The Way they Were: Bush's 100 Days Report Card (from 1st term) and Pundit Comments

FrenchieCat

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Wed Aug-05-09 11:20 PM
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The Way they Were: Bush's 100 Days Report Card (from 1st term) and Pundit Comments

Edited on Wed Aug-05-09 11:38 PM by FrenchieCat

There was no 2nd 100 days review that I could find as of yet from CNN. below you can see the love that they had for their dimson! Don't tell me that those mediawhores weren't kissing George Bush's ass from Day one till Day 2555! They would have kissed his 5 day old dirty drawers, if he would have allowed it.

actual report cards here:
http://www.cnn.com/POLL/results/1508981.html

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/bush.100/stories/report.card.html

Tucker Carlson
Political analyst
Co-host, 'The Spin Room'
"Generally I say Bush is doing fairly well, though we'll have to wait for at least Day 175 of his first 100 days to know for sure."

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Michelle Cottle
Co-host, 'Take 5'
"I have disagreed with a lot of his policy moves, but politically he continues to outperform expectations to the point of where folks in Washington are now talking about how much smarter he is than they actually thought.

"On education, he tells us it's his top priority but thus far has sat back and let Congress water down his plan to the point of worthlessness. He's low-key and stays out of the way much of the time, but he could use a lighter touch in dealing with Hill Democrats. He did not win points by cramming tax-cut legislation through the House early on."

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Robert George
Panelist, 'Take 5'
"If a movie were to be made of Bush's first 100 days, the title would be 'Return to Normalcy.' This is a no-frills administration. The nation is suddenly free of 'The Perils of Pauline'/'Jerry Springer' nature of the Clinton years.

Specifics

"(He) survived his first international controversy, with no lives lost and America coming off looking fine, check. Democrats moved $700 billion in Bush's direction on taxes, check. (He) gave up vouchers a bit too quick but got the Democrats to agree on testing and school accountability, check. Environmental record is actually good, but (he) has fumbled the politics of it -- perhaps the only area of real concern. On the 'bipartisanship' so beloved by the Beltway crowd, he's charmed both the press corps and a large segment of Democrats -- while sticking to a pretty conservative agenda -- and smiling all the way."

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Bill Press
Co-host, 'Crossfire'
'The Spin Room'
"(The White House) has so successfully lowered the expectations for George W. Bush, that even if he's just standing up in 100 days, he will be considered the greatest president that ever lived."

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Bill Schneider
Senior political analyst
"I think he's set the right tone for the new administratition. (It's) modest, open, very different from the tone of the Clinton administration, less self-aggrandizing, less conspicuous in his involvement in every issue. Best of all, he's been very selective about his agenda. He's chosen a few items, like education and the tax cut, to focus his attention and concentrated on those priorities. In other words, he knows how to prioritize. On the other hand, his handling of unexpected events has been a little clumsy. The Kyoto agreement was very poorly handled; he was very dismissive, shocking our allies and resurrecting the image of the ugly American. China, I thought, in the end, he handled well, though there was a little unsureness at the outset."

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/bush.100/stories/report.card.html

After shaky start, Bush gains public approval
By Randy Lilleston
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- George W. Bush had to fight to become president. After he took office, thanks to lingering questions over the election and his predecessor's slow withdrawal from the spotlight, he had to fight to be considered presidential.

But at the 100-day mark of his tenure, that issue seems to be fading. Bush enjoys high job approval ratings -- higher than Bill Clinton at a similar juncture in his presidency -- and even the question of vision that plagued Bush's father does not appear to be an issue.

"People said that the president did not have a mandate -- that he won't be able to govern," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Monday. "Because of the manner in which the president has toned it down in Washington ... a tremendous amount of progress has been made within these 100 days, and the progress that is laid out now is going to lead to more progress later."

In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll taken April 20-22, Americans gave Bush a 62 percent approval rating. That figure compares with 55 percent for Clinton in 1993 and 58 percent for Bush's father, former President George Bush, in 1989. And 74 percent of Amercans say Bush has a vision for his presidency -- an important number, given his father's problem with the "vision thing."

But at first, the mere assumption of the presidency looked to be a struggle for Bush. On Inauguration Day, one of the most lasting images was of Clinton at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, holding one final campaign-style appearance in an airplane hangar, hugging and talking to friends and taking a rather relaxed approach to climbing on a military jet and leaving Washington.

News networks gave the extended departure significant airtime -- in part because Bush was at a congressional luncheon at the time. But the cameras came back to the new president just in time to see him climb into his limousine for a trip down Pennsylvania Avenue -- where his car was hit by a thrown egg while tens of thousands of protesters made their feelings quite clear.
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/bush.100/stories/overview.html

U.S.-China plane collision gives insight into how Bush handles a crisis
By John King
CNN White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In the hours after the U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance plane made an emergency landing in China on April 1, President George W. Bush was debating options with his national security team and raised this question: Should he pick up the phone and call Chinese President Jiang Zemin?

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice advised against it; it would create an air of crisis, she argued, especially if the call failed to secure the release of the 24 crew members and the return of the plane. "Accident, not incident" was the administration's motto at that moment, and it was decided a leader-to-leader call was the wrong approach.

The collision was the new president's first major international affairs challenge -- one he faced with a new team whose members had little experience in dealing with China. And they were taken aback with each passing hour by the hard line taken by Beijing.

"We were very surprised," Rice tells CNN now. "Because from our point of view, this was an emergency landing of an aircraft that had been rammed over international airspace. And so what we really expected was that the Chinese would probably look at the plane and then return the crew."

But Sunday gave way to Monday, and China said the crew would be held pending an investigation.

"We began to realize that something more was going on here and that somehow the Chinese had decided to make this a different kind of issue with the United States," Rice said.

World affairs intrude into domestic policy

Bush's father, former President George Bush, wrote in a farewell note to his successor, Bill Clinton, that world affairs have a way of demanding more and more of a president's time despite any careful effort to focus on domestic policy in the early days of a new administration.

The death of 18 U.S. armed services personnel in a firefight in Somalia was Clinton's early test. Bush has faced several already, including:

� An escalation of violence in the Middle East.

� Concern from some European allies about the Bush administration's plans for a national missile defense system.

� Strains with Russia over missile defense and the Robert Hanssen spy case.

� The disappointment of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung at the Bush administration's decision to take a more cautious approach toward engagement with North Korea.

Bush also has tried to make his mark in the international arena during his first 100 days. He traveled to Mexico first to symbolize a commitment to improve relations with nations in Central and South America. Breaking from Clinton's hands-on approach in the Middle East, Bush made clear he would not try to set a timetable for peace or force a process on the Israelis and Palestinians, a shift many Arab leaders have privately criticized.

Bush skips 'hoop-de-la'

But the standoff with China stands out because of the high stakes, and for the glimpses it has offered into the way the president and young administration handle crises -- from the discussion over whether Bush should call his Chinese counterpart to the decision over how to handle the return of the surveillance plane crew.

Some advisers suggested Bush travel to Washington state for a ceremony at the home base of most of the crew members upon their return. The president decided against going, and White House press secretary Ari Fleischer recalled Bush explaining his reasoning during a meeting in North Carolina with the parents of Petty Officer 3rd Class Steven Blocher, one of the plane's crew.

"The president said to them, 'What's important is that your son come home without a lot of hoop-de-la,' " Fleischer said. "And what the president meant by that is that he could imagine no more joyous a moment than a man coming home to hug his wife and his child -- children -- a woman coming home to hug her husband and her children -- and not have to wait for a politician to finish his speech."
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/bush.100/stories/king.in.focus.html

Bush's 100 days -- the European view

LONDON, England (CNN) -- A hundred days of the George W. Bush presidency has left Europe shell-shocked at the robust conservatism of the new man in the White House.

He has worried European governments on defence and infuriated them on the environment.

It was never going to be a natural fit between Bush and the EU, where the majority of governments are led from the centre left.

His focus is clearly more on Asia. He puts business interests ahead of environmental issues. He favours unfettered markets where the Europeans are keener to regulate.

European leaders had hoped Bush�s natural conservatism and non-interventionist instincts would be tempered by the narrowness of his election victory.

Instead, after the instinctively-internationalist Bill Clinton they have found themselves faced by an isolationist president who has rejected international agreements on land mines, nuclear testing and an international criminal court.

Bush�s robust language about Russia and China, his defence deal with Taiwan and his resistance to the increasing dialogue between North and South Korea has some worried that he is a would-be Cold War warrior. For his part, Bush has been irritated by the forthcoming EU leaders� visit to North Korea.

On the environment, it is not just Bush�s rejection of the Kyoto protocol on the limitation of greenhouse gas emissions which has worried Europeans but his way of doing it.

The EU had written to Bush only the week before insisting it was a key issue in EU-U.S. relations. But he brusquely pronounced the Kyoto agreement �dead� the very next week as the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder visited Washington.

The Bush administration even questioned the science behind the Kyoto proposals and an EU delegation sent the next week to rescue something from the wreckage of hopes on global warming was brushed off with low grade meetings.

It could make for lively exchanges when Bush comes to Europe for an EU-U.S. summit in Sweden in June and for the G8 Summit in Italy in July. But the President has begun to sound a little more conciliatory, saying that he does take the global warming issue seriously and will look for ways of making progress.

On defence, European leaders remain nervous about the Bush administration�s plans for a National Missile Defence system which would involve scrapping the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the U.S. is worried that plans for the new European Rapid Reaction Force will undermine NATO.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/04/27/oakley.bush/