Bush's boiling point

Posted by Mark Silva at 8 am CDT and updated at 4:20 pm CDT

They call these the dog days of August, and even my dogs were dragging this morning as we walked along the Potomac River, with a rising sun attempting to penetrate a monochromatic yellow haze enshrouding the Capitol and all of the national monuments on the horizon in a sinister morning stew of inverted heat and urban exhaust. At least they say it's lead-free.

President Bush went in this morning for his annual physical exam, checking in to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for a long morning of tests which should yield at least a scintilla of good news on this troubling first day of August. The president is in great shape – physically, if not politically. But more on that later. (Late-breaking update, the results are in, and Bush has gained five pounds, which the 60-year-old president attributes to an over-indulgence in birthday cake lately.)

There's a glacier melting somewhere. And so am I. They are predicting highs of 100 degrees Farenheit today, tomorrow and Thursday here in the nation's capital. But temperatures already have pushed past 100 degrees from Los Angeles to Bismarck, N.D., and word arrived this morning of an electrical power outage in Chicago, which should make for more woe. Around here, they tell us to not even wander outside, if we don't have to, on days like these. They warn us about a Code Red. And that's not Homeland Security talking. That's the Health Department. Maybe I'll call in Red.

The president's physical health couldn't be better, the White House reported this afternoon.

"He put on five pounds. He's up to 196, I believe,'' said Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, following the first medical exam. "That... he does, in fact, attribute to an excess of birthday cakes in the recent past. Nevertheless, his standing heart rate is still 46.

"His cholesterol is at the lowest level ever,'' Snow said. "It's 174.

"The doctors once again have found the president fit for duty and have every reasonable expectation that he will remain so for the duration of his presidency,'' Snow said. "He's still healthier than we are.''

For Bush, the political good news is that his job-approval rating has held about steady through perhaps the roughest weekend of the summer, as the Israeli prime minister promises "no cease-fire in the coming days'' and the United States, essentially unable to offer any improvement for worsening conditions in the Middle East, turns to the United Nations for a resolution that might lead to a cessation of hostilities, but more likely will not.

But for Bush, the political bad news is that job-approval rating: 40 percent approval, according to the results of a weekend Gallup Poll released today. His numbers fluctuated between 37 and 40 percent throughout July in the Gallup Poll's surveys, far better than the 31 percent trough he hit in May but still not enough to offer his party a lot of confidence in the mid-term congressional elections fast approaching.

The fact that he actually edged up from 37 to 40 in the last couple of weeks, amidst 20 days of warfare in the Middle East that the U.S. has proven largely unable to influence, is a reflection of the American public's own divided opinion about the latest conflict.

That same weekend Gallup Poll found that more than eight in 10 Americans consider the Israeli military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon justified – while only a plurality believe that Israel has gone too far. Opinion is shifting though -- a couple of weeks ago, 50 percent of those surveyed said Israel was justified, but had taken things too far. Over the weekend, just 44 percent said so. This survey was taken Friday through Sunday, including the day of the Israeli bombing of Qana, which claimed more than 50 lives, many of them children. And only about one-third of those surveyed feel that the U.S. is not doing enough to end to the crisis. Nearly half of those surveyed believe the U.S. is doing about as much as it should be doing.

Some contend that the U.S. is unable to play its traditional role of "honest broker'' in the Middle East in the current crisis, partly because of the three years of costly warfare that the U.S. has waged in Iraq and partly because of the solid support that the Bush administration has provided for Israel, with the U.S. laying the blame for the conflict on Hezbollah.

But Michele Dunne, an expert in Arab affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, suggests that the Bush administration is not doing more because it is simply unwilling to engage in "the nitty-gritty'' of the diplomacy needed to bring an end to hostilities. Instead, she contends, the administration has taken a "transformative'' view of its role in the region, with a goal of moving more of the Middle East away from the grip of terror and into the camp of democracy and freedom.

"Their approach to the Middle East has been this sort of transformative approach,'' Dunne says, "to change the environment in the region, to stop trouble-making in the region and to spread the growth of democracy. This administration's approach has not been to get into the nitty-gritty of negotiating agreements.'' There's more on this in the Tribune this morning.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may take exception with that view, after returning from two failed trips to the region in which she tried to negotiate a solution to the crisis. Her efforts now are shifting to the United Nations, which a State Department spokesman suggested this week will become "the center of gravity'' for negotiating any solution. Yet her failure in the region may be viewed as either a measure of the administration's unwillingness to press harder, as Dunne would have it, or a reflection of the waning influence that the U.S. has in the region as a result of its own policies there, as many other well-schooled analysts would have it.

If the president has a measure of public sympathy for his inability to make peace in the current crisis in the Middle East, he has lost support for the American military's role in Iraq.

And, from a political standpoint, Bush's advisers and Republican National Committee strategists counting at-risk congressional districts probably are paying more attention today to a striking development in the Capitol than the weather: A dozen leading Democrats in the House and Senate have sent a letter to Bush demanding "a new direction in Iraq.''

Democrats have been singing that song for months, but they haven't been singing in harmony. But now they are calling in unison on the president to begin withdrawing troops by the end of the year and to "transition to a more limited mission'' in Iraq – finally offering Democrats something that they have struggled to agree upon, an alternative to the president's policy, and also offering voters something that they have lacked for a long time: A choice at the polls. The president's advisers have insisted they are content to make November's elections a referendum on the president's handling of the economy and national security. Now the Democrats are drafting a question.

It's a lot to think about, as they cranked up the treadmill under the 60-year-old president this morning. It was air-conditioned in Bethesda. But it's hot here in Washington these days, it's hot in the Middle East, and November is beginning to look a little hotter every day.