www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2004/story.html
Posted Sunday, December 19, 2004 Eagles rather than doves nestle in the Oval Office Christmas tree, pineco nes the size of footballs are piled around the fireplace, and the Presid ent of the United States is pretty close to lounging in Armchair One. He 's wearing a blue pinstripe suit, and his shoes are shined bright enough to shave in. He is loose, lively, framing a point with his hands or ext ending his arm with his fingers up as though he's throwing a big idea ge ntly across the room. "I've had a lot going on, so I haven't been in a very reflective mood," s ays the man who has just replaced half his Cabinet, dispatched 12,000 mo re troops into battle, arm wrestled lawmakers over an intelligence bill, held his third economic summit and begun to lay the second-term paving stones on which he will walk off into history. Asked about his re-electi on, he replies, "I think over the Christmas holidays it'll all sink in." As he says this, George W Bush is about to set a political record. The f irst TIME poll since the election has his approval rating at 49%. Gallup has it at 53%, which doesn't sound bad unless you consider that it's th e lowest December rating for a re-elected President in Gallup's history. That is not a great concern, however, since he has run his last race, a nd it is not a surprise to a President who tends to measure his progress by the enemies he makes. "My presidency is one that has drawn some fire, whether it be at home or around the world.
I don't expect many short-term historians to write nice things about me." Yet even halfway through his presidency, Bush says, he already sees his h istoric gamble paying off. He watched in satisfaction the inauguration o f Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "I'm not suggesting you're looking at t he final chapter in Afghanistan, but the elections were amazing.
movement will somehow wither on the vine, that somehow these killers won't get a weapon of mass destruction"as the heart of not just his foreign policy but his victory. "The election was about the use of American influence," he says. I wanted th e debate to be on a lot of issues, but I also wanted everybody to clearl y understand exactly what my thinking was. The debates and all the noise and all the rhetoric were aimed at making very clear the stakes in this election when it comes to foreign policy." In that respect and throughout the 2004 campaign, Bush was guided by his own definition of a winning formula. Yet "every time we'd have a speec h and attempt to scale back the liberty section, he would get mad at us, " Bartlett says. Sometimes the President would simply take his black Sha rpie and write the word freedom between two paragraphs to prompt himself to go into his extended argument for America's efforts to plant the see ds of liberty in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. An ordinary politician tells swing voters what they want to hear; Bush in vited them to vote for him because he refused to. it's an extraordinary polit ician who tries this while holding the title Leader of the Free World. O rdinary Presidents have made mistakes and then sought to redeem themselv es by admitting them; when Bush was told by some fellow Republicans that his fate depended on confessing his errors, he blew them off. For candidates, getting elected is the test that counts. Ronald Reagan di d it by keeping things vague: It's Morning in America. Bill Clinton did it by keeping things small, running in peaceful times on school uniforms and V chips. Bush ran big and bold and specific all at the same time, r ivaling Reagan in breadth of vision and Clinton in tactical ingenuity. H e surpassed both men in winning bigger majorities in Congress and the st atehouses. And he did it all while conducting an increasingly unpopular war, with an economy on tiptoes and a public conflicted about many issue s but most of all about him. The argument over whether his skill won the race and fueled a realignment of American politics or whether he was the lucky winner of a coin-toss election will last just as long as the debates among historians over whe ther Dwight Eisenhower had a "hidden-hand strategy" in dealing with poli tical problems, Richard Nixon was at all redeemable and Reagan was an "a miable dunce." Democrats may conclude that they don't need to learn a th ing, since 70,000 Ohioans changing their minds would have flipped the ou tcome and flooded the airwaves with commentary about the flamboyantly fa iled Bush presidency. It may be that a peculiar chemistry of skills and instincts and circumstances gave Bush his victory in a way no future can didates can copy. In the meantime, the lessons Bush draws from his victory are the ones tha t matter most. The man who in 2000 promised to unite and not divide now sounds as though he is prepared to leave as his second-term legacy the D eath of Compromise. "I've got the will of the people at my back," he sai d at the moment of victory. From here on out, bipartisanship means falli ng in line: "I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals." Whatever spirit of cooperation that survives in his second term may have to be fo und among his opponents; he has made it clear he's not about to change h is mind as he takes on Social Security and the tax code in pursuit of hi s "ownership society." So unfolds the strange and surprising and high-st akes decade of Bush. For sharpening the debate until the choices bled, for reframing reality t o match his design, for gambling his fortunesand ourson his faith in t he power of leadership, George W Bush is TIME's 2004 Person of the Year . To get immediate access to this complete story, you must be a TIME Magazine subscriber.
Back to TIMEcom Home FROM THE DECEMBER 27, 2004 ISSUE OF TIME MAGAZINE; POSTED SUNDAY, DECEMBE R 19, 2004 Copyright 2004 Time Inc. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
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