How Would George W. Bush Govern in a Second Term?

August 31, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MS. SCHALL:  I'm Ellen Schall.  Delighted to welcome you to NYU.  I'm dean of NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.  We're delighted to have this incredibly talented panel here with us and glad that so many of you made it south of 14th Street during the Republican convention.

We taped Gwen Ifill, Washington Week in Review, on Friday.  We have this panel today.  We're doing another session on catastrophe preparedness, unfortunately one of the things New York is expert in now.  And we're delighted to be part of the conversation around this important convention, particularly on this question of how Bush would govern in a second term.

My job here is just to welcome you and then to introduce you to one of our most wonderful professors, whom we were able to recruit from Washington last year, who spends part of his time at the Brookings Institution, a sponsor of this along with AEI, the American Enterprise Institute.  Paul Light, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service.  Paul?

[Applause.]

MR. LIGHT:  It's a real pleasure to introduce this event, in part because when I was at the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, the public charity formerly known as a private foundation, we funded this Transition to Governing Project with Tom and Norm and a number of partners.  At that time, we were also doing the Presidential Appointments Initiative--and Senator Thompson is the proud author of the 2000 Presidential Transitions Act--which is the last time we tinkered with the presidential transitions process.  We did okay.  Bush only set the modern record for the slowest transition in history by two months, so we slowed down the slowdown.

SENATOR THOMPSON:  We'd call that a raging success.

MR. LIGHT:  Yes.  It's particularly nice to be able to introduce Senator Thompson, with whom we worked so closely over the years.  I miss you terribly.  There's nobody in Washington to sit down and talk about internal controls, consolidated financial statements--

SENATOR THOMPSON:  Understandably.

MR. LIGHT:  Senator Thompson was a tireless advocate of government reform.  And while he has moved on, we still miss him.

I do want to tell Ellen that I did come to NYU because I love this school and I love Wagner and it's a great place to be, but honestly, I moved up here to be closer to you.  I am available for small parts.

MR.       :  [Off microphone, inaudible.]

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT:  Well, it's interesting you'd say that.  I was offered a part as a corpse, but under a sheet.

MR.       :  But you'd have to be quiet.

[Laughter.]

MR. LIGHT:  You know me too well.  So I won't delay this any further.  I'm very proud that Tom and Norm are continuing on this project.  It's got long legs.  It was a pleasure to support and it's a pleasure to see hosted here at Wagner.

So, welcome to the panelists and welcome to our colleagues in the audience.  Tom?  Norm?

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Thanks so much, Paul.  I'm Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, along with Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution.  We have for the past five years focused on governing and the transition to governing as we move into presidential elections.  We did a series of panels that the Pew did sponsor for the 2000 election.  Now, with the sponsorship of the Knight Foundation, we're doing another series of panels on how John Kerry would govern if he were elected and how Bush would govern in a second term.

This is the second in this series.  The first we did at the Democratic convention.  The next will be, actually, a double panel on both candidates down at the first presidential debate--the day before, actually--on September 29th in Miami.

And of course a part of this is an attempt to focus on the kinds of things that don't get the appropriate attention during the course of a campaign, which tends to look at the horse race or sometimes simply at the issue positions of candidates, which may not have a great deal of relevance to what could actually happen in a governing climate.

And we're hopeful as well, frankly, that we can add to the maturity level of the process out there so that if candidates actually focus on what they might do in a presidential term or in a second term, that they won't be attacked for being presumptuous, because the planning should start long before and should be done in some detail so that the transition is an effective one.

But these are also sets of issues that are of extraordinary relevance to voters and to the rest of the world as we think about who might be the president of the United States and how they might be able to deal with the climate, the issues, the agenda--what style they would use, what people they would bring in, and so on.

So we have quite a remarkable panel with us today of journalists who cover President Bush, of people who've worked with him and observed him over many, many years from his time in Texas to his years in Washington.  Let me introduce them briefly.

Just starting closest to me, Dan Balz is the national political correspondent at the Washington Post, where he has been for 22 years, including times as national editor and southwest Texas bureau chief, and worked at the National Journal in high school, right--just after high school.  And also at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

David Gergen is Public Service Professor of Public Leadership and Director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University, the Kennedy School, over the past three decades.  Of course, he served as a White House advisor to four presidents--presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton.  He has been a journalist at U.S. News, has done an enormous range of other things, including for a time being a colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of Public Opinion magazine--the late lamented Public Opinion magazine--and is a distinguished commentator on American politics and on the world.

Jon Kyl is senator from Arizona, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, a member of the finance and judiciary committees, among other things, where he is chair of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security; one of the acknowledged leading experts on defense and foreign policy, among other things; came to the Senate in 1994, after four terms in the House of Representatives.

John Cornyn is senator from Texas, elected in 2002; before that, serving as attorney general of Texas and, before that, as a district court judge and a Supreme Court justice in Texas.  And coming to the Senate, he is the chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Judiciary Committee where, among other things, he has become the Senate's leader on issues of continuity in government, and has done great national service on that score.

SENATOR CORNYN:  Norm is completely objective.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  We do have a little distance to go on that one.

Fred Thompson is perhaps best known as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.  Does a little TV on the side.  But of course first came to great national attention on the Watergate Committee, but moved on from there to a distinguished career in public service in the United States Senate where, among other things, he led the investigation into campaign finance abuses in the 1996 campaign, and was a driving force toward campaign finance reform that moved forward.  But has dealt with the widest range of issues, and was chair, as Paul mentioned, of the Governmental Affairs Committee, where he was a driving force for governmental reform in a whole host of areas.

Maura Reynolds is White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.  Before that, she served for six years in Moscow and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her coverage of Chechnya, which involved a great deal of significant danger to herself.  So coming back to cover the White House has been an interesting process.  My own view is that, after six years in Russia, she should be covering the House of Representatives, but the White House will do.

So let me turn to Tom to get our panel under way.

MR. MANN:  Thank you very much, Norm.  Let me first mention that, thanks to the Knight Foundation, which has seamlessly and gracefully, unlike some of the U.S. Olympic relay teams, taken the baton from the Pew Charitable Trusts and is supporting a continuation of these panels on how the presidential candidates would govern.

We have a terrific panel here, and I want jump right into it.  I also thought I would point out we also have a tall panel, a remarkably tall panel.  Make of that what you will.  It probably means we have at least presidential candidates here in the future.

The question before us is if President Bush is fortunate to be reelected, how will he govern in his second term?  I think we want to talk about his goals, about opportunities and constraints, about the kind of coalitional strategy he might develop in working with Congress, the staffing changes, what we've learned about his leadership style and whether that will remain the same; the lessons from the first term that might be applied to the second; if there might be anything more in the way of a mandate than there was after the extraordinarily close elections of 2000, and whether, with foreign policy such a central focus of the administration after 9/11, whether we have any hints of how that policy is either being reinforced or is beginning to evolve in different ways.

But to get us started, I wanted to ask David Gergen if he could some observations about second-term presidents in general.  We've had Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan recently.  The Nixon two-term presidency was cut short.  We have to go back to Dwight Eisenhower and then FDR before him, and then all the way back to Woodrow Wilson and William McKinley.  I'm not going to give you a quiz on William McKinley--that's for Carl Rove, David--but tell us about the opportunities of a second term, of the challenges and whether in general these periods have tended to be productive or not.

MR. GERGEN:  Thank you, and good morning.
Let me join everyone here on the panel in saying how delighted we are to be here at NYU, especially with the good folks who are now running this aspect of it.  I'm privileged to be here on this panel as a--the call came, and they said "Tom and Norm," and I said I don't care who the panel is, I'll do it.  And it turned out to be--once again, they've produced this magic of a terrific panel.  So I feel very privileged to be here.

Whoever governs in the next four years is going to find it a tough presidency.  The problems that face the incoming president are daunting no matter what your political identification may be.  But I think that the tales from the past are cautionary for a second Bush term.  Tom cited, I think, seven presidents we've had in the 20th century who served two terms or tried to serve terms or elected to two terms, and no single one has had an outstanding second term.  Second terms tend to be less productive and more anguished than first terms.  Presidents often establish their place in history in their first terms, not in their second terms.

I would say there are probably four characteristics that one finds in second terms.

First is there's a tendency, as Dick Neustaff [ph] used to write about, for a president, and his staff in particular, to be overcome by hubris at the beginning of a second term.  You feel like, you know, you've beaten the other side twice in a row, that the rules may not quite apply to you, that you somehow have this heroic status or super status.  And you make mistakes as a result.  The most glaring and obvious is Franklin Roosevelt with his court-packing plan in 1937, and it really changed the nature of his presidency.  The New Deal began to end in the first and second years of his second term, '37-'38.  Alan Brinkley has written a very good book on how that all came to an end.

The second characteristic is, of course, that the in-party tends to lose seats massively in the sixth year.  There's been a history of the out-party--this is when there's an accumulation of ills and angers or resentments about one thing and another, the out-party tends to be able to build itself up in that sixth year, and that's when they begin to come knocking on the door for a presidential election two years down the road and they tend to make a lot of inroads against the majority.  That's when Franklin Roosevelt went to the country in 1938, to campaign to try to purge the Democratic Party of its conservatives.  And he got his head handed to him.  It was one of his worst political defeats and one of his worst mistakes was to try to purge his party of the Southern Democrats during the primary season.

There is also a tendency, unfortunately, for scandal to hit during a second term.  The most obvious example is Richard Nixon, who was engulfed by scandal.  But Ronald Reagan had his Iran-Contra affair in his second term.  And of course it snapped something.  It was so precious to Reagan, and that was the trust that the American people had in him as an individual.  He spent the last two years--he slipped into the Iran-Contra scandal.  I think the recovery from the Iran-Contra scandal is a case study in damage control and how to recover from when you make a bad mistake.  It's just a wonderful story.  David Abshire has got a book coming out on his role advising Reagan.  Reagan had enormously good instincts for recovery from that.  By the end, he was a much more productive president and actually was governing.  He brought in the new team, he cleaned house, did a lot of the good things.  And then, of course, Bill Clinton.  We don't need to retell that story.

And finally, the second term tends to be one of flagging energy, especially toward the end.  But if a president goes into a second term lacking a mandate, as they often do--they often run on their accomplishments in the first term and they're not as clear about what the second term might be--they don't have that kind of energy going in.  They tend to have appointed the people they like or know the best in their first terms.  A lot of those people are burned out.  They go into a second and sometimes a third team.  Reagan went from Baker-Meese-Deever to Don Regan.  And it was a wholly different kind of presidency there for a little while.  And then he got a third team in with Howard Baker and Ken Duberstein and Colin Powell, and he began to revive toward the end.

But there is this question of staff, of turnover, of a lack of a mandate.  Many of the things that you originally wanted to do in the office you did the first term.  What you came to office to do you tended to do in the first term.  So there is a-- Are there some exceptions?  Are some things accomplished that are very good?  Yeah, Reagan got tax reform through in '86.

But if you look at it--McKinley died.  Woodrow Wilson wound up, you know, coming home from Versailles and having the Senate blocking him and then he had a stroke.  FDR never would have been reelected had it not been for the Nazi jackboots, you know, marching across Europe.  Eisenhower spent most of his second term, you know, he was sick a lot, he didn't accomplish a lot in that second term.  Reagan had a very uneven second term compared to a first-rate first term.  Now, one can argue that the Cold War began to end in the second term of Reagan.  There is an argument on the foreign policy side, and that's where you can sometimes be more productive.  And Bill Clinton, you know, was engulfed by a lot of the problems that hit him, with Monica and so forth.  So it's not been a happy pack.

Now, having said that--

MR. MANN:  I think we should call the whole thing off.

[Laughter.]

MR. GERGEN:  I just want to say history is cautionary on this.  But I just would say one thing about George Bush that you should -- There's one other precedent, remember.  We all thought that the in-party in a first term always loses seats in the first mid-term election.  The only exception to that, really, had been FDR in '34.  And who's been the guy who broke the rule since then?  It was George W. Bush in his first mid-term elections.  So history is a guide, but it's not a guarantee.  A lot depends on the judgment and the quality of people he brings to him and the other things.  It's not--there are no obvious roadmaps here, but there are cautionary tales and cautionary signs as you go into a second term.
  MR. ORNSTEIN:  Thanks, David.  We ended at least on that optimistic note that was the hallmark of the convention last night.

Now that we've--and we'll cover, I think, a lot of this ground going from the general principles that David so brilliantly laid out to the specifics.  But let's first talk about what we can learn from Bush's past experience.  In the first set of sessions that we did four years ago, we focused very heavily on Bush-as-governor and what we could learn from that about Bush's presidency.  I think much that we thought we would learn did not prove to be the case.  He governed as president in a very different fashion.

But we can still go back to it, and we have a couple of people here who covered Bush as governor and who knew him extremely well.  And of course there were two terms as governor.  Let me ask John Cornyn, who has been close to George W. Bush certainly since he began his political career and who served with him in governance in Texas.  Talk a little bit about Bush as governor, the first term versus the second term there; but also why the style of governance has been so different in Washington and whether we could imagine that continuing.

SENATOR CORNYN:  Thank you, Norm, and Tom.  It's good to be here with you.  I'm glad you introduced me because I think people were wondering who is that sitting between Jon Kyl and Fred Thompson?

And it's good to be back at NYU.  I came here a couple of times for appellate judge seminars NYU Law School has, which are known internationally and excellent.

Well, I think that in many ways what you see is what you get with George W. Bush.  I first met him in 1990, actually, when I was running for statewide election to the Texas Supreme Court.  We elect judges in Texas still--something to do with Reconstruction, I think.  And he helped me at that time.  Clearly he was surveying the field for his political future and chose to take on a very popular governor--Ann Richards--at the time, who was, as I say, very popular and looked to be unbeatable.  So he's not afraid of a challenge.  He's not afraid of competition.  Indeed, I think in many ways he's a very competitive person to the bone, whether it's sports or politics or whatever.  He likes a good challenge, and I think you will see him continue to rise to the challenge as we approach November 2nd.

I think in many ways, of course, his term as governor was one where he talked about he wanted to be, when he came to Washington, a uniter, not a divider.  And certainly that was exemplified by his term as governor.  Part of it was of necessity, because the Democrats controlled the legislature.  The speaker of the house was a Democrat, the lieutenant governor, which is arguably the most powerful position in Texas politics--Bob Bullock--was a Democrat.

But the president, then-governor, had breakfast with these gentlemen every week.  They developed strong personal relationships.  And one thing that I've learned over the last 20 years is that relationships tend to dominate party affiliation, tend to dominate a lot of the other things that divide us, and I think those strong relationships served him well.  And I think that was part of his legacy as governor.

What we saw as governor is he identified just a very small number of issues, maybe four issues.  I was trying to write them down here, and I'm afraid my mind is failing me a little bit.  I haven't had enough coffee yet this morning.  But certainly he identified a set of priorities that he wanted to accomplish as governor, like tort reform was a big one.  In 1995, we had the historic tort reform session.  Texas had gotten a bad reputation both in the judiciary and because of our very expansive laws as sort of a lawsuit haven for the world.  Indeed, international litigation.  There was a famous case out of Costa Rica where Costa Rican farmworkers were exposed to some pesticide and decided to sue where?  In Texas, because we had a very wide open legal system, which certainly allowed that.

Education reform and reading in particular was one of his big initiatives as governor.  It's one that you saw carried forward in the presidency to No Child Left Behind.  A very strong believer in educational standards and testing and accountability, and something that the rest of the nation who in some places had not had a tradition of that, as we have had now in Texas for awhile, have had a hard time dealing with because standards and accountability would mean that some people won't meet the standard.  And they don't like that.  They tend to take it personally, and "somebody's criticizing me" when in fact what we're trying to do focus on educational development for the children.

But the personal style of the governor and now president has always been one of surrounding himself with bright, talented, strong people.  He's an extremely self-confident individual.  It offends some people.  They tend to think it's arrogance.  But he is confident about who he is and what he believes in and what his fundamental principles of governance are.  And you see him surrounding himself also with very strong people as president of the United States, the extremely distinguished and long-experienced cabinet, the vice president.  For a weaker personality, you know, that would be a hard thing to do.  But he is, as I've seen described as perhaps one of America's first CEO presidents.  He's a businessman, he's used to surrounding himself with strong people, getting the best and brightest to advise him, and then having them present to him, okay, what are the options available to me; and then ultimately reserving that choice, that judgment on what the policy of the government will be to himself.

Finally, I would say that in Washington he had some initial successes in terms of this bipartisan pragmatic approach with No Child Left Behind.  I know he joked--he said, How am I going to tell the folks in the coffee shop in Crawford, Texas, that I've just joined hand-in-hand with Teddy Kennedy to pass No Child Left Behind?  And got a big yuk out of it, of course.  And of course it was a little surprising he had to explain to folks back in Texas how that could be possible.  But he had a tradition of that--Bob Bullock and Pete Laney and a Democratic legislature.

Then somewhere along the way I think what the president encountered was a wall of partisanship and hostility unlike anything we have previously experienced, or he had experienced in Texas.  He wasn't a babe in the woods, he wasn't naive because of course his dad had been in the White House before.  But I think perhaps even the hostility that David mentioned in 2002, where the president was able to accomplish something that very rarely happens--and that is the party in power is able to actually increase the membership in the Senate; we got the majority of the Senate back, thank goodness--but I think that was met with the kind of hostility and shock and surprise on the part of the opposition party that really contributed to the degeneration of relationships.

And indeed, Washington, as I'm told now being a veteran of two years in Washington, D.C., is one where relationships--and that's been my experience--are very important, but it's hard to build relationships in this modern environment--including among our colleagues, I would say, Jon and Fred--because people tend to be so driven by getting to Washington to vote and then going home and very little of the sort of relationship-building experiences both within the Senate and Congress, but also within the administration, that's important to good governance.

MR. MANN:  Thank you, Senator.

Dan, could I just--one more minute on the Texas experience and thinking the first to the second term.  Dan, you covered George Bush when he was thinking about running for president, which seemed to have occurred soon after he was reelected.  Did that shift in focus to a national presidential campaign render any lessons that we might draw from his second gubernatorial term sort of irrelevant to what he would face here in Washington?  Or do you thing there's something we can glean from that experience?

MR. BALZ:  Tom, I think it's a hard question to answer.  I was on the panel four years ago in Philadelphia, where we looked very hard at the Texas model, and I think all of us, if we were to go back and look at that transcript, would be sorry to see what a lot of us were predicting at the time.  Except for one point, and I think that was that everybody recognized that Washington and Texas had completely different political cultures.  And as Senator Cornyn pointed out, George Bush ran into that in Washington and I think it is the basic reason, apart from 9/11, that he's operated in a different model in Texas and in Washington.

If you go back and look at the Texas experience, I think a couple of things are noteworthy.  One is that running for governor the first time set forward the model for, I think, the way Bush likes to operate, which is, as Senator Cornyn said, a very focused agenda, extraordinary discipline as a candidate, and once in office, a pretty relentless focus on getting those things done that he talked about he would do in the campaign.

I think what changed as he went into the second term was that he went--he was beginning a quick transition from being a governor to being the guy who wanted to be president. I think it reshaped what he wanted to do in a second term as governor.  Part of what he was doing was getting ready to run for president and therefore thinking about how he would nail down the nomination against more concentration on trying to get a tax cut plan through.  But the basic operating style he had in Texas worked effectively because of the relationship he had with Bob Bullock.  I think if Bob Bullock had not existed in Texas, we might have had a different relationship between Bush and the Texas Democrats.

Now, he had a good relationship with Pete Laney, the speaker of the house down there, but Bullock was certainly the key to that.  And if you fast-forward to Washington--I've always thought, and this is pure speculation and take it for what it's worth, but I've always thought he came to Washington believing and thinking he could find a Bullock.  Not quite the same because there's nobody who, on the Democratic side, had the kind of power that Bullock had who also shared, in many ways, Bush's sort of conservative instincts.  I always thought the early outreach to John Breaux was the effort, that he saw in Breaux somebody that he thought he could do business with and who he thought could be a bridge to bring some other Democrats along.  I don't think they were under the illusion that they could charm half of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate or the House, but that if they had some allies, they could get something done.

I think the other thing to remember about Bush is he is an extraordinarily competitive person and I think he is a person who, when he feels he is not well treated, responds in kind.  And a wall goes up.  So to the extent that he felt that there was a wall going up with the Democrats or the Democrats didn't treat him with the respect he felt he deserved, I think whatever enthusiasm or motivation he had to try to create the relationships that he had in Texas quickly disappeared.  So I think that's the reason that Texas and Washington have turned out quite different.

Again--we haven't talked about it that much, but 9/11 is a whole nother piece of that.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Let's explore some of these areas a little bit further.  Certainly there's a difference between being a governor in Texas, which is a weak governorship by most national standards--it's more a chief executive officer, while the lieutenant is the chief operating officer--and being a president, where your formal powers may not be that great but where you have much, much more leverage.

But you also have this model, as John Cornyn said, where every week he was lunching with key Democrats.  And clearly, he was wandering around the halls, going into the offices of the Democrats, bonding and building those personal relationships.  In Washington the first several months, we had almost none of that.  But then we had September 11th.  And we had this image, which Tom Daschle is now using in his ads in South Dakota, of that warm embrace with the president after the speech on September 20th and the feeling, at least on the part of many outside observers and a lot of the Democrats in Congress, that now it was going to be more like Texas--we were going to have these regular meetings.  And it all fell apart.

Why, John Cornyn?

SENATOR CORNYN:  Well, I was fascinated to hear how Dan described it, and I don't disagree with anything Dan said.  I think 9/11 did change everything, but you also see, I think, part of Bush's compassion and his humanity.  He is a fierce competitor, but he's also easily touched and even brought to tears.  He's not afraid to show who he is.  He's very, like I said, very self-confident.  Sometimes that's a two-edged sword for him because people view that as something negative.  But I think he was not met with the kind of reciprocal response in Washington that he had been able to get out of Bob Bullock and to a lesser extent Pete Laney in Austin.

And the truth is, it's just such a different place.  I mean, one of the revelations, I think, to a lot of people is you can control the House, of course, by having 51 percent of the congressmen.  You can't control the Senate with 51.  And I think to some extent the people said, well, it's a Republican president, a Republican Congress, and a Republican Senate, why aren't they getting this stuff done?  Well, the problem is because we don't have 60 votes for cloture to allow us to have an up or down vote on jurisdictional confirmation, on passage of an energy bill, on a lot of these things on his agenda.  I think it's been enormously frustrating.

MR. MANN:  Senator Kyl and then Senator Thompson, just to follow up on this, was a sustained government of national unity possible after 9/11?  That is, certainly some critics say that those several months were so remarkable, that we somehow ended, at least temporarily, the polarization of the parties, the bitterness.  We had joint leadership meetings.  But then it began to fragment.  Certainly it was the lead-up to the 2002 elections, it was the lead-up to the war in Iraq, policy no doubt had something to do with it.  But do you think that it was even possible for us to move out of this 50-50 situation, evenly balanced parties deeply split ideologically?  Did George Bush have an opportunity or was he really playing the cards the only way he reasonably could play them?

SENATOR KYL:  First of all, I think it's remarkable that, as John Cornyn said, George W. Bush is somebody who is pretty transparent.  You know what you're getting with him.  That's why I think every one of the observations that have been made here are accurate.  We know who he is and we know what his plans were and why they've been disrailed.

This last question is a very interesting one, but let me just go back for a moment.  As in war, presidential plans are probably best characterized by the phrase "the best laid plans" are going to go awry in one way or another for one reason or another.  When the president came in, he had a few top priorities that he wanted to focus on and he had this notion, just as his father had had when he came in, with the kinder and gentler notion, that he could actually bring Washington closer to the Texas model than it had been.  And those hopes were fairly quickly dashed.  There was no single even after September 11th that caused that to happen.  It was an attitude that existed long before September 11th and was building.  September 11th was a temporary way station of bipartisanship because the country had to come together right at that moment, but it didn't last very long.

I can remember, for example, that Senator Feinstein and I had tried very hard to get some Patriot Act provisions.  They weren't called that then, but we were trying to get--she's the ranking member of the Terrorism Subcommittee, and we had a whole package of proposals to try to help law enforcement deal with the issues of terrorism.  We couldn't get to first base, primarily because of a pretty partisan opposition.  As soon as September 11th occurred, we were able to get those through and a good share of those were part of the Patriot Act.  So this had started long before that.

Just a story that might be of interest to you, and it verifies what else has been said here and it might give us a little look into the future, which is obviously where we're pointed here.  The first effort of the president was his education reform.  And I--there began to be rumors that he was going to throw overboard what was to me the key component of it, which was choice in education, which I believed to be the fundamental linchpin to real education reform and quality education in this country, a free market of ideas.  A pretty scary idea.

[Laughter.]

SENATOR KYL:  And I urged the president personally not to throw that over because Ted Kennedy was asking for it.  He threw it over because Ted Kennedy was asking for it.  He was legitimately trying his hardest to create a condition in which he could work with Democrats.  I believe they took advantage of it.  He saw that eventually.  And for that reason and others, the cooperative attitude that he started out with faded fairly quickly.

I hope--and so the answer to your question, what happened after 9/11, is I think the circumstances were already in place for a continuation of the partisanship that had already begun.  You had the Jim Jeffords incident in the Senate, you had other things that occurred later.  But in any event, there was for a time a coming together and a working together, but it was destined not to last very long because of the contentiousness of the issues and the partisanship and the close division.  And as a result, it wasn't long before we were right back into the partisanship, and it became even worse with the filibuster of judges and all the rest of it.

I hope before we're done we can talk a little bit about the few priorities that he identified in his first campaign--to what extent was he successful in getting those done, what's left over, what will be emphasized in a second term, and what role the closely divided Senate and the partisanship will play in causing him to succeed or not.  And above all, the big elephant in the room, 9/11, and how that totally changed everybody's plans and how it will continue to do so.

MR. MANN:  Thank you.  That's precisely the direction we want to move in.  But first, I'd like to ask Senator Thompson to weigh in on this issue.

SENATOR THOMPSON:  I agree with Jon.  I don't think that the feeling we had right after 9/11 was destined to last.  I think it's understandable.  I don't think that, you know, politics has ever stopped, really, at the water's edge.  I think that personalities and making particular moves and saying particular things and reaching out here, there, or the other sometimes is overestimated, that people's interests, whether they're nations or whether or not they're political leaders and so forth, are very powerful things and they're not going to be swept away because of even catastrophic events.  We had a terrible time in passing the Homeland Security Bill.  It didn't pass the first time around because of the issue of civil service and government employees and so forth, and it gets down to a bedrock decision that the parties had over reform and changing a system that was created back in the '50s, essentially, to meet what we perceived to be the new world that we were living in versus the employees' interests and the union interests on the other hand.

So even under those circumstances and with an election coming up, which turned out--that bill turned out to make the difference.  But the differences were so great there, we couldn't come together and couldn't get that done.  And I think that, as Jon indicated, when you have a closely divided country and a closely divided Congress, that every little thing becomes important and could make the difference in control of that body.  And with the constant, of course, media attention we have now, it's very difficult to sustain something like that.  So I don't think any magic moves were available on either side.  I think we could have all done better, for sure, and we should strive to do that.  But I don't think it was destined to last.

In a broader sense, it seems to me like, in looking at a president like we're trying to today, you have to look at his basic tendencies and instincts on the one hand and the events that shape the president on the other.  I mean, it's hard to think back for me, you know, the 2000 presidential race, it seemed to me and many of us who looked at it at that time to be one of the most boring times to run for president imaginable.  It was a caretaker kind of a situation.  We were talking about compassion conservatism and a kinder, gentler government.  Well, you know, those are wonderful human attributes, but is this a program, you know, to launch into the 21st century with?  I mean, and of course it seems to me that Bush approached that with a basic conservatism but it wasn't much at issue.  You know, a governor--those liberal-conservative distinctions are not as apparent when you're a governor, especially a weak governor--a weak-governor state, I should say, such as Texas was.

But soon, you know, 9/11 happened.  And that, I think, kind of coalesced everything.  Everything came to the top then.  And I think you've got his response to that, of course, as we all know, which I think is getting back to a basic instinct.  I think that he's done well.  You know, I think there he's basically done the right thing.  I think the execution has not been good, but I think it's a basic issue of forward-leaning or backward-leaning in terms of a president, and analyzing intelligence and whatnot, the confusing situation that you often have in the kind of world we live in.  And I think he's forward-leaning in that respect and I think that's what we need.

I think he's not done as well, you know, with regard to some political issues that I would like to think are not part of his basic makeup.  I think that the steel importation issue, I think the prescription drug issue.  Ironically for all young folks watching this, you know, isn't it strange how things that are seemingly done for political reasons, that maybe go against the grain, turn out not to be very good either in terms of grain or politics.  And I would like to think that those lessons have been learned and in a second term that he would certainly learn from mistakes that have been made, but basically stick to his basic instincts, which I think are good ones.

MR. MANN:  Just on that point, Maura, foreign policy.  Basic instincts.  Going back to Senator Kyl.  What was his perspective on foreign policy running initially?  How did 9/11 and then the decision to go to war in Iraq and the aftermath alter that?  And does it give us some hint of what a George Bush foreign policy would be like in a second term?

MS. REYNOLDS:  Well, clearly he did not think he was going to be a foreign policy president.  I don't think any of the rest of us exactly expected that either.  We all remember that he said that he didn't believe in nation building, that he was definitely a realist in his approach, at least initially, the way he talked about foreign policy.  Although if you go back and look at his speeches and Dr. Rice's speeches-- [tape change].

[Part of discussion lost.]

MR. ORNSTEIN:  --situation that's not resolved and could get worse before it gets better, not to mention, as Fred Thompson said, something could happen somewhere else in the world.

SENATOR THOMPSON:  [Off microphone, inaudible.]

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN:  I'm trying to keep to the optimistic theme here.  Some would argue that we are spread so thin now because of the commitment we've made that we don't have the capability, for example, to send a sizable force to the Far East as a show of American resolve if there is a crisis.  How much are we constrained, beyond the Middle East, by what Bush has done in his first term?  Or how much would you see that as an opportunity, if you can solve problems in the Middle East, to have it reverberate around the world?

SENATOR KYL:  Just real quickly, it wasn't because of his policies that we've got these issues, it was because of the circumstances that we're faced with.  He didn't cause the North Koreans to build nuclear weapons and he didn't cause the mullahs to take over Iran and want to acquire nuclear weapons.  And he certainly didn't, by virtue of his bold leadership, create the situation where the Chinese want to forcibly take Taiwan.  All of those represent huge challenges to us, the Chinese ultimately the biggest.  None of them are resolvable by preemptive military action.  All of them require a strong military force, stronger than we have today.

Be a Republican in the Senate and try to get a bigger defense budget through the Democratic opposition.  It ain't easy.  So--

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Is that going to be a priority in a second term?

SENATOR KYL:  I would hope.  You've got a combination of Rumsfeld trying to do it smarter and with less versus some of the Democrats saying you're not doing enough, we need more troops and so on.  I think that's a delicious bit of, boy, painting this fence is a lot of fun, you want to come help me do it?  Because I think some folks are going to be out on a limb to then reject some of the Democratic ideas of adding to our military, which I think is a very good idea.  Because as you point out, we are spread so thin.  One can argue that part of the problem is that we went to Iraq and we shouldn't have and so on, and you can have a rational debate about that.  But the reality is we've got huge challenges.  We don't have enough to work, neither intelligence or military.

But we'd better have bold leadership to deal with them, rather than timidity.  We are not going to resolve all of this with diplomatic support from France and so on.  We're going to have to find ways of combining our ability to use diplomacy and sanctions and economic actions and the Proliferation Security Initiative and things of that sort, with an understanding that there is only so far the United States can go.  Our military defense is certainly an option for us, but don't get the idea that we can use our military to solve the Iranian or the North Korean issues.  Those are not like Iraq, where you can employ your military to solve the problem.

SENATOR THOMPSON:  Norm, if I could just add one point to what Jon said, and that is I think that President Bush is living with the reality of what President Bill Clinton learned in Mogadishu.  And that is one reason that the Clinton presidency withdrew from some of these international conflicts, is because he realized you can't control them.  And as General Tommy Franks has written in his excellent autobiography, he said, you know, the enemy gets a vote.  You can have the greatest of plans and the enemy gets a vote.  So you can't control foreign affairs, certainly international conflicts, the way that we politicians would like to control them, to package them, to sell them in a way that people--you get a majority of the people saying, right, that's exactly what I believe in.

So because of 9/11, because not that we attacked others but that America itself was attacked, this president had two choices.  One, is to do nothing or, number two, to do something.  And he chose to do something, which of course, I believe, is the only choice realistically he had.  But that in turn has caused engagement in places which perhaps neither he nor the American people thought we would be engaged in.  But frankly, I think it's been a success if you look at 53 million people now living at least with the hope of some semblance of freedom and representative government, where in the past they lived under bloodthirsty dictators in repressive conditions.

MR. MANN:  But choices have consequences.  They aren't dictated by events or circumstances.  The president had a choice about how much to go after in tax cuts and whether to try to make them permanent.  And over time, that's going to constrain a big government with larger defense and homeland security expenditures's conservatism.  And I guess what I was saying is not his boldness on taxes, but his decisions and policies on taxes.

Secondly, on Iraq, the president had a choice.  One choice was to use the global and national unity after 9/11 to use some interim strengthening of sanctions and containment on Saddam and to try to turn that energy in ways more directly on the terrorists and the al Qaeda.  Who knows what difference that would have made?  It may not have worked at all and we may have put off a problem.  But we're talking post-9/11 we had a real choice, because there was the possibility of building a domestic political coalition.

But now the question is are there consequences to those decisions, some positive and some negative, and how will the president find them as liberating in a second term, or as constraining?

MS. REYNOLDS:  I just wanted to follow up on what was said before and to pick up on Tom's point.

First of all, earlier when I made that comment about the Greater Middle East Initiative doesn't cost anything, I didn't mean that to suggest that it's not an a idea without merits or that that's the reason why it's being done.  I think that's the reason that it can be done, which is that you don't need armies and you don't need a lot of money.  You need diplomacy.  We have the instrumentalities for that.

The issue of what the--which we really haven't talked about much--what the constraints are on Bush in a second term is very significant.  And doing much more military action, taking on new military challenges is just not possible.  So Iraq is going to be the focus in that sense.  And, you know, the Greater Middle East Initiative, I mean, there's no question, I think, that if the Middle East were full of liberal democracies that we would be more secure and our national security problems would be a lot easier to solve.

But that said, he can't actually do it because he doesn't need an army to do it, he just needs all the other things.  So that was my only point on that.

Secondly, to Tom's question about whether the boldness of his action has had some opportunities and some constraints.  That is, I think, a very important question to ask, particularly on the Middle East initiative.  When the president talks about bringing democracy to the rest of the world, the question is is he the best spokesperson for it?  I mean, if somebody who in their minds--and I'm a working a journalist here, so this is not my opinion--but the way the question gets asked in the region is:  Somebody who wants to bring democracy at the point of a gun, is that really the kind of democracy that--does that send the message to them that we really want to send, and do they see him a really the best spokesperson for the policies and the ideals that he stands for?  Which is not to say that his views aren't genuine, but when you're looking at it from the other point of view, the question, I think, is a valid one.

And then the last thing is, some of you may know a presidential scholar named Hugh Heclo from George Mason University, who has a wonderful way of describing both the power of this president's leadership and its limitations.  And that is his boldness is something that many people find very appealing.  But, in Heclo's words, he tends to lead without teaching.  He tends to assert truths, express goals, but he, unlike an FDR or somebody else, does not really see himself as a teacher to talk to people and to convince them, to engage with them and to persuade them.  And that may have some benefits and some drawbacks, but it's also part of his leadership style.

The benefit of that is that he has a very accessible and very consistent message, and the consistency is something that many people find appealing.  Other people are turned off by the fact that it seems to be assertions without engagement along the way.

SENATOR THOMPSON:  The consequences with regard to policies, as you posed the question, I think one of the things you can point to in a second term is to the issue of spending.  Clearly something is going to have to be done.  A different focus is going to have to be taken in regard to nondiscretionary, nonmilitary spending.  We can't have things like the Farm Bill, for example.  A lot of people relate all that back to the tax cuts.  I disagree with that.  We can debate as long as we're a nation, you know, about static scoring and things like that.  But setting that aside for a minute, we clearly have to do better with regard to that.  And the fact that he's not vetoed any spending bill, I think, is an approach that's going to have to be different the next time around.

I don't think we've begun to have any idea about what homeland security expenditures are going to be like.  They're going to be much greater than anybody anticipates and they're going to be [inaudible] at the state level, local level, probably mandates on progress, enterprise [inaudible].  We've got to account for that and accommodate for that.  To me, that doesn't mean to keep taxes high.  But that's another debate.

I think you also have to ask, though, the consequences of not acting in the areas that you're talking about, because that's the other side of the coin.  What would the economy have been like had there not been tax cuts, for example?

On Saddam, one of the reasons why I think the president took the right approach there, is that it's my opinion that we were losing the Gulf War, that after a little while Kuwait would have been very small potatoes in light of what was going on in that part of the world.

In terms of sanctions, you mentioned that perhaps people would have a different approach.  I think the people who did not see Saddam as a part of the terrorist problem would have still not seen Saddam as part of the terrorist problem after 9/11.  Our allies wanted to trade with him, they were doing business with him, sanctions were failing, the Oil For Food Program was being corrupted, people were getting tired.  We were all getting tired.  He was thumbing his nose at the U.N. sanctions.  He would have been the new solid and, in that part of the world, a hero, having defeated us, and with his team of scientists and experts there who could have constituted whatever nuclear or weapons of mass destruction capability that they chose to have in the future--after a period of time.  So that would have, in my mind, been the consequences of not acting.  So that's the great unknown, the other side of the coin.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  One last question before we open up, and it flows directly, really, from what we've been talking about.  It occurred to me, especially when we had the quote from Tommy Franks, "The enemy gets a vote," which could reply to the Senate, I suppose.  We are in, clearly, a corrosive political environment and have been for quite some time.  It goes back a decade, but it's gotten worse, not better.  Is there any prospect of that changing for the better in the next couple of years?  Would it be different if the Senate shifted--in either case, if we end up within a vote or two?  And do you see President Bush in a second term operating differently than President Bush in a first term when it comes to relationships with Congress, including across party lines?  If it doesn't, is there any hope of getting anything done, including in the entitlement areas or even in foreign policy, other than by executive action?

MR. GERGEN:  [Inaudible.]

MR. ORNSTEIN:  We'll take you back.  The pay's a bit lower, but we'll take you back.

Anybody?

SENATOR KYL:  No.  The answer to both questions, I think, is no.  Unfortunately.  As to the first, I don't see any prospect there.  And each party looks at it differently.  The party not in power always feels repressed, and there is some reason for that.  More so in the House than in the Senate, where each senator has a great deal of power and the majority really doesn't wield as much power as people suspect.

But with respect to the bitterness and partisanship and uncivility and so on, I don't know what it's going to take to break it.  Something has to, because you can't retain the kind of free government that we have and allow it to become so uncivil that you can't have rational discourse.  I don't know what will change it, but with the Supreme Court nominations coming up, those stakes being as high as they are, if Republicans are still in the majority you'll see the biggest food fight you ever saw--not to the benefit of the U.S.

MR.       :  Does that make prospects tough for [inaudible] and for [inaudible]?

SENATOR KYL:  Yeah.  What it leads to, unfortunately, is the legislation that passes is so loaded up with pork or--I use the term advisedly, but so loaded up with benefits to everybody that nobody can vote against it.  That does not necessarily make good policy.  The old way of trying to reach a middle ground just based on ideology--well, I guess there was pork in the old days, too, but still, that's the only way that you really get a lot done.  And it's not a good way.  There's a lot of grease--

MR.         :  So why does a bold guy not veto a single bill in his entire presidency?

SENATOR KYL:  No, I think he should have.  He should have vetoed the ag spending bill.  If the highway bill gets out of control, he may well veto that.  I think it would be a good idea for him to, because, as Fred says, we can't keep spending like we are and not have--as Maura says, there will be a constraint because of the deficit issue, both on the Democrat and Republican side.  But Ronald Reagan cut taxes a lot more and went into debt a lot--well, a lot more and built up the defense.  So you can do those things at the same time.  And my vote is that, if you weigh the deficit against the GDP, it makes a lot more sense to continue to do things to keep government out of the way of our great free enterprise system so that it can create the jobs and provide the revenue to the federal government.  Eventually you get into a surplus situation and you can pay for defense buildup.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  We'll open things up.  questions?  Please identify yourself.

QUESTION:  Bruce Smith from Columbia University.

A rather kind of too technical type question, but I might as well throw it out here.  I've thought for some time that the failure of the president to have his reorganization powers--I don't know how much is still left there, but in the whole battle over the one house veto and the legislative veto, the president's decided, well, he's willing to give up his reorganization powers.

If you had some of that back, would it be easier to make some moves of efficiencies in the executive branch?  I think this Homeland Security Department is probably too big.  I think some of our colleagues at Brookings wrote about that.  If you had a little more reorganization power with some legislative view, I didn't think that was such a bad idea.  And I think constitutionally you could sustain that so long as you didn't have the one house veto.  Would a restoration of some reorganization powers assist the president in trying to accomplish--and the country--in trying to accomplish something in a second term?

MR. MANN:  That seems ready-made for Fred Thompson.

SENATOR THOMPSON:  Yes, I think it would.  I think the whole issue of government reorganization is an important one and one that most presidents just don't have time to deal with.  I guess Jon Kyl was talking about, you know, you want to do the broad sweeping things and avoid getting down into the weeds and spending all your time dealing with the operations of government.  And because of that, these departments have proliferated, they have overlapped.  There are 40-something programs now dealing with employment training and nine different agencies involved, for example.

I must say, one of the things I was going to mention in terms of a kind of a laundry list of what I would expect next time, there are some interests over at the OMB for tackling this.  And one of the things they're look at over there right now is some results-oriented approaches to try to consolidate some of these departments and so forth.  But I think they're looking in terms of trying to create another commission rather than trying to get that authority for themselves.  Because of what these gentlemen have said, there's not much chance that Congress is going to give the president any additional authority to do these things because everybody's got an ox that will be gored in the process.

Unfortunately, as I kind of say only partially in jest when I'm talking to groups, if we get any serious problem in the Congress, we create an independent commission to take it out of Congress's reach.  And apparently that's going to be the approach with regard to any of these government reorganization plans.  But I think it would be a good idea.

MR. MANN:  Senator Thompson, what about intelligence reform?  Is this something where the administration is now likely to move?  Is Congress going to do anything about itself when it comes to intelligence?  What's your reading?

SENATOR THOMPSON:  Well, this is an example of just how much it takes to make any real change.  It has taken not only 9/11 but both houses of Congress in the report that they had, other reports, and then the 9/11 Commission report and them evidently packing their bags and going around the country, and it's taken all of that to kind of get us to a point of sitting down in Congress and discussing, you know, the points on which we disagree.  And it is a tremendous job.  Who is it, Rauch, wrote Demosclerosis?  I mean, it just keeps adding on and getting bigger and more complicated.

Only a president can break through on these issues.  That's the problem.  He only has a certain amount of time to devote to these things.  The intelligence community has kind of been the president's baby all these years.  It was kind of created for him, and he doesn't have to put up with anybody else on dealing with them and so forth.  And so he's kind of kept it that way.

But only the president can cut through and get anything done.  It's going to be true in the intelligence area also.  I would like to have seen something done a little bit sooner, but the president, in getting his team together, then was faced with 9/11, difficult to do on the run with all these things going on and so forth.  But ultimately it's still going to be up to the administration.  I don't know where they really are on that, but if the president will put it on the line to get something done, something will be done.

And we should realize as we go about it that reorganization is only a part, and probably the smallest part, of the problem.  You've got to have a system of accountability and responsibility.  You've got to have the support that's there.  You've got to have a forward-leaning group of people who are not scared of Congress all the time for the wrong reasons.  You've got to have reform of Congress in the way that they deal with the intelligence agencies and get rid of all these overlapping committees.  My own opinion is they ought to have members serve on the intelligence committee and no other committees and make it up to them in some other way, and take off term limits on the intelligence committee.  All these things have got to be done if we do any good in this regard.  And we're just nibbling at the first little bit.

QUESTION:  My name is Martha Montelongo.  I'm from California.  I do talk radio in the Salinas, Monterey, and Santa Cruz area.

With regard to the president and his characteristics, or what you called the, you know, being close-minded or not open to input from other people, I think he surrounds himself--I don't know if I'm misunderstanding you, that he's decisive.

MS. REYNOLDS:  I didn't use quite those words.

QUESTION:  Well, that was how I heard it.  He's very decisive, but he does surround himself with a lot of people with a lot of different ideas.  And he does make a decision.  And when he makes his decision, he makes his decision, and he is decisive.  And I think that's kind of shockingly different from what we're used to or what we've seen in the White House for a long time, the fact that he's willing to take it on.  And then he takes ownership for it and he's accountable for it.  And I think when he has faltered, it's when he has abandoned that style and made deals, like conceding choice in education for parents--you know, really gutted the bill by trying to make friends with Teddy Kennedy or--and there have been other instances.  But if he'd stick to his principled beliefs and be the decisive leader that he is, I think we would be better off.

And the thing with taxes, the tax situation, I don't understand why--I mean, even when the Soviet Union has adopted an 11 percent flat tax because they understand that their revenue coffers were empty before they had it and now they have revenue coming in like they never dreamed, and all these other countries that were once Soviet bloc countries have adopted a flat tax--I'm not advocating a flat tax, I'm just saying it's hard to understand why this discussion about how lowering taxes actually raises government revenue has not become common knowledge.  Because it's self-evident.  I mean, it's factual.  You can go and you can prove it.  I mean, you can go and see the results.

MR. MANN:  Get to your question.

QUESTION:  Well, that is one of the things that mystifies me about the media.  But my question is regarding our foreign policy.  Why is it that we cannot--

[Laughter.]

QUESTION:  It's regarding foreign policy.  Didn't we do this in Japan and Germany after World War II?  Didn't we go in and we changed Japan from an agricultural society that it was and help build an infrastructure so that it could become a capitalist society?  I mean, we did that in Japan.  We did it in Germany.  We went in and we occupied and we reconstructed it.  Why is that something that we don't even talk about?  Is it, like, bad to talk about taking such a leadership position?  I mean, isn't that what we need to do in the Middle East now, when what we have is--there is no sense of democracy or rule of law, and if we're going to live on this very small planet, I mean, it's far better to take responsibility for--

MR. MANN:  Okay, we're going to take one more question, and then we'll get a response more generally.

QUESTION:  Bob Shadler [ph], American Committees on Foreign Relations.  My question is with respect to public diplomacy.

For 50 years we had a U.S. Information Agency whose mission was to conduct public diplomacy.  Five years ago, Congress, on a bipartisan basis, merged it into the State Department.  It seems now public diplomacy is dysfunctional.  Condi Rice, a week ago, as reported in the Washington Post, at a lecture I attended said certainly with regard to public diplomacy we're poorly organized.

We have two models, I guess, of bringing democracy to the Middle East.  One in Iraq is by force of arms and occupation, the other is by talk and programs, ostensibly public diplomacy.  Do you think in the next term public diplomacy will in any way be something more than dysfunctional?  We had one undersecretary of state for public diplomacy for one year.  The position has been unoccupied for three years.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  So let's--we have just a couple of minutes.  We'll get final comments on those areas or anything else you want to talk about.

MR. GERGEN:  Well, I think you've actually put your finger on something very important.  I couldn't agree with you more that we have done a poor job as a country in talking about what it is we are trying to achieve in ways that, hopefully, can begin to persuade and bring the hearts and minds of our--let's start with our friends--along with us, and then we can work on our enemies.

But I would be interested in the other comments.  This is sort of outside my domain, but what I'm struck by is the 24/7 news cycle and the constant demands to sort of feed the beast for content, which has given rise to all sorts of people going on TV and radio and talking about things.  And, you know, I think we all understand the phenomenon that you don't actually need to know anything about anything in order to have an opinion.  But in the nature of the 24/7 news cycle, there are people, of course, well-informed and those that are completely uninformed, and really no great differentiation made, at least on the news on a daily basis, between those two.  And so hence the value, I think, of some of the organizations that are sponsoring this event and events like this.

But I do think public diplomacy has been a failure, whether it's finding the right people or focusing on that message.  I remember going to Iraq a year ago with nine members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and General Petreus and others, Ray Ordierno up in the northern part of Iraq, talking about their successes.  And of course we've heard so much about rebuilding hospitals and schools and getting the oil infrastructure back online, the electricity up, and so forth.  And of course, the story wasn't about that.  The story was about, okay, how many casualties did we have because of improvised explosive devices, car-borne bombs and the like.  And of course that's the nature of the news.

But that dominated things to the point where, between that and Al-Jazeera, which certainly had a loud voice and we were not meeting that voice with another equally loud voice, assuming we could, and I think we've suffered for it.  America's standing in the world has suffered as a result.

MR. MANN:  Well, maybe we will close with any ruminations by our panelists about the extent of change in the principal positions of, say, foreign policy, economic policy, and if there is a second Bush term, would we expect wholesale or retail changes?  Do you have a sense of whether the look of the administration beyond the president and vice president would be quite different or much the same as it is now?

MS. REYNOLDS:  You all are looking at me.

Okay, first, a caveat.  I mean, you know, predictions are--I don't want to be held to any of this.

MR. MANN:  Especially about the future.

MS. REYNOLDS:  Yeah.  Well, there's a lot of speculation in Washington, so all of this is informed speculation.

Bush relies very much on a close set of advisors, and he trusts them very much and he will be loath to let any of them go.  I mean, you know, to wit:  Karen Hughes left the administration but has effectively still been in the administration.

On the foreign policy side, the expectation in Washington is that Colin Powell will leave with this term.  Candidates for a new secretary of state include Jerry Bremer, who the administration feels served very admirably in Iraq; Condi Rice's name is also floated for that job.  Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld--

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Jack Danforth, also.

MS. REYNOLDS:  Right.  Yes, Ambassador Danforth as well.

In the defense area, the scuttlebutt in Washington is that Secretary Rumsfeld would like to outlast Secretary Powell.  How much longer he would need to be in that office to have outlasted him is I don't know.  That remains to be seen.

It is widely believed that Condi Rice would prefer to be secretary of defense instead of secretary of state.  That is the kind of move that I think the president would really like to make, to make an African American woman a secretary of defense.  However, there are other candidates--should Secretary Rumsfeld step down--for that job who are also very strong contenders, including the homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge.

On the domestic side, I don't hear that there are so many changes anticipated.  His advisors in the White House, I think there will be some, you know, shuffling around, or at least this is the current speculation, but I don't hear any major changes being made on that side.

But other people are welcome to add their speculation.

MR.       :  Secretary of State Thompson?

SENATOR CORNYN:  I really don't have anything to add there.  I agree that it's always seemed to me that he has been extremely loyal, close with a handful of people.  I just think, you know, like David said at the beginning, the natural tendency is to start peeling off for various reasons, and I just assume that there's going to be substantial change, whether the president wants it or not.

MR. ORNSTEIN:  Well, we've scratched the surface here.  There's an awful lot more we could talk about.  But we've overstayed our panelists' welcome.  Jon Kyl had to leave for another appointment just a few minutes early, and he extended his apologies but certainly doesn't need to apologize.  As do none of these panelists for what has been a very rich, honest, and deep discussion.

I want to thank Ellen Schall and the Wagner School and Paul Light, who are joining with us in hosting this; the Knight Foundation again. and if you're in Miami, please join us for what will be an extension of this, perhaps if we can lure them, with some of the same people.

Thank you all very much.

[Applause.]