Agence France Presse November 7, 2004
Bush faces rough path in road-testing new mandate
By Peter Mackler
Despite claiming a ringing endorsement from US voters, President George W. Bush could face some rough going when he tries to road-test his re-election mandate on the international and domestic scene.
Bush exulted that Tuesday's vote had earned him a load of "political capital" to spend freely on his anti-terror war, Iraq and a host of initiatives at home, ranging from revamping Social Security to tax reform.
The president, often criticized abroad as a trigger-happy cowboy, pledged to reach out to US allies but made it clear he had no qualms about going into battle alone if he had to.
"I believe we have a solemn duty -- whether or not some people agree with it or not -- to protect the American people," he told a news conference Thursday. "I will continue to do that as the president."
But even Republican analysts acknowledged that Bush's second four-year term was fraught with potential pitfalls and strained resources that could temper the administration's aggressive bent.
"America remains the world's pre-eminent actor," said Richard Haass, former senior State Department strategist under Bush and now president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
"But it is also stretched militarily, in debt financially, divided domestically and unpopular internationally," Haass wrote in the British magazine The Economist. "It all makes one wonder why Mr. Bush seemed so eager to keep the job."
Indeed, Bush defied the political odds as the first US president since Harry Truman in 1948 to win a second term despite a job approval rating of below 50 percent.
And if he was raring to throw his weight around, armed with a strengthened Republican majority in both houses of the US Congress, he had no shortage of enemies and even allies ready to push back.
The election dust had hardly settled when an Islamic group linked to the Al-Qaeda terrorist network threatened to plunge the United States into "unbearable hell" for giving Bush a second four-year term.
North Korea signaled it had little inclination to even begin discussing a halt to its nuclear weapons programs without major concessions from Bush and "substantial change" in US policies toward Pyongyang.
The US leader promised after the election to forge a united world front against terrorism, reaching out to international organizations such as the European Union and NATO.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's closest ally, warned his European colleagues at an EU summit in Brussels that they had to bury their resentments and deal with the "new reality" of a renewed Republican administration.
How well the message went down was unclear. French President Jacques Chirac, who spearheaded opposition to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, hoped for better ties but also geared up for new trans-Atlantic tests of will.
"It is obvious that the assertion of strong American policy leads (us) quite naturally to reinforce Europe on political and economic fronts," Chirac said.
Bush's most immediate task was to stabilize the situation in Iraq, where daily violence threatened new elections scheduled for January. But analysts saw little evidence of an exit strategy.
John Pike, director of the GlobalSecurity.org think tank, said the Americans might have to keep 50,000 troops in Iraq for decades. Bush's ballot victory merely bought time until the issue came up in the 2008 election, he said.
"It basically gives them four years to create a situation in Iraq which, in retrospect, will make their original decision to go to war historically justified," Pike told AFP.
On the home front, Bush vowed to halve the budget gap, rewrite tax law, curb malpractice suits to bring down health care costs and partially privatize the government-run Social Security pension system in danger of bankruptcy.
Here again, Bush could find himself bucking some political headwinds, particularly on Social Security, which has traditionally been an untouchable entitlement program.
More broadly, Bush will have to win over critics who fear, as the Democrats charged relentlessly, that he is merely in office to serve the rich and well connected at the expense of the struggling classes.
The Washington Post, which backed Democrat John Kerry for president, seemed ready to cut Bush some slack. But it added that "such fundamental reforms can win broad support only if implemented with a keen sense of fairness to all Americans, particularly the most vulnerable."
© Copyright 2004, Agence France Presse
