Despite initial efforts to appear dispassionately non-partisan, the Sept. 11 probe of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States has morphed into the type of bloody and binary dispute with which Washington has become all too familiar and totally comfortable.
The gloves are off as we again face a basic question: Is this problem serious enough to oust President Bush? No one has an answer, but that won’t stop the process.
It is the question most people in Washington–in politics and media alike–really care about. Discussions about better intelligence and protection from terrorism go on the back burner. Rhetoric, however credible, about the need for reform is overwhelmed by the subtext of finding out who should be blamed.
Those who think this is really a quest for a better intelligence system need look no further than the 228-page report on the causes of the August 2003 blackout in the Midwest, Northeast and Canada. Once the focus of the nation’s intense attention, the report was released, coincidentally, during the week of Condoleezza Rice’s 9/11 testimony.
There was a telling hidden connection between these disconnected events.
In issuing the report, which was all but lost in the media backdrop of the 9/11 probe, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned that “immediate actions must be taken” if we want reliable electricity. Recall that the question of dependability of the power supply was at the top of the agenda at the height of the 2003 blackout. There were dire predictions that if nothing was done, the system could collapse again. A study was commissioned.
Now it has landed, and it is a safe bet that nothing will be done this year.
The same fate might well await whatever it is that comes out of the terrorist attack commission. Again, the problem is that the real agenda, although running beneath the surface, is finding someone to blame, not fixing a dysfunctional intelligence structure.
We have been in this situation so many times that the rules of the Get the President game have nearly become codified.
They involve a type of political jujitsu in which conventional wisdom is recalibrated.
Viewed in this context, there’s a pattern connecting the Watergate/Richard Nixon impeachment efforts, the ultimately failed Clinton removal effort and the 9/11 hearings that may determine our next president, even though the outcomes in these cases were not the same.
The roles played by John Dean and Howard Hunt (in the Nixon case), Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp (for Bill Clinton) and Richard Clarke (for Bush) have a certain similarity: They involve efforts to get as close as possible to an incumbent president, followed by disappointment and distancing.
The pattern is predictable.
The White House says nothing is amiss, denies access to internal documents and is ultimately forced to retreat from both positions. It releases materials it argued were constitutionally protected and grudgingly acknowledges, in that memorable Nixonian phrase, that “mistakes were made.”
People stay interested because, despite the predictable nature of the pathway, the outcome is always in question. For example, at one point, there was a bipartisan consensus that Nixon would serve his entire presidential term. Clinton, on the other hand, was widely assumed to be toast.
Both judgments proved wrong.
Still, the connection between the Clinton case and the Nixon case seemed undeniable. It was payback time for Republicans with a long memory of the Watergate embarrassments. If there had not been a Nixon impeachment effort, by that thinking, there would not have been a Clinton impeachment effort. In both cases, the push was to “get the president.”
There also is a view, both popular and wrong, that such occurrences reflect growing partisan polarization. In fact, none of these cases would hold public attention if the criticism wasn’t bipartisan. Some congressional Democrats were very critical of Clinton, just as some Republicans were highly critical of Nixon. The 9/11 commission’s bipartisan leadership has been steadfast in opposing White House efforts to short-circuit the process.
That doesn’t mean the White House is powerless.
Power of the presidency
No institution in contemporary Washington is more powerful than the presidency, and the disparity has grown since Bush took office. Both Clinton and Nixon came under attack when Congress was controlled by the opposition party.
But even the White House operates within informally set limits, which shrink in times of trouble. Scrutiny of the media, Congress and the public imposes limitations on White House behavior. The president’s options, then, shrink in proportion to the size of the political problem he is facing. Nixon, Clinton and now Bush were not in a position to simply say “no” when the investigators came looking for damaging information, although they all tried, of course.
On the other hand, the nation tends to pull together during times of stress.
One reason a public debate about the past and present adequacy of our anti-terrorism defenses can occur now is that we’re not on code red. The less immediate the threat, the more candid the public criticism. Recall that in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, grief and shock seemed to push reason and questioning aside.
That could tempt the White House to raise the threat level, but that kind of a move could also backfire. The public might conclude the White House is shouting about threats because it doesn’t want to answer tough questions about its behavior before the 2001 attacks.
After all, there was some belief that Clinton didn’t respond more forcefully to terrorism in his second term because such an initiative would have inevitably been viewed as a way to divert attention from his big Oval Office sex problem.
The appearance of a movie, “Wag the Dog,” explicitly suggested such a diversionary plot. In some people’s minds, the suggestion made by the movie helped keep the real White House in line.
We’ve heard this story before, but this iteration has some compelling new twists.
Despite some superficial similarities (Sen. Howard Baker’s question from the Nixon impeachment debate, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” seems eerily apt), the issue this time is presidential inaction.
Was the president asleep at the switch?
If Washington had a longer memory, the more relevant comparison to today’s probe would be the series of inquiries more than a half-century ago on whether American response to Pearl Harbor, where the death toll was near the World Trade Center figure, was adequate.
Pearl Harbor investigated
Within two weeks of the event, President Franklin Roosevelt created a panel headed by a Supreme Court justice to determine whether any dereliction of military duties was involved. A later congressional probe asked precisely what he had known and when.
Bush’s opponents in Congress have been unusually quiet during the 9/11 commission hearings, in which the White House has taken an active role.
After setting aside its initial objections, the White House helped craft the structure of the commission that is now causing it so much pain. Non-participation was not an option.
The overlap between the investigation and the presidential campaign was a painful, unintended consequence of the deeply flawed early White House strategy. The pain is compounded by the coincidence of apparent intelligence failures connected to 9/11 and growing instability in Iraq.
Whether by accident or design, the opposition Democrats are enjoying an environment in which the media are raising most of the questions.
The question is whether the process we’re watching can create large enough waves to capsize the ship of state. Reflecting on the earlier inquiries, it’s difficult to say. The ghosts of those who predicted Nixon would serve his term and those who said Clinton would not are still too real.
But what is undeniably similar is the process. Mistakes were made, and someone must take the blame, perhaps at great political expense. This is the kind of process that thoroughly engrosses official Washington, which finds stormy weather that will last beyond April’s typical showers.
