EEUU

La tarea urgente de Bush: Calmar la creciente impaciencia del público

Autor: Richard W. Stevenson

Fecha: 29/10/2003

Traductor: Celeste Murillo, especial para P.I.

Fuente: New York Times

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 — Early on Tuesday morning, as many Americans were scanning newspaper headlines about the latest wave of deadly bombings in Iraq, President Bush met with his press secretary and his communications director in the Oval Office. He told them, aides said, that he wanted to hold a full-scale news conference a few hours later.
The idea had been under consideration for several weeks, but it was only after the attacks in Baghdad on Monday that Mr. Bush decided to take his message directly to the voters and the world.
For weeks, while opinion polls showed diminished support for his postwar leadership, he had accused the press of filtering out good news from Iraq and overplaying the bad.
The decision reflects how urgent it is for the White House to keep public opinion about Iraq from deteriorating to the point that it could limit the president's policy choices and threaten his chances for re-election.
With Election Day just over a year away, Mr. Bush will come under increasing pressure to start showing results in Iraq and bringing troops home. But, faced with an evolving threat that will require military flexibility, he also may be counting on an electorate patient enough to deal with what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld now calls a "long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The president will be called on to show results for the $87 billion that Congress is close to granting him for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As long as Iraq remains Topic A, Mr. Bush may have to struggle to focus public attention on an issue that might otherwise dominate the political landscape: the rapidly improving economy, a subject on which he got not a single question at the news conference.
And despite his efforts to remain above the partisan fray, he will inevitably have to begin responding to the increasingly unified Democratic attacks on his handling of postwar Iraq.
White House officials said Mr. Bush was not just speaking to voters at home. They said he was also addressing Iraqis who might wonder about the American commitment to ensuring them a chance for a peaceful future, and governments weighing whether it was worthwhile to support the United States in Iraq with money and military forces.
"At these moments of testing, where the terrorists try to create chaos and fear, where they want America to blink, it's very important for the American public and the Iraqi people to hear that we are resolved to see this through," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director.
"He was more inclined to do it after the events of the last 48 hours," Mr. Bartlett said of Mr. Bush's decision after the bombings to call a news conference. "When there are significant events like this, both good and bad, tough days as well as good days, it's important, it's the role of the president, to put it into context."
Mr. Bush, who returned on Friday from a grueling weeklong trip through Asia, seemed tired throughout the 48-minute question and answer session in the Rose Garden, and his responses often sounded more dutiful than passionate. He stumbled over his lines at times, and his usual good-natured jousting with reporters occasionally turned snippy.
Despite his longstanding attempts to cast his foreign policy as conducted without regard to polls or domestic politics, he was drawn into rare comments about the electoral implications of a drawn-out conflict in Iraq.
Mr. Bush said he expected the American people to be patient because they were "able to differentiate between politics and reality," suggesting that he would cast criticism of his leadership as partisan and unfounded.
On Monday, Mr. Bush suggested that the latest violence in Iraq was a sign of progress, saying that "the more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react."
That formulation left even some Republicans wincing, and he recalibrated it on Tuesday, saying terrorists "are targeting the very success and freedom we're providing to the Iraqi people."
But the president made it clear that he saw his strategy as slowly but surely proving successful, and said he was looking forward to defending it "right in the mix" of election-year politics.
"I'll say that the world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership, and America is more secure," Mr. Bush said, describing how he will run on his record. "That will be how I'll begin describing our foreign policy."
Democrats scoffed.
"This president appears to lack the leadership skills required to do what is necessary to successfully stabilize and reconstruct Iraq before the window of opportunity closes," Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a statement.
"Instead," Mr. Dean said, "President Bush seems content to pursue the current flawed plan, unwilling to do what is necessary to encourage our friends and allies to assist, incapable of taking the steps necessary to expedite the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis, and content to direct billions of dollars to special interests like Halliburton."
White House officials said Mr. Bush's slide in the polls appeared to have stabilized, although no survey results have yet been made public that would gauge American opinion since the most recent spate of attacks in Baghdad.
Mr. Bartlett said the White House was comfortable with the state of public opinion about Iraq "considering the climate we're in."
The question, now, is whether Mr. Bush can improve the climate.