Quotes of the Day

Just down the hall from Donald Rumsfeld's third-floor office at the Pentagon is a high-tech conference room where U.S. generals arrayed around the globe can talk to the Pentagon boss—and with his boss, if he happens to stop by. That is exactly what happened last week when Central Command chief General John Abizaid, appearing via videophone from Qatar, admitted that he was worried about the political fallout back home from the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal. Hearing this, George W. Bush peered back at Abizaid, who oversees two continuing wars in Asia, and told him to ignore the static. "You worry about getting the job done," Bush said. "You let me worry about the politics and the things back here."

Even before Clausewitz said war is politics by other means, it was almost impossible to tell where one stopped and the other began. As casualties in Iraq continue to mount—782 Americans have died there in the past 15 months, 12 in the past week—and the twisted images from Abu Ghraib are posted and reposted on websites by the U.S.'s critics around the globe, a growing number of voters are having second thoughts about Bush's instinctive brand of leadership. For the first time since his election, more Americans disapprove than approve of his handling of his job, according to a new Time/cnn poll. The drop in overall support is mirrored by sliding grades from voters for his handling of the economy, foreign policy and the war in Iraq. In the past, a majority of those polled said the U.S. was right to go to war in Iraq; 53% thought so in April. This time, the figure slipped to 48%, with 46% saying the war was wrong. Those shifts have lifted Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who now leads Bush by five points in matchups among likely voters, even when third-party candidate Ralph Nader is added to the mix. "Iraq," said a longtime Bush watcher, "is taking its toll."

The candidates, given the poll's margin of error, remain in a virtual dead heat and the election could still go either way. They face a long road, with many turning points, between now and November.

Nonetheless, the decline in support for Bush since February came across in almost every voter group Time surveyed but most notably among females, independents, Westerners and voters ages 18 to 24. The drop comes at a time when the economy is widely thought to be gathering strength and after Bush bought more than $60 million worth of ads that make the most of his accomplishments and make hamburger out of Kerry's record. Earlier this month a top Bush official told Time those spots gave Bush a 10- to 12-point boost in the race. They might now be given credit for just keeping Bush in the hunt.

The 43rd President is heading into the danger zone of American politics: not since Harry Truman has a President won a second term with approval ratings below 50% this close to the November elections.

Bush is back in a realm his family knows too well; the last man to visit this haunting place in an election year was Bush's father, who fell to 39% in April 1992 and never recovered. And so this week, in the stomachs of all those Washington Republicans who have toiled faithfully for both father and son, the spooky deja voodoo was back.

Some even spoke privately of a possible defeat in November. As a Bush campaign adviser said of the voters, "They could want change for change's sake." For months, Bush officials have insisted that as long as the news continued to turn on war and terrorism, the public would be too worried about the future to change the names on the door.

Kerry, meanwhile, is far from completing the sale with voters. "Don't you think that at the end," asked a Bush campaign aide, "people will want someone they think can get us out of this mess?"

When Bush was elected 31/2 years ago, no one much expected that he would have a crisis presidency or face the greatest strategic challenge in a half-century. Back in 2000, had they had even a hint of what was coming, voters might never have entrusted the White House to the most inexperienced candidate in a generation, however good a brand name he carried. But a crisis presidency this has become, partly because of the moment history handed to Bush and partly as a result of his own design. It was by no means obvious to the world that al-Qaeda's attacking the U.S. inevitably meant the U.S. had to attack Iraq.

Bush surprised many people with his reflexes the last time the stakes were stacked this high. A man often dismissed as somehow immature or at the very least a late bloomer, he grew up quickly in the debris of 9/11, found his footing and reassured people that he knew what he was doing. His black-and-white, good-and-evil outlook suited the moment. And his overpowering aura of certainty was a sturdy rope and harness to a country that felt as if it had fallen off a cliff.

All that feels like an eon or two ago, and not all the slippage can be traced to the war. Bush has been treading on thin ice for months as his agenda at home has atrophied and a handful of refugees from his team have written well-sourced but derogatory books. Many of the great symbolic gestures he confected in 2000 to appeal to moderate voters—his promise to "change the tone" in Washington, his credo that he would be a "uniter, not a divider" and his clever "compassionate conservative" badge—disappeared long ago or had little impact. Even when given a choice, Bush has governed mostly from the right, disappointing some suburban independents who took a chance on him. While the Bush team has had fewer broken plays and political missteps than its predecessor, the President has been reluctant to hold his war council to account when it falters. He shows so much loyalty downward that a popular joke in Washington asks, "What does CIA director George Tenet have to do to get fired?"

But it is overseas that Bush has staked his presidency, generated the most praise at home—and launched the most misgivings. The traits that served him well in Afghanistan—speed, secrecy and a revolutionary approach to modern warfare—have the potential to be his undoing in Iraq. Voters glimpsed an image of Bush in the second half of his term that at times was at odds with that of the first half: his obsession with terrorism tends to obscure his perception of facts on the ground; he can be slow to learn from his mistakes; and if he knows where he is going, he rarely explains how he plans to get there. There is an active debate in Republican circles about whether Bush is in denial about the challenges in Iraq—or simply unsure about how to proceed.

The President has, in any case, cast his lot dramatically and, it appears, irrevocably. Rather than continue an imperfect but effective policy—begun by his father and continued by Bill Clinton—of containing Iraqis with sanctions, a no-fly zone and the occasional clocker to the head, Bush simply decided that containment wasn't working anymore. The Administration spent millions to prop up a dubious group of Iraqi exiles led by Ahmad Chalabi—former Central Command boss Anthony Zinni has called them "the Gucci guerrillas from London"—who helped generate the secret "intelligence" needed to create a rationale for pre-emptive war. Much of the intelligence turned out to be flawed or confected, and when the CIA balked at some of the claims, the Pentagon set up an intelligence boutique of its own to give them the Good Housekeeping seal.

Then came the lightning 21-day war on Iraq last spring that quickly gave way to an occupation that has often seemed wrong from the start: too little planning, too few troops, too much wishful thinking. Next came the moves that turned out to be mistakes so large that Washington is still trying to reverse them a year later: disbanding the Iraqi army (only to try to reconstitute it last fall), radical de-Baathification (only to re-Baathify in certain cities this spring) and a stubborn belief that Iraqi leaders handpicked by hard-liners in Washington would be the perfect start to the Arab world's first democracy. When those leaders turned out to have no followers except in Washington, the U.S. quietly tossed the entire political puzzle into the hands of a U.N. envoy named Lakhdar Brahimi and signaled, without saying so, that it would accept just about any group of interim leaders he can get into place by June 30, the date for the long-awaited hand-off of power to the Iraqis.

Public support for the war was close to the tipping point when images surfaced of U.S. troops giving highly unconventional readings of the Geneva Conventions at Abu Ghraib. In an instant, a handful of Army troopers and their military-intelligence minders had put at risk one of the last remaining justifications for invasion in the first place: to help the Iraqi people. Watching it all unfold, it has been hard to dismiss the fear that the U.S. not only might be failing to make America safer but might be doing the opposite. Republicans following Bush's shrinking numbers this month say it's not any one thing that has landed the President in trouble; it's a little bit of everything.

"Drip, drip, drip," warned a Midwestern party official, "and pretty soon you are drowning."

faced with challenges before, bush has met them with his characteristic mix of action and resolve, and he has been following a similar pattern. At the very moment that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came under the heaviest fire from lawmakers (and from many in the Bush Administration) for mishandling the prison fiasco, Bush paid a rare visit to the morning meeting of his senior White House staff members and told them to button up. "If I hear any speculation coming out of the White House about the Secretary," he said, "you'll answer to me." Early last week Bush marched over to the Pentagon and deliberately and publicly wrapped his arms tightly around his war boss. "You are doing a superb job," he told Rumsfeld. "You are a strong Secretary of Defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude."

In this Administration, when the going gets tough, the tough go to Baghdad. It usually works. Bush made a day trip last Thanksgiving and played to boffo reviews, eating turkey with the troops and taking everyone by surprise. Rumsfeld flew secretly to Iraq with just a few aides and, not surprisingly, a press pool. His notices were equally positive as he choppered through a sandstorm to the Abu Ghraib prison and then to a pep rally at the palace that had several hundred troops cheering. Rumsfeld seemed as moved by that welcome as he had seemed stunned by his congressional grilling the week before, when he conceded that it was "possible" that the situation might be improved by his resignation. But he tried to bury that idea in Baghdad. "I've stopped reading the newspapers," he said. "I'm a survivor."

It was flawless damage control, and the White House was helped, perversely, by the ghastly death of Nicholas Berg, an American entrepreneur free-lancing in Iraq who was beheaded on-camera by a man the CIA believes to be Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Berg's death reset the moral-equivalence meter and reminded the world who the enemy is. U.S. officials said privately they could not believe that the terrorists had such a poor grasp of public relations. Between the prison scandal and Berg's death, it was easy to imagine that the war for Iraq's hearts and minds can't be won; it can only be lost.

Even so, the Bush Administration still had a lot to explain, partly because it spends so much time trying to keep things secret. The White House let it be known that it would ask for an additional $25 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal 2005—a number many budget experts believe must be doubled or tripled to cover the actual cost during the coming year. But the Administration has so far refused to detail how it would spend the money, something that doesn't sit well with lawmakers who know, thanks to Bob Woodward's latest book, that the Pentagon secretly shuffled $700 million in 2002 to pay for secret war planning in Iraq—without telling Congress. "What assurance do we have that these funds," asked Robert Byrd of West Virginia, "will ... not be diverted into some kind of dual-use activities that could be used to prepare for another war?"

Meanwhile, lawmakers who last week felt blindsided by the prison abuses are beginning to feel misled as well. Knowledgeable government sources told Time that House Intelligence Committee Democrats asked the Pentagon last January about an internal Army report on dangerous conditions and poor management at the Abu Ghraib prison. The sources said Pentagon aides told the panel that no such report existed—though it had been finished for months. A Pentagon spokesman had no immediate response.

Bush's test is to explain to the country what comes next—what, if anything, the U.S. is really going to hand off to the Iraqis when the vaunted June 30 sovereignty transfer takes place. U.S. forces will be rotating in and out of Iraq for years, and their numbers are expected to stay at current levels through 2005. Bush has resisted calls to move up Iraqi elections from next year; his advisers concede that the road leading into and out of June 30 will be bumpy. "Will it happen right on time?" asked Rumsfeld. "I think so. I hope so. Will it be perfect? No ... Is it possible it won't work? Yes. Is it possible they'll stumble and wobble? Everybody stumbles and wobbles."

That's true in both war and politics, and it seemed to sustain White House officials, who watched all this with a mixture of grim humor and gritty optimism. They are comforted by the centermost core value in the Bush White House: that 9/11 changed everything. Bush's ratings may be slipping, but we live in a terrorist age, and 2004 may be the first election in decades in which polling patterns in May end up predicting nothing about November. "Am I worried?" asked a senior Bush official. "Of course. But we always said this was gonna be close."

• MICHAEL DUFFY, MATTHEW COOPER AND JOHN F. DICKERSON