David Broder: Bush Overreached

In January, when interviewing at the White House on the prospects for President Bush's second term, I found that the reelected chief executive had instilled a belief among his close associates that the bigger and bolder the goals they set for themselves, the more they would accomplish.

Whether it was political strategist Karl Rove or budget boss Josh Bolten, the message was the same: The way to avoid the "second-term curse" that had brought disappointment and frustration to almost every reelected president in modern times would be to have a clear and ambitious agenda.

Bush sounded the theme himself in his first post-election news conference, claiming a mandate for broad change. "In the election of 2004," he said, "large issues were set before our country. They were discussed every day on the campaign. With the campaign over, Americans are expecting a bipartisan effort -- and results."

So Bush set forth an amazingly ambitious set of goals, ranging from the overhaul of American high schools to the achievement of democracy in the Middle East -- with reform of Social Security, the judiciary and the whole legal liability system, as well as a new energy policy, thrown in for good measure.

Now Bush has run into trouble on major parts of that agenda, and his overall leadership position appears to be much weaker than anyone would have guessed on his second Inauguration Day.

This week's Washington Post-ABC News poll put his overall job approval score at 47 percent -- matching the lowest score in his 51 months in office. Whereas in January as many people strongly approved of his performance as strongly opposed it, now the highly negative ratings outnumber the very positive 3 to 2.

Having armed himself with an ambitious set of goals in order to energize his government, Bush has become the victim of overreach -- the one problem he and his advisers did not anticipate.

They thought that things had gone downhill for Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton because those presidents had largely used up their "big ideas" in their first terms and were left adrift without much sense of purpose, vulnerable to their enemies, in their final four years.

So Bush set forth what any president would have to consider a breathtakingly bold agenda. As Charles O. Jones of the University of Wisconsin remarked to me in January, it was particularly striking to see "a second-term president with the smallest electoral college majority since Wilson in 1916 undertake the most ambitious agenda since Roosevelt in 1936."

Bush can count some early successes. He has signed legislation restricting class-action lawsuits -- the first and easiest step in his multi-part assault on trial lawyers -- and he has approved a bill tightening rules on personal bankruptcies, a boon to part of his business constituency.

But in retrospect, Bush clearly overestimated his political capital. ...