History > 2005 > USA > Politics

Karl Rove,

a visible presence again in Washington,

was the speaker Thursday to guests

at a black tie dinner given

by the Federalist Society at a Marriott Hotel,

his first major public appearance in several weeks.

Photograph: Jamie Rose

for The New York Times

Rove Is More His Old Self at the White House

NYT

11.11.2005

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/
politics/rove-is-more-his-old-self-at-the-white-house.html

With State Firmly in Their Control,

Texas Republicans Aren't Fretting

About DeLay

December 9, 2005
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Dec. 8 - With a judge now agreeing to an early 2006 trial for Representative Tom DeLay, fears of a spreading election year scandal may be rattling Republicans in Washington, but in staunchly Republican Texas the party faithful say they are standing by their man.

"It's much ado about nothing among the rank and file," said Eric Thode, the Republican Party chairman of Fort Bend County, near Houston. Mr. DeLay has represented the county in Congress since 1985.

Terry Keel, a state representative from Austin, said that as he crisscrossed Texas in his campaign against a fellow Republican, an incumbent, for a criminal appeals court judgeship, "I have not heard one person worried about Tom DeLay's effect on the party."

That is hardly surprising, political analysts say: Texas Democrats are too weak to pose much of a threat.

So whether out of the confidence of a majority, contempt for the criminal charges that many dismiss as politically motivated or healthy respect for the comeback powers of a party strongman known as The Hammer, Texas Republicans seem, for now at least, to have closed ranks behind Mr. DeLay.

"He's got this list and he's checking it twice, and he's not Santa Claus," said Bill Miller, an Austin lobbyist closely affiliated with the state Republican leadership.

Doug Schoen, a Democratic pollster, said loyalty appeared to be the message behind Vice President Dick Cheney's trip to Houston on Monday for a fund-raiser for Mr. DeLay.

"He was sending the message that 'We're staying loyal to our friends,' and the flip side was, 'You better be loyal to us,' " Mr. Schoen said.

In the latest move advancing the trial of Mr. DeLay and his two co-defendants, the Republican fund-raisers James W. Ellis and John D. Colyandro, on charges of laundering corporate contributions to legislative candidates, Judge Pat Priest told prosecutors and defense lawyers by e-mail Wednesday evening that he was "fine" with scheduling pretrial motions for the week after Christmas "and with planning a trial setting early next year."

Mr. DeLay's chief lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, has pressed for a quick trial to give Mr. DeLay a chance, when the House reconvenes in January, to regain the majority leader's position he had to give up upon his indictment in September.

Judge Priest noted that the Travis County district attorney, Ronnie Earle, had until Dec. 20 to appeal the court's ruling Monday that threw out one charge against the three - conspiracy to violate the election code barring corporate contributions to individuals - on the ground that the conspiracy statute was adopted after the actions in question.

Judge Priest said he was "unlikely" to agree to another request by Mr. DeGuerin this week, to try Mr. DeLay separately from Mr. Ellis and Mr. Colyandro and to try separately each of the two remaining counts against him, money laundering and conspiracy to launder money. The judge said the charges "are clearly rising out of the same criminal episode (if there was one)."

The impending trial is not Mr. DeLay's only concern. A former aide, Michael Scanlon, recently pleaded guilty to bribery conspiracy and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, and another associate, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, is under federal investigation.

With little to fear from Democrats, Texas Republicans can afford to stand with Mr. DeLay, said Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government at the University of Texas.

"The Democrats will try to exploit it as part of the general ethics trend," Professor Buchanan said of Mr. DeLay's trial, "but I do not see it changing any election outcomes. There aren't enough influenceable voters."

The notable exception, Professor Buchanan said, might be Mr. DeLay's own district, where a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found a 49 percent to 36 percent preference for a Democrat over Mr. DeLay. Mr. Thode, the county Republican chairman, called the numbers "certainly questionable."

Mr. DeLay won 55 percent of the vote in the 2004 election.

With State Firmly in Their Control, Texas Republicans Aren't Fretting About DeLay, NYT, 9.12.2005,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/politics/09texas.html

Health Coverage of Young

Widens With States' Aid

December 4, 2005
The New York Times
By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 3 - The number of American children without health care coverage has been slowly but steadily declining over the past several years even as health care costs continue to rise and fewer employers provide insurance, creating a breach that states have stepped in to fill with new programs and fresh money.

The overall ranks of the uninsured continue to swell, to nearly 46 million Americans at the beginning of this year. But a landmark federal program begun in 1997 to provide health coverage to poor and working-class children and additional measures taken by states have provided health insurance to millions of children who might otherwise go without.

In the past year, 20 states have taken steps to increase access to health coverage for children and their parents and nine states have reversed actions they took during the 2001-3 economic downturn to limit benefits, according to the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, part of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health care trends. Among them are Illinois, which just signed a child health bill, and Vermont, with its "Dr. Dynasaur" health program, both of which broadened coverage for children.

As a result of these and other steps, there are 350,000 fewer uninsured children in the United States than there were in 2000, the foundation reported. Over the same period, the overall number of uninsured rose by six million.

While elected officials cannot agree on how to provide or pay for health coverage for uninsured adults, there seems to be a consensus in many states that covering children is medically wise and politically smart.

However, even the situation for children is not uniformly favorable. Eleven states facing political and financial pressure, including Maryland, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, made it more difficult for eligible children to retain coverage.

The movement to expand coverage for children dates to the mid-1990's, after the Clinton administration devised a complex plan to provide all Americans with health care coverage. That plan failed, and advocates of wider coverage began pursuing more incremental changes at the federal level and lobbying legislatures to expand coverage.

Alan R. Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy, a nonpartisan research group, said children's health was one area of state spending that had consistently risen. Mr. Weil said it was much easier for officials to approve spending "for the kids" than to expand welfare programs for adults, even in times of hardship.

"It goes back to the Elizabethan poor laws that drew a conceptual distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor," he said. "It's very hard to call kids undeserving, even if you don't like the parents' behavior."

Illinois took the most far-reaching step this fall, enacting a law intended to provide coverage to all children in the state, extending low-cost or free coverage to the 250,000 Illinois youngsters who are now uninsured.

But even states unwilling to go as far as Illinois are moving to provide insurance for children.

New Jersey, which imposed sharp restrictions on publicly financed health care for families during the economic slowdown, restored eligibility this year to some 75,000 low-income families.

In Washington State, where 39,000 children were dropped from state-financed health care programs in 2003 and 2004, officials reversed course this year. The state eased health care eligibility requirements for families with children and delayed a plan to charge premiums.

And Texas, which has one of the nation's highest rates of uninsured children, took steps this year to stop a decline in the number of children with health coverage. The state eliminated premiums for the poorest families enrolled in state health care programs and stopped cutting off families with higher incomes that failed to keep up with premiums.

As of the beginning of this year, 16 percent of all Americans lacked health insurance, but only 12 percent of children under 18 went uncovered, although that still amounts to nine million children, according to the Kaiser commission. That gap has been widening over the years as fewer employers offer health care coverage, federal spending fails to keep pace with rising costs, and states limit eligibility to balance budgets.

The picture is brighter for children than for adults in large part because of the enactment of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, or Schip, in 1997. The program provides federal money for child health care to states, which determine eligibility, income limits and covered benefits within federal guidelines. The number of children covered under the federal-state program grew rapidly, from 897,000 children nationwide in 1998 to 3.95 million in the middle of 2003, before leveling off.

The percentage of uninsured children ranges from less than 5 percent in Vermont to almost 20 percent in Texas. The differences reflect state policies, the poverty rate, the number of immigrants, and the percentage of children covered by employers and other programs.

The chief factor determining how many children are covered is the income eligibility level set by the states under Schip. The federal government requires coverage for families at or below the federal poverty level, about $20,000 for a family of four. Only a few states set the limit that low. In some states, including Minnesota, Rhode Island and Vermont, families with incomes at 250 percent or even 300 percent of the federal poverty line qualify.

California is witnessing a battle that is also playing out in Washington and other states. State officials here and private groups are trying to bring health coverage to more than a million California children who now go without it. A bill that passed the Legislature this year would have eased eligibility requirements for the poorest families, bringing coverage to hundreds of thousands of children. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, vetoed the bill, saying that he agreed with its aims but that the sponsors had not come up with a way to pay for it.

Partly in reaction, a coalition of health groups including the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association are proposing a ballot initiative to raise the state cigarette tax to finance universal health care for children. Sponsors say that the estimated $1.4 billion raised by the new tax would pay for health coverage for more than 800,000 California children.

Vermont leads the nation in the percentage of its children who are insured through state and federal programs and private insurance, with almost 95 percent coverage.

In 1989, Madeleine M. Kunin, then the governor, created a state-financed program for pregnant women and for children up to age 6 who did not have private insurance and did not qualify for Medicaid. The program, which came to be known as Dr. Dynasaur, was expanded in 1992 under Gov. Howard Dean to cover children through age 17. Families with incomes up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or nearly $60,000 a year, qualify, and the program covers doctor visits, dental care, immunizations, vision care, medicines and mental health.

Financing comes from the federal government, tobacco taxes and general state revenues.

Despite the fading fortunes of the auto industry, 93 percent of Michigan children are covered, several percentage points higher than the national average. But that still leaves 200,000 Michigan youngsters uninsured.

Even though Ms. Granholm intends to ask for significant cuts in some state programs in her budget next month, she said she would propose increasing spending to address the problem of uninsured children.

"Let's get real about it," Ms. Granholm said. "Let's design a public system that truly reflects where we want to be, so states are not twisted into pretzels to try to insure their most vulnerable citizens. I don't think we want to be a nation where you go to Dunkin' Donuts to put a quarter in a jar for Aunt Linda's mastectomy. We need a national solution for competitiveness and moral reasons. And Washington is utterly silent."

    Health Coverage of Young Widens With States' Aid, NYT, 4.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/national/04states.html?hp&ex=1133758800&en=052e944e5079b8b0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Prominent Site Is Chosen for Eisenhower Memorial

November 27, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 (AP) - Planners have chosen one of Washington's most prominent sites for a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

A plaza-style memorial across the street from the Mall will join monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"It was his total approach to domestic and international politics that set him apart," said Carl Reddel, executive director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission and a retired Air Force brigadier general. "He's a much more profound figure than many realized."

The memorial site was approved this month by the National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission. If two other advisory groups approve, the commission will formally recommend the site to Congress next year.

There is no design for the memorial and completion is at least five or six years away, General Reddel said.

As a general, Eisenhower mounted the D-Day invasion of France and led the Allied forces to victory in Europe in World War II, but the memorial will focus on his two presidential terms, from 1953 to 1961.

"He kept the peace during the cold war," said Dan Holt, director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kan. "Most people don't understand how difficult that was in the 1950's."

The four-acre site for the memorial stands in front of the Department of Education, which Eisenhower established as a cabinet-level agency in 1953, and next door to the Federal Aviation Administration, created during his administration in 1958.

He also signed legislation that created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and his memorial will be across the street from the National Air and Space Museum.

Eisenhower, a Republican, remained popular throughout his presidency, but when he left office, some historians dismissed him as timid and indecisive. His reputation began to grow in the early 1980's, after the publication of several influential books revealed his "hidden-hand" style of governing behind the folksy demeanor.

"Ike had a management philosophy that if you take sides on major issues publicly, you polarize both those who support you and those who are against you, so he tried to stay in the middle," Mr. Holt said.

Eisenhower was criticized, for example, for not publicly condemning Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950's, but archives later revealed that Eisenhower ran a secret campaign to undermine McCarthy.

On the domestic front, Eisenhower was the driving force behind creation of the Interstate highway system and helped push through the first two civil rights acts since Reconstruction. In 1954, he made it clear he would uphold the Supreme Court's ruling invalidating school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education by sending National Guard troops to quell rioting in Little Rock, Ark.

    Prominent Site Is Chosen for Eisenhower Memorial, NYT, 27.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/national/27ike.html

Who's in the Corner Office?

November 27, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID LEONHARDT

ON some levels, corporate America can learn a lot about diversity from the nation's political elite.

When, in 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first African-American to be nominated to the Supreme Court, Franklin D. Raines was just finishing high school in Seattle. More than three decades would pass before Mr. Raines, at Fannie Mae, became the first black chief executive of a Fortune 500 company.

Today, the corner offices of the nation's largest companies are dominated by white men in a way that few other parts of society still are. Only a handful of women hold prominent chief executive jobs, while 81 women are in Congress. There are more female senators from Maine (two) than there are women running Fortune 100 companies (zero).

Yet the full picture is not as simple as all this suggests. In ways less obvious than race and gender, the corporate elite has become less elite and more diverse over the last decade or two, while its counterpart in Washington has become more homogeneous.

They may be paid like kings, but C.E.O.'s seem to come from a wider variety of economic backgrounds - with growing numbers rising from humble beginnings and fewer having attended Ivy League colleges - than they once did. Many spent just a few years, or none, at their companies before becoming the boss. Being younger than 50 no longer rules out someone for the top job.

"There's much less emphasis on the cosmetic aspects and the cultural aspects and the refinement aspects, as opposed to the down-and-dirty, get-the-job-done aspect," said Gerard R. Roche, an executive recruiter for 41 years, whose firm, Heidrick & Struggles, has recently conducted chief-executive searches for Coca-Cola, Disney and Nike.

Wall Street, for example, was once seen as a club for the well heeled; today it seems much more open. James E. Cayne, the chief executive of Bear Stearns, didn't graduate from college. E. Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, one of just three black chief executives of large companies, went to Kettering University in Flint, Mich. Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America graduated from Georgia State.

With the glaring exceptions of sex and skin color, in other words, the mold for a big-company C.E.O. has been broken, and there isn't a new one to take its place. The story is different in Washington, where political leaders are richer, older, more likely to have gone to an expensive college and more likely to have first held another elected office than they were in the past. So in some ways, corporate leaders now mirror the rest of society more closely than elected leaders do.

IT is almost as if two separate meritocracies have sprung up. The top of the corporate one remains largely closed to women and minorities. But it also rewards skills - like communication, real-world smarts and a common touch, executives say - that require little in the way of a privileged background.

"I think of the people at Whirlpool who failed over the years, and it rarely had to do with their technical skills," said David R. Whitwam, the company's former chief, who worked his way through the University of Wisconsin emptying bedpans as a hospital orderly. "It was usually their leadership capabilities."

The rules for advancement in the political system are different. They bear some resemblance to those of the college-application process that many 17-year-olds are now sweating. Women and minorities, both racial and religious, succeed far more often than they did in the past. The Senate now has almost twice as many Catholics - 24 - as it did in 1980, and more Jews and Mormons, too. (Data on the religious background of C.E.O.'s isn't readily accessible.)

But whether the goal is winning a seat in Congress or a spot in Harvard's freshman class, wealth appears to be more important than it once was. And the types of analytical skills that rarely make the difference at Whirlpool help determine both admissions decisions and Supreme Court nominations.

Not since Richard Nixon in 1969 appointed Warren Burger, who had attended the University of Minnesota, has the court had a new justice who attended a public university for college or graduate school. Since then, every new justice has held a degree from one of four universities: Harvard, Yale, Stanford or the University of Chicago. Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., who is preparing for confirmation hearings, graduated from Yale Law School and Princeton.

In fact, the changing educational backgrounds of the corporate and political elite may best sum up the trends. In 1980, about 23 percent of chief executives at big companies had attended one of the eight Ivy League colleges, while only 13 percent of senators had. The boardroom, not surprisingly, was a more elite place than the halls of democracy.

Today, the two groups have switched places. The number of senators educated at an Ivy college has risen to 16. Among C.E.O.'s in the Standard & Poor's 500, the share has fallen by more than half, to 10 percent. The University of Wisconsin has tied Harvard as the most common alma mater for top executives, according to Spencer Stuart, an executive search firm.

This is particularly telling because students at Ivy colleges have changed relatively little - in economic terms - over the last few generations. The same is true at other elite colleges like Duke, Stanford and Williams. If anything, the percentage of them coming from middle-class and working-class households has fallen slightly in recent years, recent research shows. At Harvard, for instance, the median family income was about $150,000 last year, financial aid forms suggest.

So the colleges offer a rare way to examine the shifting class backgrounds of the nation's elites. The changes seem to say something about both the business world and the colleges themselves.

At a time when the economy was not so brutally competitive, when there was less global trade and when technology had not ripped down the barriers between industries, companies could afford to draw from a relatively narrow talent pool, executives and recruiters say. That isn't the case today.

"Businesses are more complex. God knows they're much larger than they ever were before," said William W. McGuire, chief executive of UnitedHealth Group and a University of Texas graduate. An Ivy League degree "opens doors," Mr. McGuire said. "I'm just not sure that opening doors is tantamount to success in today's world."

The change is not limited to the United States. The number of top executives in Britain who graduated from its most exclusive colleges, Oxford and Cambridge, declined from 1992 to the early part of this decade, The Economist found.

Thomas J. Neff, chairman of United States operations at Spencer Stuart, said he could not remember the last time a client doing an executive search had asked him to focus on graduates of particular colleges.

"I think if a C.E.O. or a board member went to an Ivy League school, there might be a bias. But it's small," Mr. Neff said. "When it comes to senior level appointments, it's 'What have you done for me lately?' "

Executives who attended public universities also say that these campuses bear a closer resemblance to the rest of society than those dominated by the upper middle class. Many of the executives went on to business school at Harvard or Stanford, but they say that their undergraduate experience also helped prepare them for the business world.

"When you look at today's C.E.O., he or she has to be very comfortable talking about the business with folks on the factory floor or customers who are increasingly diverse," said Robert A. Eckert, the chief executive of Mattel and a University of Arizona graduate. "While private schools have the advantage of smaller classes and the financial wherewithal to attract the world's greatest faculty, the public schools offer the diversity and variety that go along with the size they have there."

The high-income students at the Ivies and similar colleges, meanwhile, have been showing less interest in corporate America. First, the antiwar movement of the 1960's and 70's made a business career unappealing to many. About the same time, colleges were changing admissions policies to give more weight to academic skills, said Jerome Karabel, a fellow at the Longview Institute and author of "The Chosen," a history of college admissions.

Capitalism is more popular on elite campuses now than it once was, but many students there still do not see corporate jobs as the best match for their skills. Instead, many turn to law, consulting or hedge-fund management. These fields tend to value skills at which the students have long excelled - skills that can often be measured objectively. Minorities have done better in some of these professions than in corporate America. The pay in these fields also tends to be higher for younger employees, and a career rise can happen quickly.

"The most able students interested in business are increasingly finding their way into entrepreneurial activity, into financial services, into high tech and into consulting," Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard's president, said. "Joining large organizations is no longer the major choice for students interested in business."

Frederick W. Smith, C.E.O. of FedEx, attended Yale in the mid-60's and recalls being surrounded by sons of coal and steel executives. In recent years, he has spoken with Yale's president, Richard Levin, about encouraging students to join corporations. Students "are more interested in Wall Street rather than in manufacturing, transportation and so forth," Mr. Smith said. "They're much more interested in government. They are much more interested in the media."

Not only are they interested in government, but running for office often requires wealth that is common among Ivy League students and alumni. Many candidates spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their campaigns, and sometimes much more.

Voters now seem to care less about a candidate's background - economic, religious or otherwise - and more about his positions, said Brandice Canes-Wrone, a politics professor at Princeton. The best example may be the willingness of evangelical Protestants to vote for conservative Catholics. But the rise of wealthy politicians from elite schools makes the point, too.

There are almost as many millionaires in the Senate as nonmillionaires, according to Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill. Since 1988, 9 of the 10 major-party nominees for president have held a degree from Harvard or Yale, the only exception being Bob Dole. In the previous 24 years, only 1 of the 12 nominees went to Harvard or Yale. That was Gerald R. Ford, who received a law degree from Yale.

"By traditional measures, we have an elected and appointed elite that is more representative of the American public," said Larry J. Sabato, of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. "Yet in many ways they're less representative."

Of course, it is hard to argue that C.E.O.'s are representative of the public when almost all of them come from the roughly one-third of Americans who are male and white.

"Clearly, it's an area where there's work to do," Mr. Eckert of Mattel said. "We haven't yet achieved the diversity of our work force and our customer base."

For all the differences between the corporate and political elite, this may be the biggest similarity: both seem to be missing out on a lot of potential talent.

Luke Kummer contributed research for this article.

    Who's in the Corner Office?, NYT, 27.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/business/yourmoney/27ceo.html

Le mauvais génie de George W. Bush

14.11.2005 | 14h27 • Mis à jour le 14.11.2005 | 14h27
Article paru dans l'édition du 15.11.2005
Le Monde
Corine Lesnes
CORRESPONDANTE NEW YORK


L'histoire n'a pas gardé la trace de l'insulte exacte que le vice-président des Etats-Unis, Richard Cheney, a lancée le 22 juin 2004 contre le sénateur démocrate du Vermont, Patrick Leahy. Certains témoins ont entendu "fuck you" ; d'autres "go fuck yourself", deux expressions que la bonne éducation réprouve. M. Leahy s'était permis auparavant de réclamer une enquête sur le contrat de reconstruction en Irak, remporté par Halliburton, l'entreprise que dirigeait M. Cheney jusqu'en 2000. Le vice-président a répondu avec "franchise", a confirmé son porte-parole. L'incident a été rapidement déclaré clos. Quand le Sénat n'est pas en session, l'échange d'insultes n'est pas une infraction.

Derrière son allure de retraité n'aimant rien tant que la pêche à la mouche, Dick Cheney, 64 ans, cache une certaine brutalité. Il lui arrive régulièrement d'employer un langage expéditif à l'égard des démocrates, de la presse, voire de membres du Congrès qu'il a un jour qualifiés de "moucherons". Il ne craint pas le conflit. S'il s'est débrouillé pour échapper à la guerre du Vietnam, il a été ministre de la défense, de 1989 à 1993. Il s'est lui-même décrit comme un faucon "qui n'a jamais rencontré un système d'armement pour lequel il n'ait pas voté".

La documentation est maigre sur Dick Cheney. Les biographes avouent eux-mêmes rester sur leur faim, comme le journaliste John Nichols, auteur en 2004 d'un ouvrage polémique (Dick, l'homme qui est président). Malgré ses trente-cinq ans de vie publique, M. Cheney "a réussi à maintenir le plus bas des profils bas", écrit-il. Le vice-président explique parfois que c'est sa principale qualité et qu'il doit son ascension à sa discrétion. Mais très involontairement, M. Cheney se trouve de plus en plus souvent à la Une des journaux. Halliburton, plan énergie, Irak, son nom est associé aux divers fiascos et controverses de la présidence Bush.

49 % des Américains ont une opinion négative de lui. "Il est affaibli", commente Steven Clemons, de la New America Foundation. Son directeur de cabinet, Lewis Scooter Libby, a été inculpé le 28 octobre dans une affaire de fuites vers la presse, liée à l'Irak. Son propre nom apparaît à trois reprises dans les 22 pages de l'acte d'accusation. Parallèlement, il est engagé dans une épreuve de force titanesque avec le Congrès sur la torture. Malgré le scandale d'Abou Ghraib, malgré Guantanamo, le vice-président des Etats-Unis fait campagne pour empêcher les parlementaires de déclarer illégale la torture dite "douce" qui se pratique contre les suspects de la guerre antiterroriste.

Un journal aussi distancié que le New York Times a publié un éditorial hors normes le 3 novembre. Première phrase : "C'est exaspérant". "Pourquoi vouloir imposer une politique dont les militaires ne veulent pas, qui ne marche pas et qui viole les standards en vigueur dans le monde civilisé depuis des décennies." La dernière phrase est à double sens : "Après tout, la pancarte sur la porte de Dick Cheney indique qu'il est le vice-président." Le journal a mis l'emphase sur vice. Vice, comme l'opposé de la vertu.

Dick Cheney est devenu vice-président par défaut, avec l'air de ne pas l'avoir cherché. Contrairement à son vieil ami de trente ans, Donald Rumsfeld, diplômé de Princeton et champion universitaire de lutte, Cheney n'a rien de particulier à mettre en avant. Une inscription à Yale, mais il a laissé tomber avant d'obtenir le diplôme. John Nichols le décrit comme "un faux athlète, un faux intellectuel et un faux homme de l'Ouest" (il a grandi dans le Nebraska). Il est pourtant devenu le vice-président "le plus puissant que le pays ait connu", un "président de facto", a même dit John Dean, l'ancien conseiller juridique de Richard Nixon. La classe politique s'est très vite rendu compte de la répartition des rôles.

Le vice-président a choisi quelques dossiers : l'énergie et évidemment l'Irak. Dans le livre de Bob Woodward, Plan d'attaque, sur la genèse de l'invasion, Dick Cheney entre en scène dès la deuxième ligne. Le journaliste le campe en train de demander au ministre de la défense de Bill Clinton, William Cohen, de "briefer" le nouveau président "sur l'Irak et les différentes possibilités". George Bush n'est même pas encore installé dans le Bureau ovale. La scène a lieu neuf mois avant le 11-Septembre. Elle se répétera ce matin-là : Cheney est à la Maison Blanche ; Bush en Floride, en train de lire une histoire pour enfants. Cinq jours plus tard, Cheney se pose en protecteur de la nation pendant la grande émission télévisée Meet the Press. Les éditorialistes relèvent que c'est lui qui a pris le commandement. Il a ordonné l'arrêt du trafic aérien. C'est aussi lui qui a conseillé au président de rester en sécurité, loin de Washington, dans l'abri souterrain du Nebraska.

Les anciens ne comprennent plus Dick Cheney. Il semble avoir échappé aux réalistes de l'école Bush père pour se ranger derrière les néoconservateurs. "Je connais Cheney depuis trente ans. C'est un ami", déclarait, la semaine dernière au New Yorker, l'ancien conseiller à la sécurité nationale de Bush senior, Brent Scowcroft. "Je ne le reconnais plus." Certains politologues rappellent que Cheney et Rumsfeld ont toujours été des "guerriers", et qu'ils complotaient de concert sous Gerald Ford (1974-1976) pour diminuer le prestige d'Henry Kissinger, qu'ils jugeaient trop mou à l'égard de l'URSS. C'est ainsi que Rumsfeld avait fini par obtenir le portefeuille de la défense et que Cheney avait pris sa place à la Maison Blanche, comme directeur de cabinet du président.

Dick Cheney n'a rien à perdre, soulignent les médias. Il n'est pas candidat à la succession de George Bush et ne craint pas de donner son avis. Pour lui, les détenus de Guantanamo sont très bien traités. "Ils vivent sous les tropiques, dit-il le plus tranquillement du monde. Ils sont bien nourris. Ils ont tout ce qu'ils peuvent désirer. Il n'y a pas d'autre nation dans le monde qui traiterait des gens qui sont déterminés à tuer des Américains de la manière dont nous traitons ces gens."

En janvier 2004, le vice-président donnait encore des interviews où il évoquait des liens entre Saddam Hussein et Al-Qaida. Depuis l'accélération de l'affaire des fuites, il n'accorde plus d'entretiens et on ne le voit plus s'adresser qu'à des cercles de fidèles ou des aréopages militaires. Il professe la plus grande indifférence pour son image. "Suis-je le mauvais génie que personne ne voit jamais sortir de son trou ?", s'interrogeait-il en janvier 2004 dans un entretien au journal USA Today. Avant de répondre, énigmatique : "C'est une bonne manière de fonctionner, en fait."

    Le mauvais génie de George W. Bush, Le Monde, 14.11.2005 | 14h27 • Mis à jour le 14.11.2005 | 14h27, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-709910,0.html,

Bush Contends Partisan Critics

Hurt War Effort

November 12, 2005
The New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

TOBYHANNA, Pa., Nov. 11 - President Bush on Friday sharply criticized Democrats who have accused him of misleading the nation about the threat from Iraq's weapons programs, calling their criticism "deeply irresponsible" and suggesting that they are undermining the war effort.

In a Veterans Day speech at an Army depot here, Mr. Bush made his most aggressive effort to date to counter the charge that he had justified taking the United States to war by twisting or exaggerating prewar intelligence. That line of attack has deepened his political woes by helping to sow doubts about his credibility and integrity at a time when public support for the war is ebbing.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges," Mr. Bush said. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will. As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."

Mr. Bush's comments, using language far more direct and provocative than in his previous efforts to parry the criticism, brought an angry response from Democratic leaders in Congress, who said questions about his use of prewar intelligence were entirely legitimate and proper.

"Attacking those patriotic Americans who have raised serious questions about the case the Bush administration made to take our country to war does not provide us a plan for success that will bring our troops home," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, said in a statement. "Americans seek the truth about how the nation committed our troops to war because the decision to go to war is too serious to be entered into under faulty pretenses."

In his speech, Mr. Bush asserted that Democrats as well as Republicans believed before the invasion in 2003 that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons, a conclusion, he said, that was shared by the United Nations. He resisted any implication that his administration had deliberately distorted the available intelligence, and said that the resolution authorizing the use of force had been supported by more than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate based on the same information available to the White House.

Before the war, the administration portrayed Iraq as armed with weapons that made it a threat to the Middle East and the United States. No biological or chemical weapons were found in Iraq after the American attack, and Mr. Hussein's nuclear program appears to have been rudimentary and all but dormant.

Mr. Bush has acknowledged failures in prewar intelligence but has maintained that toppling Mr. Hussein was still justified on other grounds, including liberating Iraqis from his rule.

Two official inquiries - by the Senate Intelligence Committee and by a presidential commission - blamed intelligence agencies for inflating the threat posed by Iraq's weapons programs, but stopped short of ascribing the problems to political pressures.

But the Senate review described repeated, unsuccessful efforts by the White House and its allies in the Pentagon to persuade the Central Intelligence Agency to embrace the view that Iraq had provided support to Al Qaeda. According to former administration officials, in early 2003, George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, and Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, rejected elements of a speech drafted by aides to Vice President Dick Cheney that was intended to present the administration's case for war, calling them exaggerated and unsubstantiated by intelligence.

And some assertions by administration officials, like Mr. Cheney's statement in 2002 that Mr. Hussein could acquire nuclear weapons "fairly soon" and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's statement the same year that Iraq "has chemical and biological weapons," have been proven overstated or wrong.

In defending his administration against the new round of Democratic criticism, Mr. Bush said Friday, "While it is perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."

"Some Democrats and antiwar critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war," he said. "These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.

"They also know that intelligence agencies from around the world agreed with our assessment of Saddam Hussein. They know the United Nations passed more than a dozen resolutions citing his development and possession of weapons of mass destruction."

After simmering for much of this year, the issue of how the administration used prewar intelligence has boiled over again in the last few months, leaving Mr. Bush on the defensive. The C.I.A. leak investigation focused new attention on the role of the White House, and especially Mr. Cheney, in assembling the intelligence used to justify the invasion.

The rising death toll and the difficulty American and Iraqi forces have had in containing the insurgency have depressed public support for the war. With Mr. Bush weakened politically on many counts, Democrats have been emboldened to take him on more aggressively than they have in the past, and have pushed in particular to keep a focus on the White House's justifications for the war.

Under pressure from Democrats, the Senate Intelligence Committee has begun closed-door meetings about how to proceed with a long-promised second phase of its inquiry into prewar intelligence. That effort is to focus in part on the use of intelligence by the Bush administration, Congress and others.

But that inquiry is unlikely to be completed any time soon, given the complexities of assessing how the White House, the Pentagon, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, Iraqi exile groups and others employed intelligence in setting policy and making public statements. Republicans have rebuffed an effort by Democrats to begin a similar review in the House Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Bush's comments on Friday only intensified the partisan battle. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mr. Bush's Democratic rival in the presidential campaign last year, accused him of "playing the politics of fear and smear on Veterans Day."

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, called Mr. Bush's speech "a campaignlike attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those who seek truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war."

The White House, which has sought to define its opponents on the issue as liberals who are out of the mainstream on national security, struck back quickly at Mr. Kennedy as part of a new rapid-response plan through which administration officials hope to blunt the Democratic message about Mr. Bush.

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said it was "regrettable that Senator Kennedy has found more time to say negative things about President Bush than he ever did about Saddam Hussein."

"If America were to follow Senator Kennedy's foreign policy," Mr. McClellan said, "Saddam Hussein would not only still be in power, he would be oppressing and occupying Kuwait."

In responding so strongly to the criticism, the White House seems to be throwing fuel on a political fire that it may not be able to control.

But the administration appears to be calculating that it has always benefited so far from focusing the debate on national security, where the Democrats in recent years have been divided and tentative in advocating alternatives to Mr. Bush's stay-the-course policy in Iraq. And with Mr. Bush's poll numbers crumbling, the White House may have little choice but to take the risk; an Associated Press-Ipsos Poll released Friday found that 42 percent of Americans viewed Mr. Bush as honest, down from 53 percent at the beginning of the year.

Beyond taking on the Democrats over prewar intelligence, Mr. Bush used Friday's speech to make a case that despite the violent insurgency, Iraq is making steady progress that is creating the foundations of a stable democracy.

"By any standard or precedent of history, Iraq had made incredible political progress - from tyranny to liberation to national elections to the ratification of a constitution - in the space of two and a half years," he said, speaking to a friendly audience of veterans, military personnel and their families under a banner reading "Strategy for Victory."

At the same time, he said, Iraqi troops are showing increased ability to battle the insurgency.

"Our strategy is to clear, hold and build," Mr. Bush said, referring to the military tactic of sweeping suspected insurgents from towns and cities, leaving Iraqi forces behind to keep the insurgents from re-establishing a foothold, and then creating political institutions that can sustain a stable peace.

He also continued his effort to cast Iraq as part of a broader struggle against a virulent strain of radical Islam.

With Mr. Bush in Pennsylvania, Mr. Cheney took up traditional Veterans Day wreath-laying ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery.

    Bush Contends Partisan Critics Hurt War Effort, NYT, 12.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/12/politics/12bush.html?hp&ex=1131858000&en=a34ff60a4fd84e94&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Bush says war critics rewrite history

Fri Nov 11, 2005 8:08 PM ET
Reuters
By Caren Bohan

TOBYHANNA, Pa (Reuters) - President George W. Bush ripped into Democratic critics of the Iraq war on Friday, charging them with trying to rewrite history by accusing the White House of manipulating intelligence before the war.

Bush, facing waning public support for the war that has helped push his approval ratings to new lows, hit back at critics who have said his administration misused intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to justify the war.

Democrats responded to Bush's Veterans Day speech by accusing the president of exploiting the holiday to try to shore up his faltering political standing.

Bush said he respected his opponents' right to disagree with him about the decision to go to war against Iraq, and that as president he accepted responsibility for what has taken place there under his watch.

But he added, "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began."

"Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgment related to Iraq's weapons programs," Bush said.

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges," Bush added in a speech that broadly reviewed Washington's declared war on terrorism since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Bush's aggressive counter-attack followed stepped up charges by Senate Democrats that top administration officials, and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, manipulated intelligence on Iraq and leaked classified information to discredit critics of the war.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a top aide to Cheney, was indicted last month for obstructing justice, perjury and lying after a two-year investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity. Plame's husband has said she was outed to get back at him for his criticism of the war.

A few days later, Democrats imposed a rare closed session of the Senate to force majority Republicans to complete a probe on whether the prewar intelligence was misused.

Administration officials have acknowledged the intelligence on Iraqi weapons was faulty, but have said Democrats, Republicans and foreign intelligence agencies had believed Baghdad had deadly weapons before the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

BUSH AIMS AT ONE CRITIC

Bush opened fire at one critic in particular, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, who voted for the war in a key 2002 Senate vote and whom Bush defeated in the presidential election a year ago.

He quoted from Kerry's Senate speech supporting the use of force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein, based on charges that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever found.

Kerry, Bush said, backed the president "because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hand is a threat and a grave threat to our security."

Kerry, one of 29 Democrats who voted for the war, responded by accusing Bush of dishonoring "America's veterans by playing the politics of fear and smear on Veterans Day."

"Today they (administration officials) continue the same games hoping Americans forget the mess they made in Iraq that's cost over 2,000 Americans their lives and their failure to find Osama bin Laden. Americans will not forget," Kerry said.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who also voted for the war, charged that Bush was resorting "to his old playbook of discredited rhetoric about the war on terror and political attacks as his own political fortunes and credibility diminish."

Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who voted against the war, called Bush's speech a "campaign-like attempt to rebuild his own credibility by tearing down those who seek the truth about the clear manipulation of intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan tried to turn the tables on Kennedy, saying he chose "Veterans Day to continue leveling baseless and false attacks that send the wrong signal to our troops and our enemy during a time of war."

He said Kennedy has "found more time to say negative things about President Bush then he ever did about Saddam Hussein."

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Adam Entous and Tabassum Zakaria)

    Bush says war critics rewrite history, R, 11.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-12T010812Z_01_RID122734_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-IRAQ.xml

Rove Is More His Old Self

at the White House

November 11, 2005
The New York Times
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT

WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 - The architect, it seems, is back.

Hunkered down for almost all of October while a grand jury considered his fate, Karl Rove has rebounded as a visible presence at the White House over the last two weeks, according to administration officials and Republican colleagues. He is running meetings and pursuing candidates for the 2006 elections - and, associates say, devising long-term political plans that suggest he does not believe he will face future legal trouble despite the C.I.A. leak investigation in which he has been involved.

On Thursday night, Mr. Rove made his first major public appearance in several weeks, speaking at the Federalist Society in Washington. The remarks on judicial restraint were hardly newsworthy in themselves, but his presence was. Just three weeks ago, at the height of the administration's worst troubles over the Supreme Court and as anxiety in the leak inquiry consumed the White House, Mr. Rove canceled a speech for the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia.

Since then, Mr. Rove has remained in legal limbo, neither cleared nor charged. But the frenzy surrounding his role has subsided since the Oct. 28 indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., and associates say there has been an elevation of Mr. Rove's persona inside and outside the West Wing - a shift that has the added benefit of assuring conservatives that the White House is trying to regain its footing after a spate of recent disasters.

"I've noticed a big difference," said one Republican in regular contact with Mr. Rove who declined to speak for attribution because the White House did not authorize it. "There's a spring in his step, more focus, more - something. Some sort of weight off his shoulders."

White House officials have insisted that the legal complications did not subtract from Mr. Rove's ability to do his job in recent weeks - disputing, among other things, that the botched response to Hurricane Katrina and the Harriet E. Miers nomination resulted from the political director's distractions. Nonetheless, Republican officials are now relieved to be able to demonstrate how engaged Mr. Rove is. Several have gone so far as to suggest that Mr. Rove's recovery is a harbinger of brighter days for the administration.

"I think he's focused on a lot of things - working to help people at the White House and talking to people on the Hill about the agenda next year, and he's certainly focused on the '06 elections," said Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who filled in for Mr. Rove at the Oct. 15 event for Jerry Kilgore, Virginia's attorney general.

In particular, several Republicans said, Mr. Rove drove the decision to recruit Judy Baar Topinka to run in the Illinois governor's race in 2006, a development this week that suddenly made the race competitive for Republicans. Although Mr. Rove is still leaving contact with candidates to his subordinates, especially Mr. Mehlman and Sarah Taylor, the White House political director, he is back to mapping out the nationwide strategy as he has in races past, several Republicans said.

"He was never as far out of it as people said he was, but he was distracted," said one Republican official, declining to speak for attribution because he does not speak officially for Mr. Rove. "Now he's not distracted anymore."

In his address to the conservative Federalist Society, Mr. Rove criticized "judicial imperialism." If the judiciary is not reined in, he said, voters will demand constitutional amendments to rectify what they perceive as bad decisions. Among the decisions he criticized: a Supreme Court ruling that forbade the death penalty for murderers under 18, saying it "ignored the fact that at the time, the peoples' representatives in 20 states had permitted the death penalty for killers under 18."

In a speech that lasted less than half an hour, Mr. Rove did not mention the leak controversy. He did crack several jokes about liberal fears that the Federalist Society is a conservative "conspiracy." "Every conspiracy needs a gray eminence," Mr. Rove said, toasting the guest of honor, Edwin Meese III, the former United States attorney general.

A senior administration official said Mr. Rove was back "in a good mood," sending off rapid-fire e-mail, sticking his head into meetings uninvited and acting in a familiar, mischievous manner.

"He's Karl," the official said.

Mr. Rove's role in the leak controversy came to light slowly. White House officials initially denied he played any role in disseminating information about Valerie Plame Wilson, the undercover C.I.A. officer whose name was published by the columnist Robert Novak in July 2003.

    Rove Is More His Old Self at the White House, NYT, 11.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/11/politics/11rove.html?hp&ex=1131771600&en=bd7a8494c398b39a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Elections locales aux Etats-Unis :

un test pour la popularité

de George W. Bush

08.11.2005 | 14h07 •

Mis à jour le 08.11.2005 | 14h58

LEMONDE.FR

Les électeurs américains doivent se prononcer, mardi 8 novembre, dans plusieurs scrutins locaux dont certains dépassent largement les enjeux de la politique régionale. Des élections de gouverneurs doivent se tenir dans les Etats de Virginie (Sud-Est) et du New Jersey (Est), alors que les habitants de New York s'apprêtent à voter pour élire un nouveau maire. Le même jour, le gouverneur de la Californie, l'ancien acteur Arnold Schwarzenegger, organise un référendum lors duquel les électeurs sont amenés à se prononcer sur une série de mesures destinées à "reconstruire" l'Etat.

L'élection du gouverneur en Virgine est perçue comme un test pour le président Bush, qui a apporté son soutien au candidat républicain, Jim Kilgore. "Si vous voulez garder des impôts bas et une économie en expansion, il n'y a qu'un seul candidat dans la course qui est votre homme, et c'est Jim Kilgore", a déclaré le président américain, venu assister au dernier meeting républicain en Virginie à peine rentré du sommet des Amériques, rapporte le New York Times. Un soutien destiné, selon la presse américaine, à mobiliser la base républicaine la plus fervente dans le pays. Jim Kilgore a pour adversaire Tim Kaine, adjoint du très populaire gouverneur démocrate sortant Mark Warner, pressenti comme candidat potentiel à la Maison Blanche à trois ans de la fin du mandat de George W. Bush. Selon les derniers sondages, aucun des deux candidats ne serait certain de remporter le poste de gouverneur, l'écart entre eux étant très serré, voire inexistant, malgré l'optimisme de Tim Kaine. "Nous allons gagner cette élection. Nous sommes certains de pouvoir le faire, parce que les habitants de la Virginie se posent la question : 'En qui pouvons-nous placer notre confiance pour tirer la Virginie vers l'avant ?'", s'est exclamé le candidat démocrate lors de son dernier meeting. Lors de la campagne électorale, ce dernier a été violemment pris à partie par ses adversaires républicains sur sa position en faveur de l'abolition de la peine de mort.

"AMITIÉ IDÉOLOGIQUE" AVEC LE PRÉSIDENT

Dans le New Jersey, Etat traditionnellement ancré à gauche, le candidat démocrate, Jon Corzine, est donné favori avec 6 à 7 points d'avance dans les sondages face à son rival républicain, Doug Forrester. Ce dernier a été pointé du doigt pour son "amitié idéologique" avec George W. Bush, et ses adversaires n'ont pas hésité à ironiser sur le soutien qu'il a reçu de l'épouse du président, Laura Bush. Une victoire de Jon Corzine pourrait également, selon les observateurs, renforcer sa stature de présidentiable pour 2008.

L'impopularité croissante de George W. Bush – dont la cote de confiance globale stagne à 39 %, selon un sondage ABC-Washington Post paru la semaine dernière – a été, plus généralement, un handicap pour les candidats de son parti, dont certains ont préféré ne pas s'afficher en sa présence à la veille du scrutin.

A New York, ville pourtant connue pour ses sympathies démocrates, c'est le candidat républicain, Michael Bloomberg, qui serait en passe de s'imposer face à son rival Fernando Ferrer, démocrate d'origine latino-américaine. Les deux candidats ont sillonné la ville jusqu'au dernier moment, hier soir, en appelant les électeurs à ne pas "croire aux sondages" et à se rendre aux urnes.

Outre New York, les villes de Detroit, Houston, Boston, San Diego et Atlanta doivent également élire leur maire. Des référendums sur des sujets tels que les droits des homosexuels, le système de santé ou la fiscalité auront lieu dans six autres Etats.

    Elections locales aux Etats-Unis : un test pour la popularité de George W. Bush, LeMonde.fr, 8.11.2005, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-707711@51-707724,0.html

Senate Passes Budget

With Benefit Cuts and Oil Drilling

November 4, 2005
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - The Senate on Thursday narrowly approved a sweeping five-year plan to trim a variety of federal benefit programs and to allow drilling for oil and natural gas in a wilderness area of Alaska, increasing the chances that the energy industry and Alaska officials will achieve a long-sought goal.

The budget bill, the most ambitious effort to curb federal spending in eight years, was approved by a vote of 52 to 47. Five Republicans opposed the measure; two Democrats voted for it.

Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said, "This bill is a reflection of the Republican Congress's commitment to pursue a path of fiscal responsibility."

It will, Mr. Gregg said, reduce the deficit and save roughly $35 billion over the next five years.

Democrats said the savings would disappear and the deficit would increase if Republicans carried out their plan to cut taxes by $70 billion later this year.

The Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, called the budget "an immoral document" that "harms vulnerable Americans to provide another round of large tax breaks for the elite of this country, special interests and multimillionaires."

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, told a Congressional committee on Thursday that lawmakers should not extend President Bush's tax cuts if they could not make up for the lost revenue.

The Senate held 22 roll-call votes on Thursday as it methodically disposed of a stack of amendments to the budget bill.

In the House, Republicans have drafted a bill that would save $53.9 billion over five years, about 50 percent more than the Senate measure.

House Republican leaders said they hoped the House would approve their version of the budget next week, but they appeared to remain short of the votes for passage.

The House bill would also allow drilling in part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But the House has become a battleground, and the fate of the overall budget bill is in doubt because two dozen House Republicans have objected to the drilling.

President Bush praised the Senate for passing a deficit-reduction bill and for voting to allow drilling in a small part of the Arctic refuge.

Opponents of Arctic drilling said they believed they had enough moderate Republicans on their side to defeat the House bill in its current form. Party leaders said they were considering changes in the plan. They said they hoped to win support from some New England Republicans by emphasizing that the bill provided an extra $1 billion for home-heating assistance.

The Senate showdown on Arctic drilling came over a proposal by Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, to preserve the longstanding ban on oil and gas drilling in the Alaska refuge. By a vote of 51 to 48, the Senate rejected her proposal.

Moments later the Senate voted overwhelmingly, 83 to 16, to prohibit the export of any oil or gas extracted from the refuge.

The export ban was proposed by Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri. Without the ban, Mr. Wyden said, "there is no assurance that even one drop of Alaskan oil will get to hurting Americans."

Senator Talent said that he was "a very strong supporter of exploring for oil in the Arctic," but that the main reason for such drilling was "to enhance our national security and our own domestic oil supply."

Drilling in the wildlife refuge is a priority for President Bush, who says it would increase the supply of oil and gas. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said Thursday's action took the nation "one more giant step toward the possibility of oil exploration and development on a tiny sliver of Alaska's coastal plain."

Senate opponents of Arctic drilling have used filibusters, or the threat of such open-ended debate, to block drilling proposals in the past. But drilling could not be thwarted by a filibuster this year because it was considered under special Senate rules that apply to the budget process. The budget assumes that the government will receive at least $2.4 billion over five years from the sale of drilling rights.

Senator Pete V. Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, chairman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said that Alaska drilling would produce oil and jobs.

"It's high time that we do something about our oil dependency," Senator Domenici said. "It's time that we do something for the American people about the rising price of gasoline at the pump. This is a rare opportunity to produce substantial quantities of crude oil from our own homeland. It will also produce up to 736,000 jobs."

The Republican senators who voted against the budget bill were Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Susan Collins of Maine, Mike DeWine of Ohio, and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine. The Democrats voting for the bill were Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting for this article.

    Senate Passes Budget With Benefit Cuts and Oil Drilling, NYT, 4.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/04/politics/04spend.html

Analyse

George W. Bush

en état de grande faiblesse

1.11.2005
Le Monde
par Alain Frachon

Le camp conservateur américain est en rébellion ­ contre son chef. Depuis quelque temps, George W. Bush sème dans les rangs de sa propre coalition doute, colère et incompréhension. A tel point que l'un des maîtres à penser de la famille républicaine, William Kristol, s'interroge : "Si les conservateurs sont toujours aussi démoralisés lors des législatives de 2006, quelles sont nos chances de maintenir une solide majorité au Congrès ?" Les derniers développements dans le scandale dit du "Plamegate" affaiblissent un peu plus encore une Maison Blanche qui reste dans la ligne de mire d'un procureur spécial particulièrement tenace. La présidence est sous surveillance.

Retour en arrière. Quand il emporte la Maison Blanche en novembre 2000, George W. Bush a su réaliser l'union des différentes familles républicaines. Il s'affirme comme le chef des trois tribus du mouvement conservateur américain. Affichant haut et fort ses convictions chrétiennes, comme un programme politique, il séduit les gros bataillons électoraux du renouveau évangélique, mouvement qui domine le sud des Etats-Unis. Fils de son père, incarnation de l'aristocratie de la Côte est, il dispose aussi de la confiance des républicains traditionnels, milieux d'affaires, bourgeoisie aisée et nationalistes purs et durs. Enfin, il a conquis le petit groupe des intellectuels néoconservateurs, qui, depuis le 11 septembre 2001, reconnaît en lui le digne successeur de Ronald Reagan, un homme habité par la mission de propager de par le monde les valeurs de la démocratie américaine.

Cocktail réussi : Bush a su marier différents courants aux objectifs parfois contradictoires. C'est son talent politique.

Et il était convaincu d'avoir posé les bases d'une coalition électorale durablement majoritaire, destinée à dominer la vie politique du pays pour au moins un quart de siècle.

L'opposition démocrate, aujourd'hui divisée et sans programme, n'était pas loin de penser la même chose.

Or voilà que la famille ne reconnaît plus son chef. Chacune de ses branches a des raisons de lui en vouloir, de s'estimer trahie dans ses convictions les plus profondes. Le camp conservateur tonne contre la Maison Blanche. C'est peut-être un tournant, un moment-clé dans la dynamique politique et culturelle qui, jusque-là, a assuré le succès de l'équipe Bush.

Premier grief : les nominations à la Cour suprême. A peine était-il arrivé à la Maison Blanche que deux des piliers de la coalition républicaine ­ – chrétiens fondamentalistes et néoconservateurs ­ – avaient prévenu M. Bush : il leur devait, il leur avait promis de faire pencher l'équilibre de la Cour de leur côté et de façon durable ; il aurait l'occasion, rare, de renouveler au moins deux des sièges d'une institution qui, autant que le Congrès ou l'exécutif, façonne le profil politique du pays.

M. Bush a obtenu l'approbation du Sénat pour une première nomination, celle du juge John Roberts, devenu président de la Cour. Assurément conservateur, mais tendance molle, le juge Roberts n'a pas suscité l'enthousiasme des républicains intégristes. D'où sa confirmation rapide par la commission des affaires judiciaires du Sénat, avec l'approbation de certains démocrates.

Restait le deuxième poste à pourvoir, une opportunité à ne pas rater, une chance que la famille conservatrice attendait depuis longtemps : M. Bush se devait d'être au rendez-vous. Au moins une demi-douzaine de hauts magistrats, à l'ADN ultraconservateur, figuraient comme prétendants politiquement et juridiquement légitimes. M. Bush n'a choisi aucun d'eux.

Il a désigné celle qui fut longtemps, au Texas, sa conseillère juridique privée et, à la Maison Blanche, la responsable des services juridiques de la présidence. Harriet Miers n'a jamais été juge ou professeur de droit. Impossible de savoir quelles sont ses opinions sur les questions juridiques importantes pour l'avenir du pays ­ – fédéralisme, avortement, séparation de l'Eglise et de l'Etat, discrimination positive, etc.

SCANDALE DU "PLAMEGATE"

Son parcours a été hésitant : il a fallu une double "conversion" à cette catholique démocrate pour devenir ce qu'elle est aujourd'hui, "born again" évangélique républicaine... Bref, elle était jugée deux fois illégitime pour le poste : ni compétente ni idéologiquement sûre. Le mouvement évangélique et nombre de néoconservateurs ne comprennent pas. Ils ont affiché leur colère contre M. Bush. Ils l'ont acculé à retirer la candidature de celle dont il disait "connaître le cœur" , faute de pouvoir détailler ses opinions juridico-constitutionnelles...

Certains attribuent le fiasco Miers à une Maison Blanche désorientée et déstabilisée par le scandale dit du "Plamegate" ­ – du nom de Valerie Plame. Le "Plamegate" est l'une des retombées de la campagne de désinformation orchestrée par la présidence ­ – notamment, le vice-président Richard Cheney et son chef d'état-major, Lewis Libby ­ – en 2002 et 2003. Il s'agissait de vendre à l'opinion la thèse d'un Saddam Hussein à la tête d'un arsenal d'armes de destruction massive présentant une menace telle qu'elle justifiait la guerre contre l'Irak.

Pour se venger d'un envoyé spécial du gouvernement, l'ancien diplomate Joseph Wilson, qui avait dégonflé un des bobards de la Maison Blanche, l'achat par Bagdad d'uranium nigérien, des "sources" ont révélé à la presse que sa femme, Valérie Plame, était un agent de la CIA ­ – ce qui ruinait la carrière de cette dernière et constitue un crime fédéral.

Chargé d'identifier ces "sources", un procureur spécial, Patrick Fitzgerald, enquête dans une seule direction : la Maison Blanche. Il vient d'obtenir l'inculpation ­ 0 pour mensonges à la justice ­ – d'un des hommes-clés de l'aventure irakienne : le néoconservateur Libby, bras droit du vice-président. Et le juge Fitzgerald regarde aussi du côté de Karl Rove, principal conseiller politique de M. Bush et architecte de la coalition républicaine.

LA RAGE DES NÉOCONSERVATEURS

Cette enquête puis le procès Libby vont ramener au coeur du débat public ce que MM. Bush et Cheney voulaient faire oublier : les conditions dans lesquelles ils ont décidé la guerre contre l'Irak. Le "Plamegate" agit comme une pincée de sel sur la plaie irakienne ; il rouvre débats et divisions au sein des républicains sur l'opportunité de cette guerre. Il ravive la rage des néoconservateurs contre le secrétaire à la défense, Donald Rumsfeld, accusé d'être responsable du chaos irakien actuel pour n'avoir pas su préparer l'après-Saddam Hussein. Il exacerbe la colère des républicains ancienne manière ­ – en gros, ceux qui furent les collaborateurs de Bush père à la Maison Blanche ­–, tous, ou presque, opposés à la guerre.

Ce dernier groupe rejoint d'autres éléments de la coalition pour stigmatiser une ultime trahison du credo républicain par l'équipe Bush : la politique économique.

Très exactement, l'ampleur des déficits budgétaires ­ – hausse du budget de la défense et de celui de la santé ­ – et la mobilisation, à retard, de l'Etat fédéral pour reconstruire le Sud après le cyclone Katrina interdisent de lutter contre le "big government" , c'est-à-dire de mettre en œuvre l'un des dogmes du parti : réduire le poids de l'Etat dans la vie du pays.

Complétez ce tableau avec l'inculpation pour malversations financières ­ – dans une coalition qui se pique de défendre les "valeurs" ! ­ – du chef des républicains à la Chambre, le Texan Tom DeLay, et le résultat est clair : un Bush singulièrement affaibli.

George W. Bush en état de grande faiblesse, Alain Frachon, Le Monde, 1.11.2005,
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3232,36-704990,0.html

Putting It Back Together Again        NYT        30.10.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/weekinreview/30nago.html

Putting It Back Together Again

October 30, 2005
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY

GEORGE W. BUSH and Karl Rove came to Washington with the boldest of ambitions: to overhaul the nation's political architecture, establishing Republicans as the indisputable majority party for a generation or more. It was a meticulously conceived plan: broaden the Republican base, strip moderates away from the Democrats, even make incursions with such solidly Democratic constituencies as African-Americans. But a White House that has prided itself in thinking in broad historical strokes found itself struggling to keep afloat through the news cycle, as it confronted the indictment of a senior White House aide and a failed Supreme Court nomination.

After "this disastrous year for Republicans," in the words of the G.O.P. consultant Joe Gaylord, some Republicans were suggesting this White House would be lucky to revive the ambitious legislative agenda Mr. Bush presented 10 months ago, much less achieve the permanent Republican governing coalition that many argued began to take shape with the election of Ronald Reagan.

It may be premature to suggest, as some Democrats and historians have, that this ambitious plan is now dashed; these political realignments take place over decades, and typically can be identified only after the passage of time. And surely, until recently, President Bush had done nothing but strengthen his own party. Still, even some Republicans were suggesting that the Bush presidency could set back, rather than advance, the Republican Party as it seeks its goal.

"It's certainly not going to happen if the president continues on the course he has been operating on," said Richard A. Viguerie, a veteran conservative activist. "The only way you can build a governing coalition is to draw a clear distinction between you and the other side. But the longer George W. Bush is in office, the more like his father he has become. He is uncomfortable with confrontation."

Political analysts said hopes for creating this coalition had already been strained by the Iraq war and Mr. Bush's unpopular plan to privatize Social Security. But the recent crises that have besieged the Bush administration, beginning with the reaction to Hurricane Katrina, have presented a series of systematic challenges to the central elements of this ambitious plan.

Mr. Bush's nomination of his counsel, Harriet E. Miers, to the Supreme Court, produced a rupture with the conservative base, which was already distressed by Mr. Bush's spending policies. In startlingly blunt language, several said that Mr. Bush would have to produce a nominee to their liking to repair the damage.

"If we don't get a good nominee - if it's somebody else who is a stealth candidate, and we don't know what their judicial philosophy is - well then that will be the end of the Bush coalition," said Paul J. Weyrich, a conservative organizer and founder of the Free Congress Foundation.

Beyond that, the corruption and cronyism allegations and that have swirled around Republicans in the White House and Congress are the kind of issues that have historically disturbed moderate swing voters. The White House's response to Hurricane Katrina has undercut any hope that the party might have made gains with African-Americans.

"If there was a realignment going on, that's now over," said John Podesta, a White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton who is now president of the liberal Center for American Progress. "It has crashed and burned."

The attempt by Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove to make enduring changes in the political landscape has, for Democrats, been one of the most threatening aspects of his presidency, particularly after the elections of 2002 and 2004 suggested the strategy was working. Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, said that over the past four years, there had been a steady increase in voters who said they were Republican, as well as in the number of unaligned voters who said they leaned Republican.

"The Republicans were making gains through the first four years of the administration - and they could have consolidated those gains and made further gains," Mr. Kohut said. "I don't want to preclude anything, but with 38 percent approval ratings, Republicans gains are going to be hard to come by. More likely they will experience reversals."

While there is abundant evidence of the weakness of Mr. Bush and his party, there is little reliable evidence of just how enduring this setback is.

After all, issues that drove the Republicans to victory, like same-sex marriage, are still around. And Democrats may be at a disadvantage in the midterm elections - their next big opportunity - because of redistricting and the races actually in play. Still, Mr. Gaylord, who advised Newt Gingrich in 1994 when Republicans orchestrated a takeover of the House, warned that Republicans could be in for a surprise.

"This is the time when good candidates decide whether they are going to run," Mr. Gaylord said. "And the atmospherics are not good for the party right now."

Mr. Bush is hardly the first two-term president who has suffered through a difficult second term. And Mr. Bush's advisers could certainly be forgiven from drawing encouragement by the fact that most Americans do not recall today that Truman, Eisenhower and Reagan all had dark periods.

The national Republican Party chairman, Ken Mehlman, says that Mr. Bush's tenure is hardly over, noting that President Reagan recovered after the Iran-contra scandal. That said, the situations are different in some serious ways.

Mr. Bush is facing a crush of problems, from high gas prices to growing casualty counts in Iraq. And President Reagan, even during the depths of the Iran-contra scandal, never suffered from approval ratings as low as Mr. Bush's. Polls today suggest that Americans seem despondent about the state of the country, typically a bad sign for a party in power.

"The thing that is the most disturbing to me now - this wasn't true then - is this sort of hopelessness that the American people are feeling," said Michael K. Deaver, who was a senior Reagan adviser. "When you have 70 percent of the people saying they don't think are things are going to get better - that to me is the most disturbing thing."

Mr. Podesta noted that Mr. Bush was apparently echoing the strategy that Mr. Clinton adopted in warding off questions about problems during his own troubled second term, saying that he would focus on the problems of the country instead.

The difference, Mr. Podesta noted, was that "the public liked the job Clinton was doing."

And Fred Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University, noted that most presidents who recovered from second-term slumps did so because of the way they responded to events that took place overseas, like Mr. Reagan's strong challenge to the Soviet Union. "If you look statistically at presidents that have gone into real decline, I'd say more often than not they haven't pulled it out," he said.

There were still some glimmers of optimism. Grover Norquist, a conservative with close ties to the White House, said that while "we've had some bumps," he predicted that Mr. Bush's grandest plans, including Social Security, would eventually be successful, albeit not necessarily while Mr. Bush was still in office.

"They will be called W accounts," he predicted. "Fifty years from now, children will learn that Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and George Bush privatized Social Security."

But David Mayhew, a political scientist at Yale University, said he thought the White House had little to hope for now. Any chance of a realignment, which he said he had always considered slight, was now gone.

"I would doubt that he's going to get very much through now," Mr. Mayhew said.

    Putting It Back Together Again, NYT, 30.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/weekinreview/30nago.html

Steve Sack

Minnesota        The Minneapolis Star-Tribune        Cagle       

28.10.2005

http://www.sackstudio.com/

George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States.

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/sack.asp

History

The Latest in Second-Term Scandals

October 30, 2005
The New York Times
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - White House scandals in the second term of presidencies have become the rule.

Dwight D. Eisenhower's chief of staff was forced from office by accusations of corruption. Richard M. Nixon resigned over Watergate. Ronald Reagan's White House was embroiled in the Iran-contra scheme. Bill Clinton was impeached because of his affair with an intern.

But President Bush's situation is different in several respects.

Most important, from Mr. Bush's perspective, he is the first second-term president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to have both houses of Congress controlled by his own party. The other scandals were driven, at least in part, by Congressional investigations. This Congress is unlikely to investigate this president.

On the other hand, except for Nixon, the other second-term presidents in the last half-century mostly maintained their popularity even as the scandals were unfolding.

At his low point, in the spring of 1958, Eisenhower's handling of the presidency was approved of by 48 percent of the public and disapproved of by 36 percent, a Gallup poll showed. At the end of his term, Eisenhower's approval rating had climbed to 59 percent.

In February 1987, as the Iran-contra scandal was breaking, 42 percent of those questioned in a New York Times/CBS News poll approved of Reagan's presidency, with 46 percent disapproving. It was the only month of his second term when a plurality was against him. By summer, his approval rate had climbed above 50 percent, and it was 60 percent when he left office.

Mr. Clinton's approval rating in his second term never fell below 55 percent, and it was 68 percent at the end of his presidency.

Mr. Bush is faring much worse. A Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll taken last weekend found Mr. Bush's approval rating to be 42 percent and his disapproval rating 55 percent.

Another difference is that I. Lewis Libby Jr. is the first high-ranking White House official in many decades to be indicted while still in office. Plenty of top White House staff members from other administrations have been indicted, including H. R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman from the Nixon White House and Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, who was Reagan's chief of staff, but they all resigned long before they were indicted.

The last sitting White House staff member to be indicted may have been Orville Babcock, Ulysses S. Grant's private secretary, who was charged in 1875 with a group of whiskey distillers in a conspiracy to defraud the government of taxes.

In 1973, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned as part of a plea bargain on accusations of corruption in which he avoided a felony indictment. And in 1984, Reagan's labor secretary, Raymond J. Donovan, was indicted on a grand larceny charge that involved the construction business he owned before entering the government. Mr. Donovan took an unpaid leave of absence and resigned the next year. Ultimately, he was acquitted.

Except for Nixon, the two-term presidents in the last 50 years took successful steps to get their presidencies back on track after the scandals broke.

In 1958, Eisenhower's seemingly indispensable chief of staff, Sherman Adams, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had interceded with federal agencies on behalf of a businessman who had given him gifts. With the economy struggling to recover from a recession, Republicans lost 48 seats in the House and 15 in the Senate in the midterm elections. Eisenhower called the year, his sixth in office, the worst of his life.

But his wartime associate Maj. Gen. Wilton B. Persons, who was named to succeed Mr. Adams, proved to be a competent chief of staff. Eisenhower focused on foreign affairs and took several trips abroad. The Adams scandal was soon old news.

"The president was still Ike, and the presidency went on," said Stephen Hess, who was a young White House aide in Eisenhower's second term and is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

In the throes of the Iran-contra scandal, Reagan brought in a new top staff. He made Howard H. Baker Jr., the Senate Republican leader, his chief of staff and A. B. Culvahouse the White House counsel.

Mr. Baker demanded resignations of White House staff members and put trusted aides from his Senate staff in charge of operations.

Mr. Reagan gave a speech taking responsibility for the Iran-contra affair, and his popularity began to rise.

Then Mr. Reagan turned to foreign policy. He made his famous speech in Berlin demanding that the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev "tear down this wall," and presided over the beginning of the end of the cold war.

Mr. Clinton also turned to foreign policy after the Senate refused to convict him on impeachment charges. He traveled to China, negotiated a peace accord between Israelis and Palestinians and fought a successful war in Kosovo.

"The president proved that he clearly had the whip hand on foreign policy," said John D. Podesta, his last chief of staff.

In domestic policy, Mr. Clinton was strong enough to beat back Republican tax cuts and other policies advanced by Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House.

In the last 100 years, said Lewis L. Gould, author of "The Modern American Presidency," "there has not been one good second term."

But except for Nixon's, they did not end in disasters either.

The Latest in Second-Term Scandals, NYT, 30.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/politics/30history.html

I. Lewis Libby Jr.,

chief of staff to the vice president,

riding to work this morning.

Doug Mills        The New York Times        28.10.2005

Cover-Up, Nothing but the Cover-Up

By SCOTT SHANE        NYT        October 30, 2005

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/
weekinreview/coverup-nothing-but-the-coverup.html 

Cover-Up,

Nothing but the Cover-Up

October 30, 2005
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Charles W. Colson, the Watergate conspirator turned prison reformer, watched with a sense of déjà vu as I. Lewis Libby Jr., chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted Friday in the C.I.A. leak investigation.

"For years in Washington, they've all ended the same way - perjury and obstruction of justice," said Mr. Colson, who pleaded guilty in 1974 to an obstruction charge and served seven months in prison. "I don't know why people don't learn this lesson."

From Watergate to Iran-contra, from the Monica Lewinsky case to the current one, the pattern has been the same. The offense that launched the investigation rarely ends up in the bill of particulars when indictments come down. Instead, the charges are often related to the cover-up, which, Mr. Colson recalled, President Richard M. Nixon could be heard on the White House tapes presciently declaring as potentially more dangerous than the original crime.

Mr. Colson, who was Mr. Nixon's counsel from 1969 to 1973, said his crime closely mirrored the allegations facing Mr. Libby. He was convicted in a case involving efforts to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Libby is accused of lying about his efforts to gather information on Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Bush administration's use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq. Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate, said the charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and false statements were based on "alleged inconsistencies" in recollections and that Mr. Libby was innocent.Underlying both cases and many like them, Mr. Colson said, is "government hubris, political hubris."

Donald C. Smaltz, who was independent counsel in the case of Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy, said powerful officials often underestimate the seriousness of an inquiry when F.B.I. agents first come calling.

"When they're questioned in what seems a routine investigation, they will sometimes shade the truth," he said. "That gets the ball rolling in the wrong direction. If the investigation continues, these senior officials don't want to admit their mistake, and suddenly they're in front of a grand jury."

David Gergen, who served as adviser to four presidents, believes the pattern reflects not just the arrogance of official Washington - "the tendency to believe that the laws of gravity don't apply to you," he said - but also the intensity of its politics. "Loyalties are so fierce that people are willing to fall on their swords for a higher cause - whether it's protecting a boss or serving an ideology," he said.

Mr. Gergen said officials may grow so accustomed to the malleable rhetoric of politics that they carry it unconsciously into the unforgiving arena of criminal law. "Spin has become so central to the way Washington works, and there's a blurred line between spin and lying," he said.

    Cover-Up, Nothing but the Cover-Up, NYT, 30.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/weekinreview/30shane.html

The Vice President

In Indictment's Wake,

a Focus on Cheney's

Powerful Role

October 30, 2005
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 - Vice President Dick Cheney makes only three brief appearances in the 22-page federal indictment that charges his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., with lying to investigators and misleading a grand jury in the C.I.A. leak case. But in its clear, cold language, the document lifts a veil on how aggressively Mr. Cheney's office drove the rationale against Saddam Hussein and then fought to discredit the Iraq war's critics.

The indictment now raises a central question: how much collateral damage has Mr. Cheney himself sustained?

Many Republicans say that the vice president, already politically weakened because of his role in preparing the case for war, could be further damaged if he is forced to testify at Mr. Libby's trial about the infighting over intelligence that turned out to be false. At the minimum, they say, his office will be temporarily off balance with the resignation of Mr. Libby, who controlled both foreign and domestic affairs in a vice presidential office that has served as a major policy arm for the West Wing.

"Cheney has had a tight, effective team, and they have been an incredible support system for the presidency," said Rich Bond, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. "To the degree that that support system is weakened, it's a bad day at the office. But no person is indispensable."

Mr. Cheney's allies noted that there was no suggestion in the indictment that the vice president had done anything wrong, and that he had a large Rolodex of support. "His reach within both the party mechanism and the policy structures of the government is so deep that I believe that it is possible to find somebody who would provide the technical and intellectual support that Libby did, even if he doesn't have the same personal relationship that he had with Libby," said Tom Rath, a New Hampshire Republican with ties to the White House. "That's very hard to duplicate."

The larger question, Republicans said, was Mr. Cheney's standing with the public, and what his staff has often called the vice president's constituency of one, Mr. Bush.

Paul Light, a vice presidential scholar at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, said that Mr. Cheney's relationship with Mr. Bush was likely to remain solid but that the taint of the scandal could hurt the vice president outside the private counsels of the White House.

"Cheney becomes a bit of an albatross except with the base, where he's a real rock star," Mr. Light said. "It'll be less possible for him to make campaign trips because this issue will dog him."

A number of influential Republicans agreed, although they did not want to speak for attribution for fear of harming their relationships with Mr. Cheney.

"Cheney doesn't have a legal problem, but he has a political problem," said one Republican close to the White House. "As the driving force on foreign policy and the Iraq war, his leadership is now nowhere near as credible. Bush has got to approach the stuff coming from the vice president's office with raised eyebrows."

Although Mr. Cheney makes only three appearances in the indictment, the episodes tell the story of a vice president directly involved in an effort to learn about Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who emerged in 2003 as a critic of the administration's use of prewar intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. The episodes do not shed light on the action that set off the special prosecutor nearly two years ago: who first leaked the name of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, an undercover officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, as an effort to denigrate Mr. Wilson's trip as a nepotistic junket arranged by his wife.

Mr. Cheney's first appearance in the indictment is on Page 3, where the document states that in 2002 he made an inquiry to the C.I.A. "concerning certain intelligence reporting." Although the indictment does not say so specifically, Mr. Cheney made that inquiry after reading an agency report, now known to be based on forged documents, that said that Niger planned to send several tons of uranium to Iraq.

The query from the most powerful vice president in American history was enough to prompt the C.I.A., on its own, to send Mr. Wilson to Niger to investigate the claims. Mr. Wilson returned to tell the agency that the reports were wrong and based on forged documents, which infuriated the administration.

Mr. Cheney's next appearance in the indictment is on Page 5, where he is described as telling Mr. Libby, on June 12, 2003, that Mr. Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A., in the counterproliferation division. "Libby understood that the vice president had learned this information from the C.I.A.," the indictment states.

Lawyers involved in the case have said that Mr. Libby's notes of the meeting indicated that Mr. Cheney's information came from George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, raising the possibility that the vice president was actively pursuing information about Mr. Wilson and his wife.

Mr. Cheney's next appearance is on Page 8, when he flew with Mr. Libby and others on Air Force Two on July 12, 2003, to Norfolk, Va. On the return trip, the indictment states, Mr. Libby "discussed with other officials aboard the plane" what he should say to reporters in response to "certain pending media inquiries," including questions from Matthew Cooper of Time magazine.

The indictment does not say who the "other officials" are or the nature of the reporters' inquiries, but it states that Mr. Libby spoke to Mr. Cooper on the same day, and that he confirmed that he had heard that Mr. Wilson's wife was involved in sending him on the trip.

Republicans who have known Mr. Cheney for decades say they feel he has changed, and that he reacted to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by becoming consumed with threats against the nation and his long-time desire to rid Iraq of Mr. Hussein. Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to the first President Bush, said as much in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine.

"I consider Cheney a good friend - I've known him for thirty years," Mr. Scowcroft was quoted as saying. "But Dick Cheney I don't know anymore."

Mr. Scowcroft added: "I don't think Dick Cheney is a neocon, but allied to the core of neocons is that bunch who thought we made a mistake in the first Gulf War, that we should have finished the job. There was another bunch who were traumatized by 9/11, and who thought, 'The world's going to hell and we've got to show we're not going to take this, and we've got to respond, and Afghanistan is O.K., but it's not sufficient.' "

Some Republicans say that Mr. Cheney's relationship with Mr. Bush has already changed, and that Mr. Cheney has become less of a mentor to the president after Mr. Bush's nearly five years in office. Even so, Mr. Cheney's allies insist that with or without Mr. Libby, Mr. Cheney will be at the president's side.

"I don't think it's ever been about Cheney's staff," said Victoria Clarke, a former Pentagon spokeswoman and aide to President George H. W. Bush. "It's about him. Cheney's influence has always been his own."

    In Indictment's Wake, a Focus on Cheney's Powerful Role, NYT, 30.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/politics/30cheney.html?hp&ex=1130644800&en=d599c390429480e0&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Libby a quiet force who pushed case for war

Fri Oct 28, 2005 5:24 PM ET
Reuters
By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide, has been a quiet yet powerful force in shaping the Bush administration's policies and helped build the case for the Iraq invasion.

Libby, 55, resigned on Friday minutes after he was indicted on charges of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of justice in the probe of the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

Cheney said in a statement that he felt "deep regret" in accepting the resignation of Libby, an attorney known by colleagues for his analytical mind and loyalty to his boss.

A specialist in national security, Libby had logged long hours in his office near the West Wing of the White House, steeping himself in subjects like counterterrorism, bioweapons defense and energy policy.

Libby, who could face up to 30 years in prison, held three titles: chief of staff and national security adviser to the vice president and assistant to President George W. Bush -- a sign of his broad influence.

But outside the halls of power, Libby has a literary side -- he published a mystery novel, "The Apprentice," in 1996.

Set in rural Japan in 1903, the book was praised by Publishers Weekly for achieving "a sense of mystery and claustrophobia through pared-down prose and minimalist characterization."

Libby goes by his nickname, "Scooter," but many people also refer to him as Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney.

"He is to the vice president what the vice president is to the president," said Mary Matalin, who worked with Libby as an adviser to Cheney during Bush's first term.

She described Libby as a deep thinker and problem-solver who gives "discreet advice."

Libby shares the vice president's hawkish views on national security and his penchant for operating behind the scenes.

"He doesn't grandstand," said World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, Libby's friend and mentor.

REPORTER'S SOURCE

While Libby is rarely quoted in the press, his private conversations with reporters became a focus of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame case.

Among those he spoke to was New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who testified in the case and spent 85 days in jail for initially refusing to reveal her source.

Central to the five-count indictment against Libby is his involvement in the response to diplomat Joseph Wilson's accusation that the administration twisted the facts to justify the Iraq war. Wilson is Plame's husband.

In the war's run-up, according to journalist Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack," Libby presented a document to top officials citing evidence of weapons of mass destruction and possible contacts between Iraqi officials and a ringleader of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The weapons were never found and the administration has since backed away from the idea of a connection between Saddam's government and the September 11 attacks.

Libby got his nickname Scooter as a child after the Yankees baseball player Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto. Born in Connecticut, he attended Phillips Academy, a private school in Massachusetts.

He graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and has a law degree from Columbia University.

At Yale, Libby took a political science course with Wolfowitz, who tapped him to serve in the State Department in the Reagan administration and later in the Pentagon.

Wilson has said he believed Libby was part of a White House campaign to "smear" him. But Wolfowitz said Libby has never been "a rabidly partisan political type."

"There is a difference between people who focus on policy and people who believe it's my party right or wrong -- that's not Scooter," he said.

Before he worked for Cheney, Libby was a managing partner at the international law firm Dechert, Price and Rhoads.

One of his clients was Marc Rich, the billionaire fugitive pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 2001.

Reacting to his indictment, Libby said in a statement that it was a "sad day for me and my family." He planned to fight the charges and said he expects to be exonerated.

Libby has two children with his wife, Harriet Grant, a former lawyer on the Democratic staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In addition to writing, he likes to ski.

A September letter that Libby sent to Miller in jail showed his literary side. Urging her to testify, he wrote: "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life."

    Libby a quiet force who pushed case for war, NYT, 28.10.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-10-28T222349Z_01_YUE660942_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Rove wields power and stirs controversy

Wed Oct 26, 2005 11:52 AM ET
Reuters
By Adam Entous

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senior presidential adviser Karl Rove, one of Washington's most powerful and polarizing figures, is revered by supporters as the brilliant architect of President George W. Bush's electoral victories and reviled by opponents as a ruthless political operative.

Far more than his official title suggests, deputy White House chief of staff Rove has played a powerful behind-the-scenes role, with a hand in everything from politics to foreign policy to personnel decisions.

Credited with keeping Bush relentlessly on message and defining the candidate with a focused set of issues, Rove, 54, can be brusque, single-minded and at times mischievous.

His pranks have included offering the president's suit jacket to underdressed reporters and lying down in front of the wheels of Air Force One.

Rove has been with Bush since his early political days in Texas. But his career has been marked by controversy, long before questions arose about his role in outing covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose diplomat husband was an outspoken critic of Bush's Iraq policy.

"Level an opponent, leave no evidence" is how The Dallas Morning News summed up Rove's strategy as Texas' top political operative.

Critics have long accused Rove of using leaks and stunts to damage his political opponents.

A decade ago, he was credited with leaking to a reporter that a rising Democratic political star, whose resume said she was a top graduate of the University of Texas, didn't have a degree.

In the 1986 Texas governor's race, Rove said he found an eavesdropping device in his office. Democrats accused Republicans of setting up the incident to stir publicity.

Political opponents say Rove also played a behind-the-scenes role in "whisper campaigns" against Ann Richards, whom Bush defeated in the 1994 governor's race, and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, whom Bush knocked out of the 2000 presidential race.

At the height of last year's presidential campaign, critics tried to link Rove to attacks on Democratic rival John Kerry's Vietnam war record. The White House denied any involvement in the attacks launched by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

"He's a brilliant political strategist, and he's proved brilliantly effective at destroying Democrats personally," former President Bill Clinton said in a July 2005 interview with NBC's "Today" show. "I mean, they've gotten away with murder, and he's really good at it."

THIRTY-YEAR FRIENDSHIP

Rove first met Bush while working at the Republican National Committee in the mid-1970s and revived the friendship when he moved to Austin in 1981 to set up shop as a political consultant.

In 1994, Rove helped the neophyte politician win his first elective office as governor of Texas. With Rove at his side, Bush repeated in 1998, winning in a landslide and becoming the first Texas governor to be elected to back-to-back, four-year terms.

In a sign of Rove's clout in the Texas Capitol in those days, then-governor Bush scrawled on a photo, which hung in Rove's office, "To Karl, the man with the plan."

Rove was a protege of the late Lee Atwater, who played a key role in the 1988 presidential campaign of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. Like Atwater, Rove is well known for employing a strategy of attacking an opponent on the opponent's strongest issue.

When Bush declared his bid for the presidency, Rove sold his company to devote all his attention to the campaign.

Since coming to the White House, Rove's influence has expanded far beyond setting political strategy. One of his tasks was to lead the secretive White House Iraq Group, which set strategy for selling the Iraq war to the public. The group's work became a focus of the leak investigation.

He has become a driving force behind administration policy, and Bush recently put him in charge of coordinating internal White House domestic, economic and national security policy councils.

After shaping policies, Rove makes sure Republican constituents follow them.

Some have attributed the Republican backlash over Bush's slow response to Hurricane Katrina and against his Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers to the fact that Rove has been distracted by the Plame case.

Born in Colorado and raised in several Western states, Rove attended the University of Utah but left before graduating. He began his political career during former President Richard Nixon's administration as head of the nationwide College Republicans.

    Rove wields power and stirs controversy, R, 26.10.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-10-26T165225Z_01_YUE660719_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

A Lobbyist in Full

May 1, 2005
The New York Times
By MICHAEL CROWLEY

"Can you smell money?!?!?!'' Jack Abramoff wrote.

It was December 2001, and he was a kingpin of Republican Washington, one of the city's richest and best-connected lobbyists. His former personal assistant had gone to work for Karl Rove, the new president's top political adviser; he was close friends with the powerful Republican congressman from Texas, Tom DeLay, a relationship most of his competitors would kill to boast of. He was making millions on fees of up to $750 per hour; he was the proprietor of two city restaurants; and he was even a man of good works -- a charitable giver and the founder of a private religious school in the Maryland suburbs. Dressed in expensive suits, he moved around the capital in a BMW outfitted with a computer screen, often headed to one of the countless fund-raisers he gave for Republican congressmen and senators at Redskins and Orioles and Wizards games in his private sky boxes. Jack Abramoff was a man in full.

But he was still expanding. The scent of money was coming from the Saginaw Chippewa, the owners of the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort -- a $400-million-a-year enterprise in Mt. Pleasant, Mich. Abramoff and his informal business partner, Michael Scanlon, an independent public-relations consultant who had been a spokesman in DeLay's Congressional office, had begun to specialize in representing Indian tribes with casino operations. They hoped for a contract with this tribe.

''Did we win it?'' Scanlon wrote back.

''The [expletive] troglodytes didn't vote on you today,'' Abramoff responded.

''What's a troglodyte?'' Scanlon asked. (In his early 30's, he had much to learn from his master.)

''What am I, a dictionary? :) It's a lower form of existence, basically,'' Abramoff wrote. ''I like these guys,'' he hastened to add, yet then continued: ''They are plain stupid. . . . Morons.'' Ultimately, the lower life forms would pay Abramoff and Scanlon $14 million -- just a fraction of the $66 million the two men's businesses would take in from six different Indian tribes over the next three years. (Abramoff would offer his lobbying services to tribes at relatively modest rates, but then tell them that they couldn't afford not to hire Scanlon, who charged astronomical amounts for his P.R. services and then subcontracted much of the work at budget rates; he also supposedly kicked back millions to Abramoff.)

By last September, however, the ride was over. That's when dozens of Abramoff's ''Sopranos''-like e-mail messages were released at a hearing before the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The e-mail messages, seized from Abramoff's computer, told a story of front groups, secret kickbacks, manipulated tribal elections and political payoffs. ''What sets this tale apart, what makes it truly extraordinary, is the extent and degree of the apparent exploitation and deceit,'' an outraged John McCain said at the hearing. ''Even in this town, where huge sums are routinely paid as the price of political access, the figures are astonishing.''

Nearly as shocking as the sums was the coarseness of the e-mail messages, especially given that Abramoff was a devout Orthodox Jew who presented himself publicly as a man of conservative values. About one tribal client Abramoff had written to Scanlon, ''These mofos are the stupidest idiots in the land for sure.'' In another e-mail message he wrote, ''we need to get some $ from those monkeys!!!!''

Money was always the imperative, the language of his desire strong enough to make the 46-year-old father of five sound like a frat dude in a beer ad: ''Da man! You iz da man! Do you hear me?! You da man!! How much $$ coming tomorrow? Did we get some more $$ in?''

At the hearing, Abramoff cut a handsome figure in a dark suit. His short black hair was neatly trimmed and combed. With his square jaw and dark eyes, he might have passed for a dashing Baldwin brother. But Abramoff had the look of a condemned man. (He would tell me later that the experience reminded him of ''that scene in 'Braveheart,' when he's brought in on a gurney to be cut up, with the crowd assembled.'') As the assembled senators lambasted his dealings -- ''a pathetic, disgusting example of greed run amok,'' said one -- Abramoff would merely invoke his right not to testify.

Abramoff's rise and fall is not just a Washington story of our time. His close-knit relationship with DeLay -- the contours of which have been the chief topic of discussion in Washington for the past month -- threatens DeLay's position as majority leader of the House. Yet in Jack Abramoff's telling, his is merely the story of how Washington really works.


I met with Jack Abramoff in late March at Signatures, the upscale contemporary American cuisine restaurant in which he has a majority stake. Located on Pennsylvania Avenue, between the White House and Capitol Hill, Signatures is no personal lark: it has been an important locus for Abramoff's business, broadly defined, a hangout where Republican lobbyists and congressmen could dine on a $35 beef filet and where Abramoff held many political fund-raisers. Abramoff -- who, except for a brief TV interview, had not spoken for attribution since the Indian Affairs hearing in September -- agreed to see me with the understanding that he would not discuss specific allegations. (He is the subject of investigations by two Senate committees, the Department of Interior and the Justice Department.)

When I arrived, Abramoff was finishing lunch with his lawyer Abbe Lowell, a scandal specialist who represented Washington's last great pariah, Gary Condit. Abramoff and Lowell soon joined me in a private dining room at the back of the restaurant. Abramoff walked in quietly and extended his hand with a sheepish grin. In his notorious e-mail messages Abramoff comes across as manic, impatient and ruthless. Now he seemed deflated. He was pale and tired-looking and thick around the middle. He took a seat by a window and fidgeted with an empty yellow packet of artificial sweetener he had poured into an iced tea. Sitting beside him, Lowell seemed more tense than his client. ''Jack is doing this against my advice,'' he said.

Abramoff was friendly, talkative and funny. When I suggested to him -- gently, not wanting to put him off -- that he had become ''a little radioactive,'' his face brightened. ''I don't know what it's like to be a little radioactive! The Geiger counters are going'' -- he raised his hands in lieu of completing the thought. At other times, he was far more somber. ''I have basically had my life obliterated,'' he said softly.

Put simply, Abramoff claimed not to see what he had done wrong. ''I've been shocked at how I've been portrayed in the media,'' he said. ''The Jack Abramoff who has been made into a caricature and a punching bag in the national media is not the Jack Abramoff who I think exists. If I read the articles about me, and I didn't know me, I would think I was Satan.'' The experience, he said, has been ''Kafkaesque.''

Over the course of two meetings -- the second one a week later at the offices of Lowell's law firm -- Abramoff maintained that his lobbying work had been totally ethical and that his fees were justified by his effectiveness. ''I have been an aggressive advocate for people who engaged me,'' he said firmly. ''I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.'' He suggested that jealous rivals had sabotaged him. ''There is this tremendous cutthroat zero-sum game'' in the lobbying industry, he said.

Despite some reports to the contrary, Abramoff was not prepared to turn on his Capitol Hill friends, DeLay among them. But there were occasional hints that the knowledge he possesses could indeed be quite damning. At one point, for instance, I asked Abramoff to gauge the influence of lobbyist money in Congress.

''I just don't think members of Congress for the most part sell their votes or their ideology,'' he told me.

For the most part?

''Ahem!'' Lowell interjected. ''Hold on, hold on.''

Lowell stood and summoned his client from the table. The two men walked to a corner of the room and huddled with their arms around each other. After a minute or two Abramoff returned and sat down.

''I would say the same thing,'' he told me. ''I would say, generally speaking, that's the case.'' Generally speaking, that is.

Abramoff was born, as chance would have it, in Atlantic City, where his father was with Arnold Palmer Enterprises. When he was 10, the family moved to Beverly Hills, Calif., where Abramoff became a high-school weight-lifting champ who once squatted 540 pounds. He was raised in a nonobservant Jewish household. But when he was 12, he told me, a viewing of ''Fiddler on the Roof'' changed his life: ''I made the decision that I would become religious in order to preserve the faith in our family.'' He ran out and bought books on Judaism with his own savings.

Abramoff inherited his conservative worldview from his father, who had ties to Ronald Reagan. As a student at Brandeis, outside Boston, he brought California Reaganism with him, organizing Massachusetts campuses for Reagan's presidential campaign in 1980. After graduating a year later, Abramoff was elected chairman of the College Republican National Committee, a position once held by Karl Rove.

Even in his early 20's, says Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan aide and longtime mentor to young conservatives: ''Jack was a good politician. He clearly was a leader.'' And he looked the part, in his pinstripes and fedoras. ''He always dressed incredibly well, even when he was a kid,'' says a conservative activist in Washington who has known Abramoff for more than 20 years. (Like many people I spoke to, he did not want his name in an article about Abramoff.) ''He was always more stylish than Brooks Brothers. The hair was immovable, always done up. I don't think I ever saw him not in a suit.''

Early on, Abramoff made friends who would be vital to his future success. His College Republican campaign had been managed by Grover Norquist, who is now one of Washington's most influential conservative activists. Joining the team as a $200-per-month intern was a baby-faced college student, Ralph Reed. Together, the three of them shaped the organization into a right-wing battle machine. ''It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left,'' Abramoff was quoted as saying in the group's 1983 annual report. ''Our job is to remove them from power permanently.''

Abramoff's next stop was Citizens for America, a Reaganite grass-roots group that helped Oliver North build support for the Nicaraguan contras and staged a daring meeting of anti-Communist rebel leaders in 1985 in Jamba, Angola. (''I spent Shabbos in Jamba, and when I went out to pray,'' he told me, the locals thought he was a ''mystic.'') Things ended on a sour note when the group's millionaire founder, Lewis Lehrman, concluded that Abramoff had spent his money carelessly.

By the mid-1980's, Abramoff was tiring of political activism and its low wages. ''I wanted to make money,'' he says. After graduating from Georgetown Law School in 1986, Abramoff, not yet 30, started a production company. Its signature achievement was the 1989 film ''Red Scorpion,'' an action movie in which Dolph Lundgren plays a Soviet agent who turns on his evil Communist masters. Produced and based on a story by Abramoff himself, it is a crude film: in one scene, Lundgren stumbles into a crowded bar, belches loudly and then proceeds to head-butt a barfly, punch out the bartender and boorishly sing the Russian national anthem before machine-gunning the joint. In the film's first 30 minutes, Lundgren K.O.'s or kills a dozen people. When I mentioned that I'd seen half of the movie, Abramoff grinned and said: ''You got through half of it? Wait until you see 'Red Scorpion 2'!'' (Yes, there was a sequel.) A few years after ''Red Scorpion'' was released (but before the sequel), however, Abramoff claimed to be upset, publicly blaming the film's director for its runaway violence and profanity. He established a short-lived Committee for Traditional Jewish Values in Entertainment, but then concluded he wouldn't be able to put out movies that met his standards.

The political world soon beckoned. In November 1994, with the public frustrated over the Clintons' health care proposals and with Republicans leveling charges of corruption at Democrats in Congress, the G.O.P. won control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1954. ''The 1994 election was a huge shock on K Street,'' Abramoff recalled, referring to the location of many lobbying firms. ''These folks they were used to ignoring'' -- conservative bomb-throwers like Newt Gingrich and DeLay -- ''were suddenly running committees. I found myself in the position of being one of the few who actually knew these guys.'' On the very Saturday after the election, Abramoff was approached about a job with the prominent law and lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds. Upon his hire, the firm's news release boasted of Abramoff's ties to Ralph Reed's Christian Coalition, the Republican National Committee and top House Republican leaders. ''He is someone on our side,'' Tom DeLay's chief of staff, Ed Buckham, explained to National Journal magazine soon after. ''He has access to DeLay.''


Abramoff soon made his name representing an obscure client: the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States commonwealth in the remote western Pacific Ocean where businesses enjoyed a quirky status. American labor laws like the minimum wage did not apply, but manufacturers there could still affix the Made in the U.S.A. label to garments they produced for companies like the Gap and Tommy Hilfiger. Abramoff depicted the tiny islands as an entrepreneurial paradise, fighting Congressional attempts to impose pro-worker regulations there (and bringing in some $7 million to his company). It was during this period that he cultivated the art of the junket, over the years flying dozens of members of Congress and their aides to the islands, where they stayed in luxury resorts. Numerous conservative columnists and think-tankers made the trips as well. ''Suddenly the Mariana Islands became one of the critical conservative causes of the mid-90's,'' says Marshall Wittmann, who was then a senior official with the Christian Coalition but has since defected to the Democratic Leadership Council.

One of Abramoff's key allies in the Marianas fight was Tom DeLay, then the No. 3 Republican in the House. They had met through Daniel Lapin, a Seattle-based rabbi with strong ties to the Christian right, and bonded over their hard-edged conservative politics and devout religious faith. Since then, they have traveled together on at least three lavish junkets, including trips to Moscow and London. (It was on a trip to the Marianas in 1997 that DeLay proclaimed Abramoff ''one of my closest and dearest friends.'') Abramoff did DeLay smaller favors, like lending him premium sky-box seats to a Three Tenors concert in 2000 (a gift DeLay did not report). In 2002 Abramoff even dropped by a baby shower for DeLay's daughter. One former DeLay aide described him as the ''godfather'' of DeLay's Washington network.

During the mid-1990's, Abramoff began representing Indian tribes with casino operations. The first was the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who would pay his firm more than $5 million in the late 90's. As his business and reputation grew, Abramoff was becoming a vital cog in the G.O.P.'s money machine. He played a major role in ''The K Street Project,'' a Norquist-designed initiative that pressured lobbying firms to slant Republican in their hiring and donations. Public-interest watchdogs were appalled at the new level of coordination between Congress and business lobbyists, but Abramoff makes no apologies for it. ''It was my role to push the Republicans on K Street to be more helpful to the conservative movement,'' Abramoff told me. Partly to that end, Abramoff hired several former senior G.O.P. Congressional aides onto his lobbying team, including DeLay aides like Michael Scanlon and Tony Rudy, now a prominent lobbyist. He also sent his associates in the other direction; in 2001, for example, his personal assistant, Susan Ralston, took the same job under Karl Rove, effectively making her Rove's gatekeeper.

Abramoff also directed his clients to donate to the conservative movement. None did so more than the Indian tribes that he had begun to represent. Abramoff once boasted he had steered more than $10 million in tribal contributions to G.O.P.-aligned groups. Documents from the Coushatta Tribe, based in Kinder, La., show how this worked: Abramoff presented the tribe with a specific list of ''requests,'' which included such helpful notations as ''Very receptive to tribal issues,'' ''Senate Appropriations cmte. Member'' or simply ''Race is priority for the Republican leadership.'' Abramoff's old friends, including DeLay, were often the beneficiaries of Coushatta money. For instance, the tribe sent $20,000 to one DeLay political committee and $10,000 to Texans for a Republican Majority, a DeLay-run state political committee whose activities are now under investigation. Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform received $25,000 from the tribe for a promised meeting with the president, which never took place. Coushatta money also went to Ralph Reed's Atlanta-based political consulting firm. That firm took more than $4 million from Abramoff to rally religious opposition to a casino Abramoff was trying to shut down on the Coushatta's behalf. (Reed, who is running for lieutenant governor of Georgia, has insisted he was ''deceived'' by Abramoff. Others on the Christian right aren't so sure. ''I think it's a hard sell that he didn't know any of this,'' says Paul Weyrich, a dean of Washington social conservatives.)

Abramoff wouldn't talk specifically about his relationship with DeLay. But he did suggest, in a general way, that people are being naive about the capital's true workings. ''I don't think it's a secret that, in Washington, the role of the lobbyist includes gaining access to the decision maker, all within a proper legal context,'' he told me. ''There are probably two dozen events and fund-raisers every night. Lobbyists go on trips with members of Congress, socialize with members of Congress -- all with the purpose of increasing one's access to the decision makers.

''That is not unusual,'' he continued in a calm voice. ''They've been made to seem unusual with me. Perhaps because they haven't pulled e-mails to see the various fund-raisers and golfing outings that [other lobbyists] have been engaged in.

''I think there are people who would prefer that there are no political contributions, people who would prefer that all members of Congress live an ascetic, monklike social life. This is the system that we have. I didn't create the system. This is the system that we have.'' At another point in our conversation, he said something else about that system. ''Eventually,'' he said, ''money wins in politics.''

Certainly money fueled Abramoff's lobbying work. One case study is Abramoff's relationship with the Tigua Indians, based in El Paso. A poor tribe, desperate for casino riches, the Tiguas were the incidental victim in 2001 of an Abramoff lobbying campaign to enforce a state gambling ban in Texas, focused primarily on an upstart tribal casino near Houston that threatened his Louisiana Coushatta clients. When the ban also shuttered the Tiguas' Speaking Rock Casino, Abramoff showed little pity at first. Writing to Ralph Reed on Feb. 11, 2002, he declared: ''I wish those moronic Tiguas were smarter in their political contributions. I'd love us to get our mitts on that moolah!! Oh well, stupid folks get wiped out.''

But Abramoff soon converted the Tiguas' loss into his gain. By Feb. 18, 2002, he was pitching his services to the tribe in an e-mailed memo that scorned the ''ill-advised'' ban he had just supported and noting ''the critical importance of not allowing tribal sovereignty to be eroded by the actions of the State of Texas.'' The Tiguas hired Abramoff and Scanlon, but it was a delicate relationship. When Abramoff was copied on a mass e-mailing apparently sent by Marc Schwartz, then a consultant to the tribe, he sent a livid message to Scanlon: ''that [expletive] idiot put my name on an e-mail list! what a [expletive] moron! he may have blown our cover!! Dammit. We are moving forward anyway and taking their [expletive] money.''

Abramoff planned to slip a provision granting the Tiguas gaming rights into a bipartisan election-reform bill before Congress. He turned to an old Republican friend, Representative Bob Ney of Ohio. On March 20, 2002, he sent Scanlon good news: ''just met with Ney!!! We're [expletive] gold!!!! He's going to do Tigua.'' A few days later, Abramoff sent Schwartz an e-mail message asking for $32,000 in donations to Ney's campaign fund and political action committee -- ''asap.''

In June, Abramoff sent Schwartz an e-mail message with a new request: ''our friend asked if we could help (as in cover) a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff . . . for August. The trip will be quite expensive (we did this for another member -- you know who) 2 years ago. I anticipate that the total cost -- if he brings 3-4 members and wives -- would be around $100K or more.'' (Schwartz later testified before a Senate committee that Ney was ''our friend'' and that Abramoff told him that ''you know who'' was DeLay. Records show that DeLay did, in fact, travel to Scotland in 2000, accompanied by Abramoff as well as his wife and two top aides.)

Abramoff told the Tiguas that Ney ''would probably do the trip through the Capital Athletic Foundation as an educational mission'' and asked them for a donation to the foundation, a charity Abramoff had founded ostensibly to support youth athletics. That August, Ney traveled to Scotland with Reed. (Eventually, money from other Abramoff clients paid for the trip.) In a disclosure form, Ney -- who now says he was ''duped'' and ''misled'' by ''these two nefarious individuals'' -- would report that the purpose of his trip was to give a speech to Scottish parliamentarians, attend an Edinburgh military ceremony and visit the British Parliament.

Abramoff's plans came to naught, however. In a July 25, 2002, e-mail message to Scanlon, he explained how Senator Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat thought to be supporting them, had let him down: ''I just spoke with Ney who met today with Dodd on the bill and raised our provision. Dodd looked at him like a deer in headlights and said he never made such a commitment and that, with the problems of new casinos in Connecticut, it is a problem!!! Mike, please call me immediately to tell me how we wired this, or were supposed to wire it. Ney feels we left him out to dry. Please call me!!!''

The deal had collapsed. But Abramoff never informed the Tiguas, who now claim he continued to hold out hope of victory even when he knew the battle was lost. Based on what he has learned subsequently, Schwartz told me that ''from July 25, 2002, it became an absolute fraud.''

Abramoff insisted to me that he kept working on behalf of the Tiguas: ''We were like flying Dutchmen going from bill to bill.'' He made a last-ditch effort to attach the Tigua provision to a huge budget bill, a plan he outlined in a Dec. 30 e-mail message to Schwartz: ''Our hope is that an omnibus bill is put together so we can work through our friends on the leadership staff to insert the language at the very end of the process, instead of working through the normal appropriations process -- which involves too many people and could jeopardize our legislative fix.''

That tactic failed, too. In this instance money did not win. By early 2003, the Tiguas, having paid $4.2 million on the campaign, were running low on cash. Schwartz says it would be months before the Tiguas realized that, just a year before, Abramoff had made millions supporting a ban on casino gambling in Texas.

Abramoff is adamant about one thing: he did not dupe his Indian clients. The topic brings him to life and elicits an aggressive tone reminiscent of his e-mail messages. ''My clients got tremendous value!'' he told me. ''My clients used to refer to me as the most profitable slot machine in the whole operation! Tribes are not a bunch of idiots and simpletons. If a tribe spends millions of dollars to protect billions of dollars, that doesn't make them saps! It makes them good businesspeople!''

It was our second meeting, in a conference room at Lowell's law offices. When I arrived, Abramoff was tapping at a laptop computer, trying to find a synagogue for Lowell, who would be traveling to Mississippi for another client. ''There's a conservative synagogue in Biloxi!'' Abramoff exclaimed merrily. Lowell said, ''Jack's my spiritual adviser.''

Abramoff had proposed a second meeting for the specific purpose of explaining that ''the story of the Tigua is not a story of me going 'hahahaha!''' -- here he rubbed his hands together in sinister movie-villain fashion. He had come armed with a Rand McNally atlas and spent the better part of an hour walking me through the saga. It was a maestro performance: Abramoff waved his arms, jabbed a pencil at obscure towns on the map and let his voice boom. The talk of strategy and deal-making had him out of his funk; I felt I was seeing the master operator of the not-too-distant past.

The crux of his argument is that he never planned to shut the Tiguas down and then ''go out to get them to pay me.'' From the e-mail messages released by the Senate, that much seems true. Abramoff's main target was a Houston-area casino; the Tiguas were collateral damage. What about Abramoff's fear that his ''cover'' had been blown in an e-mail message? He insisted his fear was that rival lobbyists might spring into action if they learned that someone of his caliber was involved. Oddly, however, Abramoff seemed most passionate about the notion that he had failed to get what he wanted. He blames Ney and Dodd, whose recent claims of ignorance about the details of his Tigua lobbying, he said, are bogus. ''We would have succeeded but for Chris Dodd, who said yes -- and then all of a sudden, he changed!'' Here he was practically pleading with me: ''He changed!''

But he reserved special scorn for his old friend -- ex-friend -- Bob Ney. Abramoff said that Ney was deeply involved in the lobbying effort and that any claims otherwise are untrue. He singles out a meeting and a long conference call Ney conducted with Tigua leaders in which he assured them that he would help. ''Ney told the press, 'I was duped'? It's crazy!'' He turned up his palms, again with the pleading look in his eyes. ''He was on the phone for an hour and a half!'' (A spokesman for Ney, Brian Walsh, said that Ney only considered the Tigua provision when he heard it had Dodd's support. ''After Congressman Ney spoke to Senator Dodd and found that Jack Abramoff was lying, no further action was taken,'' Walsh said. Dodd has issued a statement saying he never supported the provision, a contention supported by the testimony at the Indian Affairs hearing.)

''That,'' Abramoff said, collecting himself, ''was the only time I can think of that we failed to achieve our goal. That was 1 loss against 10,000 wins.'' He stared at me intently. ''We never lost,'' he said, stabbing the table to punctuate each word. ''We. Did. Not. Lose. One. Fight. Ever.''


Today Abramoff's life is in shambles. Stacks, the Washington deli he opened in 2002, has closed. So has the Eshkol Academy, a small private Jewish school in suburban Maryland that Abramoff founded in 2001; a group of its former teachers is suing Abramoff for unpaid wages. Given the multiple investigations, an indictment and maybe even prison time are possibilities for Abramoff. ''All of a sudden, in an almost Job-ian fashion, my whole world collapsed,'' he says.

His friends maintain that Abramoff will be vindicated. ''I don't know what it is that he is supposed to have done that is supposed to have been illegal or wrong,'' Norquist told me. ''I understand that there's a lot of money here, and more than people are used to. But that's different from some broken law.''

Abramoff also seems to see himself as an innocent victim. ''Of course, I have made mistakes,'' he told me. Yet it's not quite clear what he thinks those mistakes are. Abramoff insisted that his hunger for riches was driven by charitable impulses. ''I have spent years giving away virtually everything I made,'' he said. ''Frankly, I didn't need to have a kosher delicatessen. That was money I could have bought a yacht with. I don't live an extravagant lifestyle. I felt that the resources coming into my hands were the consequence of God putting them there.'' And he has a ready explanation for much of his behavior. When asked, for instance, how a religious man who reportedly loathed Hollywood profanity could send e-mail messages playfully calling Scanlon a ''big time faggot'' or declaring, apropos one intransigent tribal client, ''We need a beautiful girl to send up there,'' Abramoff suggested that he dumbed down his words to motivate Scanlon. ''I didn't have a lot of time to articulate things,'' he said. ''Sometimes I would find myself speaking to people in the language that they speak.'' He likened himself to the Biblical character Jacob, who dressed in his brother Esau's clothes. Jacob did this, Abramoff told me, as ''a more effective means of communicating with Esau.'' (In fact, Jacob's goal is to deceive his father.)

And the racism implied in calling tribal leaders ''monkeys'' and ''troglodytes''? Abramoff responded: ''That's probably the thing that hurts me the most about all this. It's just so opposite of who I am.''

Lowell interjected: ''When he uses the word 'monkey' to describe one part of a faction, he is referring to an opponent, not Native Americans in general.''

The shame is particularly acute for a religious man. I had noticed that amid the vast profanity and insults and Machiavellian exultations in his e-mail messages, Abramoff drew lines. In one message, he rendered ''God'' as ''G-D.'' Abramoff nodded solemnly when I brought this up. ''This is a Jewish tradition, to not write out God's name in something that might be destroyed,'' he explained. (Bizarrely, amid all the damning candor of his e-mail messages, Abramoff also showed this tantalizing dash of caution: ''I have an idea but don't want to put it on e-mail,'' he wrote to Scanlon in early 2003.)

The effect has been devastating for a man once defined by his exuberant hubris. ''In Judaism, it's one of the definitions of hell,'' Abramoff told me, ''that you have to sit and watch the replay of everything you said and did with the people you know.'' Members of the Jewish community whose respect was so important to him are especially upset. ''[It] is a scar on the entire Jewish community,'' a conservative Jewish activist who knows Abramoff told me. During a Purim comedy night in March, one Georgetown synagogue performed a gag song entitled ''The Ballad of Jack Abramoff.'' Sample verse: ''With all this influence and all this power/His deli still couldn't cook a burger in an hour.''

And yet Abramoff only seems ready to embrace his faith more fully. He said he wants to have another try at making movies -- this time ''for the audience that was rediscovered by 'The Passion.''' He has already written a few treatments, he said.

Michael Crowley

is a senior editor at The New Republic.

A Lobbyist in Full, NYT, 1.5.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01ABRAMOFF.html