TIME: MATTHEW COOPER - "Bush's Long Hot Summer" [View All]

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http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1098858,00.html

Bush's Long Hot Summer
With his numbers slipping over Iraq and high gas prices, the president's advisers ponder what to do next

By MATTHEW COOPER

The North Carolina coast is Bush country. But when the Republican congressman from the area, Walter Jones, was picking up hardware at the local Lowe's last week he got an earful from constituents worried about the situation in Iraq and when the U.S. would start pulling out. "Everyone of them said we need some kind of goal line. The Vietnam veterans were especially upset," says Jones who does not favor immediate withdrawal from Iraq but has offered a bipartisan resolution in Congress—along with liberals like Ohio Dem Dennis Kucinich—calling on the administration to come up with some kind of road map for pullout. "I don't know who his speechwriters are," Jones says of the President " but we need to better articulate the guidelines of what is victory."

This has been a tough summer for the Bush Administration. While the President tries to relax on his five week Texas vacation, he's had to contend with deteriorating military and political conditions in Iraq, a Woodstock-like peace protest at the edge of his Crawford compound led by Gold Star mom Cindy Sheehan, declining public opinion polls (that are echoed by "even worse" internal polling, says one Bush adviser), high oil prices and a recognition that things are not likely to turn around anytime soon. A senior Bush official attributes the president's collapsing poll numbers to "high gas prices and a lot of anxiety about the war" and acknowledges "that's not likely to change anytime soon." A cruel summer is likely to fade into an autumn of discontent as congressmen like Jones come back to Washington having heard complaints from constituents.

So what's the White House plan? There really isn't much of one. If anything, there's a certain sense of fatalism among Bush staffers, a belief that the difficult moments in Iraq just have to be toughed out and that there is no ready cure at hand other than to make the case to stay the course as he did last week when he addressed National Guard troops in Idaho. As for the president himself, Bush is hyperresolute about the situation in Iraq according to advisers. "One of the things that's real consistent about this President is that he doesn't spook," says Bush's media advisor Mark McKinnon.

When it comes to Iraq, White House officials recognize that there are not a lot of options other than to keep training Iraqi troops and hope that they can assume more of the responsibility for defending their own country. Increasingly though that seems like a pipe dream even to conservatives who have supported the war. Last week no fewer than three conservative columnists expressed disappointment with the president. William Kristol, the neoconservative editor of The Weekly Standard, and a strong proponent of the Iraq war, wrote that it was a "terrible signal" to insurgents as well as allies to draw down forces at all; Tony Blankley, the editorial page editor of conservative The Washington Times, pondered why Bush wasn't asking for more troops, and former Bush speechwriter David Frum said the president was using his bully pulpit "very badly indeed" in making the case for war. Most of the letters that poured in for Frum's article from fellow conservatives were positive.