is this.

How much of what we've seen in Bush, post- September 11th, was there in some form before?  And then you talked about lessons learned.  How much has there been an evolution, especially in the president's thinking?  Do we have three stages?  Do we have a pre-September 11th, a immediately-passed post-September 11th, and then some sort of reconsideration of this?

Give us some sense of the evolution of the views of the president, especially, but if not, his administration.

MS. ROBBINS:  You know, I've been doing this a really long time, and I have to admit that there is no president who I cover, who I less understand than George Bush.  That doesn't mean you shouldn't read The Wall Street Journal cause I think I understand him better than a lot of other people do.

But there is a certain "black hole" quality to this administration, and you can figure out things basically because--not a lot of light escapes but you can see gravity pulling things in different directions--but it's really a hard one to figure out.  You know, George Bush was a very moderate, you know, governor, he was an internationalist, he had great relations with Mexico, and that was basically the limit of his foreign policy experience.  But he was also his dad's son and I think a lot of people expected him to be like his dad, more, shall we say, playing to the conservative constituency, which was the, you know, criminal court, Kyoto, "dead on arrival"--there were early things there and there were warnings there.  You could see this in Condoleezza Rice's early Foreign Affairs piece during the first campaign, there were warnings, that's why everyone was sort of shocked, shocked, shocked when they pulled out of Kyoto.  They were warning it there, but that was, a lot of that was playing to--the need to be different from Clinton, the "anything but Clinton" policy.

I think that September 11th was not only a transformative experience for the country; it was such a transcendent experience for this administration, for this president.  You know, everybody make a lot about those seven minutes when the president sat there, you know, in that classroom in Florida.  I cannot imagine what it must have been like to sit there and think to yourself, to gather your thoughts and think to yourself, What will I do now to ensure that this never happens again to the United States, to the country?  This is my responsibility.  This is who I am now.

And that's just an experience that people can make jokes about Bush and his lack of experience, and all these other things.  It is an experience for which I have an enormous amount of sympathy and a frightening amount of empathy for how transformative that must have been.

So going forth, the notion of having to protect the country, you can disagree with the way he's gone about doing it, but I don't think anyone should ever minimize that this is what George Bush has become, and that need to continue to do it in a second term is going to be defining.

Now will he decide, if he's reelected, that we've done enough in Iraq, because Saddam Hussein was the real problem, and democracy, oh, well, it's a nice thing but it's a luxury, let's move on to the second part of the axis of evil.  That I really can't predict.

You hear a lot from inside the administration, people who are really, feel that they need to be excused for their early exuberance or their early arrogance, or their early bullying.

That, you know, we've learned now, we want to try to work better with people.  You hear a lot of that.  Certainly, my good friend, Vladimir, my good friend, Alexander Klosnevski [ph]--I mean, you hear the president in one of his press conferences even talking about Karina Perelli, the head of the elections effort with the U.N.  I mean, there is a whole sort of new moderate internationalist, gee, the U.N. are really a bunch of our friends, and  I loved, in the second debate, this fight about, you know, who are more of a multilateralist in dealing with North Korea.

I think there has been some learning on this but I think that the fundamental loneliness of American leadership came home to the president.  So I think they'll try to be more multilateralist in a second term but I think it's about this deep.

MR. FORTIER:  Carla, could I press you on a couple of things--

MS. ROBBINS:  Just as long as you don't talk about my early Bush predictions.

MR. FORTIER:  About whether it was ever reasonable to think that George W. Bush would approach foreign policy in the same manner as his father.

My impression is that the current President Bush has pegged his presidency, both in terms of process, slash, politics and policy, as a counterweight to his father, that is, I think the loss of the reelection effort in '92 was a sort of devastating experience for both father and son, and son decided, early on, he was going to do it differently with regard to his political base and with regard to the certainty and consistency on the domestic policy pursuits, particularly the tax cuts.

So that I think that there was a suspicion of father's foreign policy orientation, which seemed, I think to the younger Bush, to be too much caught up in the foreign policy establishment, and, if anything, I think Bush 43 is anti-establishment and uncomfortable with that whole world.

Secondly, he was advised and tutored on foreign policy during the campaign by the so-called Vulcans, that it was a largely neoconservative group, that had a view of the world that was, say, different than Brent Scowcroft's, for the most part.

And we have evidence that sort of during the campaign, and in the early months of the administration, prior to 9/11, certainly Iraq was not off the screen, it was--

MS. ROBBINS:  I would disagree with that.

MR. FORTIER:  Really?  Okay.  Well, good.  That is not that they had specific plans but it was seen as a problem that had to be dealt with.  So I'm just wondering if we were ever realistic in expecting George W. Bush to be like his father in foreign policy?

MS. ROBBINS:  I don't think he could ever be like his father because he certainly didn't have the world experience his father had, or the sophistication that his father had.  But very few presidents have.  You know, certainly Bill Clinton didn't come in with that either.

I think there's a sort of 20/20 hindsight, you know, sort of thing, oh, we could always see that the Vulcans were all neocons.  I mean, Condi Rice a neocon?  Would you have predicted that before?  Condi Rice was Brent Scowcroft's choice for national security adviser.  Condi Rice had served under Brent Scowcroft, the expectation was that she was going to be much more of a moderate internationalist, and that's what she was, to begin with, and I think that if you look at his closest advisers, I mean, even Dick Cheney--is Dick Cheney the Dick Cheney we remember from the first Bush term?

I mean, talk about one of the great surprises there.

Now was it inevitable there?  Were the seeds there?  I mean, one of the Vulcans was Rich Armitage.  I mean, was Rich Armitage--certainly not the neocon of this administration.  I mean, what were the most creative things they came up with in the 2000 campaign.  Unilateral arms cut with the Russians.  It wasn't all just missile defense. It was a continuation of his father's, you know, his father's idea of unilateral arms cuts, the idea we were going to embrace the Russians, we were going to overthrow traditional things.

What were the No. 1 goals?  We were going to build a new relationship with India.  Interestingly enough is the most sort of neocon thing about it was the fact that China was going to be the real threat.  That was the No. 1 threat of the second Bush term.  Now the Chinese, we have a strategic alliance with the Chinese a la Bill Clinton, not to mention, you know, his father's own role in opening up China to the West.

I think you're absolutely right, that he came in sworn, not to repeat the mistakes of his father.  I don't think the arena was foreign policy for them.  I also don't believe that Iraq was really a key issue for them.  I think that they had almost no discussions of Iraq during the campaign. Cheney talked about Iraq with people.  Bush never talked about Iraq, from what I understand.

You talk to the people, the Vulcans, they never talked about Iraq.  They'd all signed this letter, you know, about how things were supposed to be different.  But, you know, if you look at the Suskind book on O'Neill, who says, oh, my God, you know, regime change was their policy--well, regime change was Bill Clinton's policy too, it was the policy of the U.S. Congress.

I just don't think--interestingly enough, the first time that Iraq comes up in a really major way, in which you have a sense of a Bush policy, is after the war in Afghanistan begins, and remember those two religious women who had been taken, were freed in Afghanistan, they brought them home, and they were in the Rose Garden, and some reporter says to the president, "Mr. President, what are you going to do about Saddam Hussein?"

And he sort of stops and he says, "Well, he's got to let the inspectors back in."  I think to myself, hmm, boy, the game has just changed, isn't it?  We're going to go back to that game now.

And the follow-up question is, "And what are you going to do if he doesn't let the inspectors back in?" and Bush said, "He'll find out."

So I went scurrying and calling people--my God, is there a new policy?  Have you guys sat down at a principals committee meeting, you decide you're going to reembrace 1284, are we going to have to return to inspectors?

You know, I wrote soon after that, a front-page piece, a profile of Hans Blix who, at that point, was the Maytag repairman.  I mean, no one paid any attention to this guy.

And basically it was him "talking off the top of his head" because they hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about it.  So I agree with you--"anything but Clinton" was a big part of it, they needed to define themselves differently during the campaign, this whole sort of we're not multilateralists was, more than anything else, a rejection of the Clinton style, a definition that was sort of silly to my mind.

I don't think they--yeah, they wanted to get rid of the ABM treaty because that was an article of religious faith for the Republican Party itself.  But I don't think they had all that transcendently, a different foreign policy from Bush, [inaudible] to a certain extent from Clinton, they were going to tactically be very different from Clinton because they were going to reject it.

I think that they wanted to play to their base, I don't think foreign policy was the arena, so to my mind the defining moment was much more September 11th.

MR. FORTIER:  Alexis, you want to add and then we'll--

MS. SIMENDINGER:  Just two quick things and we'll move on, because Carla's discussion is excellent, but I just have some specific observations.

One is I have, for a reason--in a story that we were doing to--this deals with the question of the lessons of dad, to go into Ari Fleischer's office when he was the president's first press secretary and ask him--tentatively, I asked the question tentatively, about the lessons of dad, and much to my surprise, Ari Fleischer had a book, a book to present to me, footnoted, practically, in terms of his mental recitation of what are the lessons of dad.

He was not only eager to discuss it but he was able to walk through it sort of step by step, and how determined the president was to not follow the mistakes of his father, and I'm really struck by how open they were willing to be about this, and I'll just boil down the one lessons I think that probably guided the president's thinking, cause this conversation was after 9/11, and that was that his dad had political capital and squandered it, that he had the support of the country and the world, that there were things that he could have done when he was at, you know, "sky high" job approval, and not only did he not use it but of course he was defeated later by someone they thought was so drastically inferior to President Bush 41.

So I'd just add this idea that this was something that the entire Bush team had thought a lot about and was very willing to discuss.

The second thing I wanted to add is an observation I also came to from another story that we were working on, and that is this question about was Iraq on the president's mind in 2000, and the answer is yes, and the reason I say that is because the record shows that it was.

Go back and read the debates from 2000.  Who introduced the subject of Saddam Hussein?  It was George W. Bush.  Three times he did this, on his own, and described this in the debates with Gore--you remember, we talked about how terrorism never came up.

Well, in the question of world situations, yes, terrorism didn't come up, but Bush's thinking about Saddam Hussein was there for all to see, because he was the one who introduced it into the conversation.

So whatever happened afterwards, in terms of his feeling that this was part of the world dilemma, that he knew something about because of his father, I think that you can go back and look at the record and see that it was on his mind.

MR. FORTIER:  Well, Alexis has a perfect lead-in to my next question.  In fact I think she was reading my mind.  We'll have to have that box removed from her back, the one that was directly feeding from my brain into her, and that is the question of political capital.

Moving a little bit to domestic policy--we'll switch back and forth--I think this is true, you hear a number of Bush people on background saying the lesson Bush learned was his father had "sky high" approval ratings after the Iraq war and didn't do much in domestic policy afterwards, didn't have an agenda, didn't use that for other purposes.

And Bush has many times claimed a mandate, when he's had the opportunity.  After a close victory in 2000, where some said he should govern more from the middle, took that as a real serious political win.

After 9/11, after the 20002 midterm elections, and after the initial surge in popularity in the initial parts of the Iraq war, using that political capital to project forward a domestic policy agenda.

Bush wins in 2004, it's likely to be a narrow margin.  Do you expect him to come out and say I have a mandate, I have a legislative program, I'm going to use my victory, my popularity bump to do things in the "lame duck" Congress, in the new Congress?

What's the big mandate push from Bush and what sort of items might be on an agenda that he would push coming out of an election victory?

MS. SIMENDINGER:  You know, President Bush never says that--he never constructs a sentence like that--I have a mandate and therefore, blah, blah, blah.  He just actually does what he wants to do and the "What I want to do," as we learned from 2000, is no matter how narrowly you win, you win.  You're the winner, and you're the President of the United States and the people are with you.

The question that I think we're all wrestling with and I know we just did a story about the Cabinet, is, as Carla was suggesting, is, What is it about a second term that may change their thinking? and at least based on the reporting that we were doing in the past couple of weeks, the answer is not that much different.

In other words, as Tom as suggesting, if you win reelection, why would you change?  Why would you change?  It's not in his makeup to change.

The learning may be, you know, around the edges, but in terms of what it is that they want to do, they're going to be more, I would say, corralled by what Congress can help them with, or the time, the calendar, cause Tom would, I think, suggest historically that you have a window in a second term for legislative achievements, if that's what the president is also thinking about, besides Iraq, of what? 18 months, two years maximum, and then you start, as even President Bush has said--"quack like a duck."

So you're constrained by what you can do with Congress, you're constrained, as Carla was suggesting, by the faucet, the money, the appropriations for what it is you'd like to do, and there are lots of looming constraints like that for President Bush, the deficit being one, and the fact that there's pressure from his own party to take a completely different tack towards government spending, and that's an issue.

But one of the other things that the reporting that we were doing in the past couple weeks indicated, is that the president has set himself up, to some extent, for some difficulties because your campaign agenda is designed to help you win, not to help you govern, and why I say that is because the idea is to be as muddy as you can be to get as many voters as you can to support you, especially in this election.

So if you think about the domestic agenda, as John was just suggesting, what is it?  It's the soft-focused thing about tax simplification and Social Security reform, and reducing the deficit, and expanding No Child Left Behind to high school.

So one of the things the reporting was suggesting is that the president has left the electorate very ill-equipped, and even Congress, because we interviewed members of Congress who find this as mysterious as anyone else.  What exactly does he have in mind?

It is very difficult to govern if you have not told people where you are going, and so one of the difficulties I would expect to see is not just pressure in the arena Carla's been talking about, in terms of the things that this administration may be accused of letting drift.  Iraq has sucked up all the oxygen and they're not paying attention to these other parts of the world that Carla was mentioning.

But also the domestic agenda.  If you have not told people where you want to go--and these are very big things he's talking about.  Tax simplification is something you lay the groundwork for for years, if history is a guide.

Social Security reform seems to be this chestnut that keeps coming up.  The deficit would suggest it's difficult to do and a very narrowly-divided Congress, as eager to look at Bush as yesterday's news, looking ahead to 2008, or as Tom suggests, 2006--very, very hard.

MR. FORTIER:  I guess just to follow up.  In a way, isn't this somewhat unBush-like?, as we learn from his past.  When he first ran for governor, Bush ran on four very distinct platform items.  It was tort reform and juvenile justice, and I'm not going to quiz myself on all of them.  Education.

But he used that as a platform to run his domestic agenda, very clearly.  What was on the campaign trail translated into his legislative agenda.  To some extent, you see this happening after the 2000 campaign, at least measures such as No Child Left Behind, eventually getting to a prescription drug benefit, certainly the tax cuts.  A lot of the things he laid out, again he followed through, especially in the beginning--tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the first things, they weren't big surprises to us.  I guess the other thing I would throw out from history is that in Bush's second term of governor, he made a big play, a big play for a change in the way that financing of education happened in Texas.

The property tax system and the education financing in a large package, which people were surprised by how bold it was, ultimately didn't get there, had to settle for something much less.

That, to me, seems to be the analogy for Social Security reform.  Is there some chance that he will push for something big like this, which seems very difficult, given the deficit situation?  Or is tax simplification, and some of these things he's listed, maybe not laid out all of the groundwork for, but is that more likely to be what we see at the beginning of the term?

What are we going to see in the next Congress, early on, introduced, or in the lame duck?

MS. SIMENDINGER:  You know, my answer to that would be that what we've learned about President Bush is that when he puts his mind to something and the topic, the policy issue totally grasps him, gets his attention, and he wants to put his political muscle behind it, he ends up being relatively successful, or very clever at saying I always was willing to settle for x, x, x, and this is a success.

What I don't know, and I don't think any of us can know, is to what extent the president, as Tom was suggesting, when you're maybe flagging a little bit, a little out of gas, that you're able to refocus your attention and say, okay, these are the priorities, I'm not going to be able to do everything in that 18 month or two year window, and I'm really going to put all my "marbles" into this particular basket.

You know, what did we find from the first term?  Tax cuts totally engaged the president.  That was something he understood in his mind, he was philosophically totally wrapped around it, and he was pushing for it, and continues to push for it.

I'm not so sure Social Security is that kind of an issue.  Iraq definitely.  He's invested in that, as we can see, 200 percent, and clearly, by the second term, the success or failure of the policy and the directional beacons he set come into play and it will come into play with the team he chooses to keep around him for the second term.

So I don't think we know.  I would think that Tom would suggest that if history is a guide, you have to pick and choose, because if it was easy to do you would have done it in the first term.

What's left in the second term, with a few exceptions from history, are that the harder things are not the things you usually accomplish.  At least the reporting that we have done suggests that political scientists believe that second terms are very middling in terms of achievement.

MR. MANN:  John, a couple of points in response, partly to supplement a question about why the lack of an explicit focused agenda on the part of the president to set the stage for his second term.  I think the answer there is simple.  It reflects the realities of a very difficult campaign.

A year and a half, two years ago, the president would have imagined running a triumphal campaign as commander in chief in the war against terrorism, and as a leader who had turned the economy around with his bold tax cuts, identifying more explicitly his idea of an ownership society, which is really quite a grand ambition that has specific policy components to it.  That has always been the basis of developing an enduring Republican majority in this country.

So that was the initial game plan.  The problem is the war in Iraq soured and the economy never took off in the fashion that they had anticipated.  The president was vulnerable on both fronts.  That's why he made the decision, one, to make terrorism the overriding issue of the campaign and everything else really gets pushed to the side, and secondly, to try to make it a referendum on John Kerry, and that's why so much of the campaign resources have gone into trying to define Kerry as an unacceptable alternative.

If your strategy is terrorism is the issue and Kerry is not an acceptable alternative, then there isn't a lot of room for laying out a second term agenda.  You know, you've got to remember, the original objective was to drain the swamp.  You've got to win the election before you can do anything else, and I think winning has taken on a much higher priority now because, frankly, not only is there no guarantee of that but, at best, it's "up for grabs" right now.

The second point I wanted to make was with respect to the political capital argument, spending political capital.

You know, there's a certain irony here.  We think we have distilled these truths, this political wisdom, and that if you follow it you will succeed.  Well, the irony here is that, yes, George W. Bush did spend his 9/11, post 9/11 political capital, but he spent it on a war in Iraq which has become the major obstacle to his reelection.

I mean, set aside the wisdom of whether we should have done it or not done it.  The fact that we did it and it's proven so difficult in the aftermath, has created the entire environment in which George Bush's reelection is perilous.  Had he either not spent that capital with something ambitious but kept it more small bore, and focused on the war on terrorism and other sort of domestic midlevel achievements, he'd probably be cruising toward a 55, 56, 57 percent reelection victory right now.

Sometimes going with your best assessment of where your predecessor failed and how you're going to overcome it ends up being your potential undoing.

MR. FORTIER:  Do you want to add to that, Carla, or--

MS. ROBBINS:  You know, it's interesting, if you look at the three debates this time, I get the impression that for the president, the only thing that truly captivates him is international affairs.  You don't have that sense of--in the 2000 campaign, when he talked about education, when he talked about the--what was the term about low expectations and--

MS. SIMENDINGER:  Bigotry.

MS. ROBBINS:  Bigotry of low expectations.  I mean, you talked to him about trade in 2000 and he would get excited about how trade could open up possibilities around the world.

You listen to him now and the thing that truly captivates him is America's role in the world and the war on terrorism and Iraq, and you look at Clinton in the second term and the only thing that truly interested Clinton in the second term was international affairs, and this is a guy who came in with no experience in international affairs, got really excited about it.

If you look at the last few months of Clinton 2 in which he was trying to cut a deal with both the Israelis and the Palestinians and the North Koreans, and time just ran out for him.  I mean, when he started thinking about his legacy, all of the legacy, it was in international affairs.

I think for Clinton, it was intellectually challenging.  I think he just saw this as something he was incredibly good at and he saw that he was good at because he was personally good at it, that he could bring people together and try to cut deals, and see larger visions.  For a guy who came in with absolutely no strategic vision at all, it's the thing that captivates.

For Bush, I don't think that he necessarily feel that he's transcendently good at it but he knows that he's transcendently right about it, and so I think that whether or not it would be forced on him, it's forced on him, and this is probably also the thing that has totally captivated him, is dealing with international affairs.

The other issue out there, and I always feel like I'm jinxing things, is the possibility of another terrorist attack, which we haven't talked about, which will define, and if it were to happen, entirely, a second term, and interestingly enough, it may define it domestically as much as anything else, because for as much as the Bush people make fun of Kerry for talking about terrorism as a police issue, an intelligence issue, in many ways, that's really what it is.

I mean, we found that Iraq has not slowed down, you know, has not helped the fight on terrorism.  If anything, maybe when they say that you fight them over there, maybe the best thing that Iraq has happened is it's kept al Qaeda over there, so people will die over there [rather] than over here, but I'm not exactly sure that's what they meant.

They set up this Department of Homeland Security, they talk about intelligence reform.  Let's face it; it's a mess.  I mean, there are all of these incredible gaps and things that haven't been dealt with domestically, from chemical plants to nuclear plants to the security of cargo.

I mean, all of these things that we have this big bureaucracy.  No one really even knows where the bureaucracy is.  I mean, they do have that building but I'm not sure that the people are really in there, and it's one of the most chaotic of organizations that I've ever seen.

And we may get lucky and not have another terrorist attack, but, if not, I think there's going to be a lot of internal focus on all of the things that we didn't do domestically after 9/11 about terrorism, and then of course the other issue is we're supposed to have this sweeping intelligence reform, which seems to be "nickeled and dimed" in a smaller way.  If we have another terrorist attack, those will be, I think too, sort of domestic focus of international issues.

MS. SIMENDINGER:  Could I add something really quickly and that is, you know, talking about Bill Clinton, and his second term, one of the things that happened to him was a driving force is that he ended up facing an opposing party in Congress and the whole White House got oriented towards the idea of what can the executive do.

But that happened to him kind of late.  Certainly as a Democrat he was very interested in legislative achievements, and his turn to what can the executive do without having to seek approval of Congress?, drove some of his interest, not only in international policy but in every other way.

What can the executive do without asking for permission?  Well, that happened to this president very early on--

[Start tape side 1B.]

MS. SIMENDINGER:  [in progress] [inaudible] oriented, results-oriented guy, this is what he says, and that is true.  So to the extent that we're talking about the second term, I just want to add that it is hard for me, a little bit, to imagine the action, results-oriented guy who has "cut his teeth" on Iraq in foreign policy, saying, okay, now I want to go back and hold hands with Congress to get this legislation done, because I would say the president, at this point, believes very heartily in his own direction as an executive and less about asking anyone's permission to do anything, as we have seen him describe in many other ways in this campaign.

MR. FORTIER:  I'll move on to another topic although I want to say one last thing.  I think, to some extent, this president has shown he can "walk and chew gum" at the same time.  The criticism of his father, that he didn't pursue a domestic agenda, that he was only interested in foreign policy, I don't think is true of Bush.

Bush has continued to go back to Congress for tax cuts, for major legislative accomplishments, surprising people with legislation about Department of Homeland Security.

You may disagree with, agree with this, it may not be a good idea, but he's been very active and very able to hold together his majority in the House and willing to go back again and again on the domestic front.

So I think his primary interest is in foreign policy, and the second term I think does point in that direction.  But one lesson that he seems to have learned from his father is you can't simply forget that domestic agenda and I think he's going to be pushing on that as a sort of secondary measure.

Let me turn--I promised we'd talk about personnel.  Everybody's interested in who's in what position.

First, as a general matter, will there be personnel changes that are intended to change the direction of the administration, change the focus either in foreign or domestic policy, but beyond that specifically, who's thought to be leaving, maybe for personal reasons, not for philosophical reasons, who might be likely to replace them?

Alexis has a piece tomorrow, but we can also, if Carla has any special insights on the foreign policy team, I'd like to hear them as well.

MS. SIMENDINGER:  You know, this is such a speculative thing and journalists, it's a perennial thing that we do, so, you know, caveat, caveat, caveat, asterisk.

One of the things that was interesting, and I'll just give you the headline, is that the basic reporting on this that we've been able to do, and I've been working on this since the convention, just here and there, asking people is that--it's a very small group of people, obviously, in the Bush White House, who know what the president's thinking maybe about his team, but that the consensus seems to be that he is very happy with the team, he's not interested in doing a huge clean sweep of saying, oh, well, I made mistakes here, there, we're going to change focus on policy and therefore we're going to bring in completely different individuals who will signal that I made a mistake.

This is not the way President Bush thinks.  When, in New York, a group of reporters sat down with Andy Card, the chief of staff, the question of, first of all, Andy's tenure, and I'd just like to mention that Andy Card must be mechanical somehow, or living on some kryptonite or something, because four years as chief of staff is a very, very unusual thing in the modern White House.

And Andy is very proud of his record and he actually tasked some people on his staff to tell him, figure out what's the average tenure for a White House chief of staff, and they came back and told him 22 months.  So he has outstripped his predecessors.  I ran into him in one of the debates and asked him, now tell me what's the longest-serving chief of staff, and without blinking an eye, in one second he could tell me exactly who they were and how long they served.

So it's a question about whether Andy will stay but the president is largely happy with his staff and with his Cabinet, with a few exceptions.  So I would not be expecting to see big, big ideological shifts.

But let me just add that the reporting we did also suggested that, as Tom intimated, fatigue and personal desires, desires either to, because of age or health, or the desire to make money, which is an obvious thing that happens after you've served a president, will probably drive maybe, a turnover of maybe three-quarters of the Cabinet, or Cabinet level positions.

I would not be surprised to see that kind of an exodus or maybe a few "chairhoppers," you know, where the president is eager to them to stay with him but he can only do that by giving them a change of job.

So there may be a few of those.  But I would say that the speculation that Carla and I probably were most interested in is the national security team.  What the heck is going to happen to that team?

And I could just tell you that our reporting suggested, and of course this is just anybody's good guess work, from talking to White House people and folks outside of the administration, that the president is very happy with Donald Rumsfeld and that Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary is perhaps very eager, even at age 72, to finish the military reform, reorganization that he set his mind to, and that people have persuaded him that he is uniquely qualified to complete.

So to the extent that you may see some hold-over there, maybe for a year or two, maybe not all four years of course, but I'll give you another reason why it might be advantage to the president to persuade Donald Rumsfeld to stay, and that is you probably, in time of war, may want to avoid to avoid a confirmation battle or any sense that there's some question mark about what your team is or any lull that might occur.

State Department.  There's been speculation in the press that, partially prompted by Colin Powell and the president himself, these kind of quotes where I love you, you love me, maybe we'll stay together.  The reporting is no.  At least the reporting that we've been able to do, sources inside the White House tell me that the conventional wisdom, that Colin Powell and Armitage are leaving, his deputy, is correct, that they will be leaving, and so the big speculation is what happens to State.

One of the name that a White House official threw out to me was the president's very enamored with John Danforth who's recently moved to the U.N., and so the information that we got was pay attention to how Danforth is doing in the U.N. and that perhaps he could be a very welcome conservative but someone who is very much highly regarded by Democrats.  So you might want to watch that.

The other equation was what would Condi Rice do, and she is, has a very unique relationship with the president, as my colleagues here from the White House press corps will tell you, in detail, just because of the amount of time she spends with him and how closely he relies on her.

The reporting that we did inside the White House is that they would be very surprised if Dr. Rice wants to stay at the NSC, but to get her to stay in the administration, which people think the president will want to do, he may try to woo her with some kind of Cabinet promotion.

But her friends say that she has absolutely no interest in State and other people suggest she is ill-qualified to do defense and what would she be interested in doing, because her personal interests have perhaps, in the past, been more the Pentagon.

So by default, she may rotate back to California, she may do something in the private sector, I think that's still a question mark, and in terms of who would succeed her at the NSC, the reporting inside the White House is that the president loves Steve Hadley, very fond of him, admires his work, and also Mr. Blackwell who is the strategic policy adviser to Dr. Rice, is a name of someone highly regarded inside the White House.

So I toss that out for what it's worth, don't hold me to it, as Carla was suggesting, as time goes by we'll see, we'll know soon enough.

MR. FORTIER:  Let me follow up with Carla, a few things.  One other rumor I'll throw out there and that is that Rumsfeld, if he were to leave, is going to wait out Powell, wants to leave after Powell.

MS. ROBBINS:  He won't have to wait long.

MR. FORTIER:  Yeah.

The question is how long?  But some of the speculation about Condi Rice, if you're talking about Steve Hadley, or Bob [inaudible], that actually is something of a difference of worldview, right? and would signal something.

Carla, you want to talk about what you know of this and the foreign policy team.

MS. ROBBINS:  I don't know anything, and I'm not sure anybody really knows anything about this.  This is certainly our favorite party game.  It's better than ad libs.  And in fact I had my daughter's birthday party, we had fifteen 11-year-olds, and I was actually asking them who they thought was going to be the next national security adviser so--they're Washington kids.

MR. FORTIER:  Jimmy Carter asking his daughter--

MS. ROBBINS:  Right.  They're Washington kids.  I thought you were my friend, John!  Everybody else here is too young to know what that reference is.

You know, I was out at Hoover earlier this year, and where talking about Condi rice is like a major activity, and the betting, I think from people who know her, is that she's had enough in this job, that she says that she "wants out" altogether.  Some people see her enthusiastic foreign policy lectures, and which just happened to take place in swing states, as perhaps a certain throat clearing in preparation for her own run for the Senate.

But, you know, the relationship that she has with the president appears to be such a tight one, and it is in a world that is so dangerous and so challenging at this point, I suspect he'll ask her to stay, which then raises this very interesting question, I don't think she wants State, Alexis is absolutely right, and what I do think, what people who know her say she wants is the Pentagon.

I mean, she wrote her thesis on the Soviet general staff, and she knows generals and she really has very little patience for ambassadors and diplomats.  So that might raise a very interesting challenge.

I think Condi would have a much easier confirmation battle than a lot of other people would have because she's a woman, and because she's an African American.  I know these are incredibly politically incorrect things to say.  Nevertheless, I just can't see her getting that "beat up" on the Hill.

I don't think it'd be that easy, but I suppose if she wants it, the president will be in a rather tough place, because he's very loyal--you know if he gets rid of Rumsfeld, it would imply that something has gone wrong, and if he didn't get rid of him after Abu Ghraib, I don't think he's going to push him out too quickly, so--

MS. SIMENDINGER:  The thing to add about that, though, I think, is that Republican on the Hill who are even, very supportive of the president's policies, believe that Dr. Rice has been an exceedingly poor manager of some outsized egos and hasn't been able to even run a cohesive shop in the NSC.

So I think Carla's right about this idea that, you know, she'd have an easier time, but there are members of the president's own party who would be horrified at the thought.

MS. ROBBINS:  Well, I don't know.  I mean, I've seen her work a group.  Listen, this may all be moot anyway, but--and I'm certainly not going to state--this is more what her friends think.  But she's pretty compelling.  You know, people can complain about her when she's not in the room.  She gets in the room and she wins a lot of people over really, really quickly.  It's not an accident that she had an oil tanker named after her.

I mean, she has a certain gravitas or at least projects gravitas, that I think, you know, would make it rather hard for people in the party who grouse about her--I mean, it's not a particularly well-run NSC, and there's no question about it, but God, you think this is a well-run Pentagon?

And so that's one thing, I think, that's sort of an intriguing question.  I've heard Danforth a lot and he does have the appeal, a bipartisan appeal itself.  You know, would Rich Armitage stay to become national intelligence director?, you know, is an interesting question.  I suppose if Rumsfeld stays, the betting is that Wolfowitz is gone because he takes the fall.  But take that for all that it's worth, and as I said, I got most of this from the 11-year-olds at my daughter's birthday party.

MR. FORTIER:  One last question we'll ask about personnel and we'll try to open it up to the audience.

The president's legal team, John Ashcroft, but also looking ahead, either candidate potentially facing a Supreme Court nomination.

We were thinking we would get one this term, obviously is going to be controversial, maybe lay out some of the president's thinking on this and is it going to be the "battle royal" that we expect in a Supreme Court nomination?

MS. SIMENDINGER:  Well, let me just add what I know which is skant, but basically on the reporting, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez--let's start there.  The White House counsel's been there for four years, came with President Bush from Texas, and the reason I bring him up first is because he of course is the name that has emerged so consistently as the president's first choice as a Supreme Court vacancy that may open up, whenever it does, and one of the things that I was surprised to find out in our reporting is that after four years in the White House at the counsel's office, there are two elements that are interesting about Judge Gonzalez, and that is, A, he actually is said, by friends, to covet the Justice Department more than he does a seat on the Supreme Court.

So that is a very interesting dynamic, if you want to watch whether that is in fact true.

And second is that after four years of service to the president in the White House counsel, he may have discovered it is the poorest perch from which to sit and wait for the Supreme Court because of all of the mud that sticks to your shoes after four long years in the counsel's office.  It's just not a place where you come out on unscathed.

So that doesn't say that, that doesn't speak to the president's desire, I think he is very, very supportive of Judge Gonzalez.  But if there was that conversation about what is it that's on your mind, and Judge Gonzalez is honest about it, that might be an interesting dynamic to watch.

And I should mention in the package that we have coming out on Friday, Stuart Taylor, who's excellent, with our magazine, has written some unbelievable amount of word count on the Supreme Court.  So I haven't been able to read all of it in the galleys yet but it's in our magazine this week, so you all will be much more educated if you read Stuart than listening to me on this.

On Ashcroft, the reporting seems to be that he is leaving and the question is, Is he going of his own volition of being pushed?  And there's conflicting reporting on that.  Some suggest that the president is not unhappy with Ashcroft, that he's served his purpose, been an effective spear carrier" at Justice during difficult times, and that the White House is not unhappy with him.

The other side of the equation is that yes, they are, that they would like to use the second term to maybe turn the page a little bit, and if the president is serious about reauthorization of the Patriot Act, maybe they need a different kind of "spear carrier," and the element that's interesting is in the president's own party there are conservatives who think that John Ashcroft singlehandedly did more to damage the party's reputation with civil liberties and on immigration issues, and that they desperately want him out and they also are opposed to the Patriot Act being reauthorized.  They'd like to have it sunsetted.  So there is an interesting fight going on.

Two names that came up consistently, there are many more, but I'll just mention two that keep coming up as a successor to Ashcroft.  Larry Thompson, his deputy.  He would have the distinction of not only being someone that the Department itself would welcome but also he would be an African American, someone the president could talk about as diversity and could actually, you know, make a, I think a point, a historic point there.

The other person is Marc Racicot, who's been the chairman of president's campaign, and the reason he gets mentioned is because of course he was not only governor of Montana but he has a legal background and was considered for the Justice Department in 2000, and as you may recall, ended up having some lobbying questions and stuck with his day job.

I ran into Marc Racicot recently at one of the debates and made sure I asked him what was his thinking about this, and he got very annoyed, as you're supposed to, if your name is being talked about, and he said look, you know, people think that you have something that you want just because you're helping out with the campaign, but he swore up and down that he had promised, promised, promised his law firm, his lobby firm,that he was going back after the election,and he got so disgruntled at the idea, he said, you know, please take me off any list, and of course we didn't.

I left him our story.  But the president has a lot of regard for Racicot if he wants to go in a direction that is slightly less of that ideological, conservative bent than John Ashcroft.

MR. FORTIER:  Tom, last comment before we go to the questions.

MR. MANN:  Just a couple of general observations in response, to agree with Alexis.  I think if the president wins reelection, he will interpret his victory as an affirmation of his choices in his first term, and he will try to avoid large-scale turnover in his government because it would send a signal that he has no interest in sending.

Having said that, most of the Cabinet posts aren't very important to him.  The key national security posts are important, Justice is important, but even Treasury, which we always thought of as an absolutely central policy making position, has become relegated to the cheerleading squad, and therefore I don't--frankly, it'll be more a matter of individuals ready to leave or someone they want to reward, to move in.

But it's not very consequential.  That's why I think we've discussed all the important positions there already.

What I'd add again is that I think we will get a change at Justice and my view is that Larry Thompson is a much more plausible choice than Racicot.  He's become, because of his position in the campaign, quite a partisan figure, and in these polarized times, I think they want to lower the heat a little bit there and I think Thompson would serve other purposes.

Finally, on the Supreme Court, whoever is elected president, this is going to be ground zero of partisan warfare.  I am convinced that if either Bush or Kerry is in the White House and doesn't take seriously the injunction to seek the advice as well as consent of the Senate, and try to negotiate something ahead of time, then the other side will be prepared to filibuster their choice, and this may come down, if it's the case of a Bush presidency, and a Republican majority in the Senate, to basically blow up the Senate rules, and have the chair rule that extended debate may not occur on appointments or on judicial appointments.

Right now, there are too many Republican senators who won't go along with it, but I could imagine that happening.

So this is where the future shape of the government is determined by these Supreme Court appointments and it will be the source of rancorous battles in the years ahead, because there will be openings on the Supreme Court.

MR. FORTIER:  Okay.  We're going to turn to questions and what I'd ask is that you wait for the mike and that you identify yourself at the start.  We'll start right here in the front row.

QUESTION:  Michael Beckfish, Germany's business daily Handelsblatt.  Referring to the "big black hole" question and the learning curve of the president, could you tell us--

MS. ROBBINS:  Wait.  You're my colleague, you're not supposed to give me a hard time.

QUESTION:  Why not?  You know--

MS. ROBBINS:  All right.

QUESTION:  --are sometimes like that.  But anyways, I'm sure you could give us some interesting details.  What direction can we expect in the second term?  Will Bush become a little bit more multilateral, as you were alluding to?  Or will he go back to the beginning of the time after 9/11?  Will there be more carrots or more sticks, and what about a possible reemergence of the neocons?

MS. ROBBINS:  You know, this is the other party game right now, which is is Bush 2 going to be Reagan 2, and, you know, if it's that, who's going to play the Gorbachev role in it, the one who tames him and brings him along?

You know, if Tony Blair falls, he's going to be a rather lonely guy out there, he'll be left with Alexander Klosnevski and Vladimir Putin which is--

MR. FORTIER:  And John Howard.

MS. ROBBINS:  Right.  Right.  He does get Howard, that's true, but it's really a long way away and the time zone thing is really hard for the phone calls.

You know, since I don't know what Bush has learned, I don't know what message he's taken from his experiences.  I know what the message that the permanent bureaucracy has taken from the experience, which is we went too far out on a limb by ourselves.  You know, we bullied and the world took it for a while and now it's really lonely out there in Iraq.

So I think the bureaucracy and not just the bureaucracy of the State Department but also the bureaucracy of the NSC, would like to see this a much more engagement-oriented second term, and they've made more of an effort.

One of the problems and one of the constraints is that even if they did reach out--and Kerry's going to have this problem if he's elected.  Even if they did reach out, Old Europe is not really prepared to help very much, and yeah, there's a lot of talk about engaging on Iran, and the grand bargain, and things of that sort, but when you ask them, You going to send troops to help Kerry? the answer is no.  Certainly not going to send troops to help Bush.

So while Bush may come in with some expectation of trying to be more multilateral and certainly the world would require him to be because it's lonely and we've a lot of very hard things to deal with, you're going to constantly be bumping up against Iraq where nobody really wants to help him.

Now does he learn from that that he made a mistake in Iraq and he should be much more multilateral, six-party talks have real content in North Korea, really work with the U-3 on Iran?  Maybe he'll learn that message or maybe he'll get so pissed off about Iraq because nobody's going to help him, that he'll go the other way.

So I can't answer your question but I can tell you I spent a lot of time asking it.

MR. FORTIER:  Right here.

QUESTION:  Hi.  Bill Douglas, Knight Ridder newspapers.  You both mentioned the window of opportunity in the second term, in fifth year, sixth year.  How much of that will be complicated by the fact that the president has not picked a successor for him?  I mean, Dick Cheney has said he's not going to run for president and so you have an open, potential presidential split on the Republican side.  How much will that complicate what Bush can get done in a second term?

MR. MANN:  I think it's a complication as the years of a second term go on but not much of a problem at the beginning.  Frankly, the problem at the beginning is the policy inheritance.  If Bush is serious about really wanting to begin to move on the ownership society, you can make some additional marginal changes with tax policy that continues the move to reduce or eliminate taxes on unearned income, but it costs bucks to do it and we have huge deficits that will almost certainly get larger.

We have a problem of needing to have a fix on what's called the AMT, the alternative minimum tax, that brings more and more middle class households into its minimum tax, thereby eliminating the value of the tax cuts that are going into effect.

The Social Security reform, enormously complicated.  The two complications that seldom get discussed are one, the only way to make it work is to lower the guaranteed benefits for those who partake in a voluntary program of setting aside part of their payroll tax into private accounts, and the transition costs.  Both of those pose enormous obstacles and the chance of really making progress on that are limited.

Making permanent the tax cuts that exist, for the most part, since we had the extender already in the fourth of five tax cuts, won't have an immediate impact but there are restless Republican fiscal conservatives who are beginning to get very uneasy about the red ink as far as the eye can see.

So my own personal view is that the problems Bush will face in a second term with his domestic policy agenda are overwhelmingly constrained by substantive realities and not by the kind of political obstacles that will appear, like the scramble for the Republican nomination in 2008.

MS. SIMENDINGER:  Can I just add real quickly to this?  Tom's colleague, Paul Light, in a story that I was doing, had mentioned something I thought was really interesting, and that is that there is a sense that the day after the election is concluded the war begins, and that there is a lot of pent-up resentment among members of the president's own party about his control over the entire agenda, what happens, the money, the money that goes into races, and that the sense of control that this White House and campaign have wanted to have for four years will break out after the president's future is no longer in question.

So it will be interesting if Paul's theory is right.  Grover Norquist says that it's terrific, that there is no heir apparent because what will happen is that all these governors out in the states are going to be competing immediately, the day after the election, to raise their hand and say I'm the most acceptable conservative and will be actually the engines of conservative movement out in the states, that will then push Congress.  That it will come from outside of Washington for another three, four, five years, and that that is actually to the good of the party and that the president's wisdom in picking Cheney, just on that score, will turn out to be very profitable for the party.

MR. FORTIER:  Why don't we move to the back here.  Back left.

QUESTION:  Thank you.  Louis Knott, IDPA.  There's been some speculation that Colin Powell  might consider the presidency of The World Bank which will become vacant in a few months.

Have you had any discussion about where he might go on the soft side of international relations and be able to make some impact?  The president seems to have an interest, with his Millennium Challenge Fund, in doing something in the development area.

MR. FORTIER:  We have a panel coming up, How Capitol Hill would govern The World Bank.

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS:  You know, I was Wolfensohn and Powell together at the White House's corespondents dinner, and they were playing with each other, you know, Wolfensohn like was taking a piece of paper out of his coat and handing it to Colin Powell and saying Will you sign your contract now, and they went ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, as is their wont.

You know, the talk is that his old office has been repainted and it's waiting for him where he is.  He's going to start wearing a little wagon again.  You know, if you look at Powell just this week, it really is intriguing, cause he's been, you know, at times, a very passive and frustrated Secretary of State and then he sort of wakes up and gets very aggressive and excited again and tries to do good, because that's really what he wants to do, is he wants to do good, and he's gone out to Asia, it's like a week and a half before the election and he's trying to revive the six-party talks.

I mean, there's something sort of sweet about it, and there's a certain pathos to it, and, you know, is there that faint possibility that he imagines himself even staying as Secretary of State because of all the good he could do in a second term?

I mean the guy is--you know--he's used to sacrifices.  I know he wants to do good.  Whether it'll be on the international or on the domestic--I mean, let's not forget that before he came in as Secretary of State he was very, very focused on the issues of urban youth and volunteerism and making the place better.

And so he could go either way.  What I do know is he's probably not going to need to go out and make money.

MR. FORTIER:  I'm going to take one more question.  Before I take the question, let me thank a few people.  I know if you wait till the end, people start to leave the room, and there are a few people who really made this possible.

Chris Trenler [ph], Brian O'Keefe, Matt Wile [ph], Marisa Armoni [ph], but most of all, Kimberly Spears who has put together this event and tomorrow's.  So thank you and thank you for tomorrow.

Let me take one more question I've got in the back here, with the notebook, and then we will conclude our session.

QUESTION:  Hi.  Seth Linden, NBC News channel.  As you know, when President Bush came into office, one of the thing that he made a priority was his energy policy.  He said I want a big energy policy, he talked about drilling in Alaska, drilling in ANWR.  He still talks about it on the campaign trail but for all intents and purposes the energy bill is dead.

What do you see in the next term?  Is that possible?  Is it possible that drilling ANWR could ever happen or this is a "done deal"--it's dead?

Mr. MANN:  My own view is that the political obstacles to the president's energy proposals will remain in place in the Senate after the election and what he is--if he is reelected president, he is likely to do what he has not been willing to do beforehand, which is to break it up into more palatable pieces so that some parts of the plan can go forward.

But I think you will find a second Bush term faces at least the level of political obstacles that he faced on some of these second tier issues, and possibly more as a consequence of restiveness among Republicans.

MR. FORTIER:  Okay.

I'm going to remind you that we have the parallel session tomorrow at 10:15 here at AEI again, How Would John Kerry Govern?  We thank you all for coming and the session is adjourned.

[END OF TAPED RECORDING.]

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