WP: Series of Misjudgments Cost President His Lead [View All]

[kskiska]

Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page A01

No gloating, President Bush warned his White House staff in November 2002. It was an order he strained to follow himself.

Flush with his success at leading Republicans to victory in congressional midterm elections, Bush claimed the results as a mandate for his policies on terrorism, Iraq and tax cuts, and for his brand of trust-my-gut conservatism. "I think the way to look at this election is to say that people want something done," he told reporters. To skeptics at home and abroad, he declared: "I don't spend a lot of time taking polls . . . to tell me what I think is the right way to act; I just got to know how I feel."

As Bush heads to the Republican National Convention in New York this week, the man who stood astride the political world at that news conference in 2002 is a distinctly more life-size figure. With the election just 65 days away, there is a puzzle: How did a leader who was so formidable become so vulnerable?

In small ways, the answer is an accumulation of miscalculations and missed opportunities that have marred the president's political operation this year, in the view of some Republicans inside that operation and others beyond it. In a large way, however, Bush's predicament is less a reversal of his 2002 success than a natural progression of it -- the consequence of two confrontations he sought that autumn.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42626-2004Aug28.html