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Morning News

The Bush Presidency: President to Publicly Address Congress Tonight

Aired February 27, 2001 - 11:04 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight, President Bush makes his first appearance before a joint session of Congress. He's going to talk about his priorities as he outlines his budget plan for the coming fiscal year. But will the president's message get through, given all the media attention of the troubles of his predecessor?

Here's CNN senior White House correspondent John King.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN KING, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Tonight's speech is in some ways a second beginning for a new president who has been forced to share the spotlight.

PETER HART, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: The Bush sun has really been eclipsed by the Clinton moon. So instead of being able to get his agenda across, he's had to stay under the radar on Bill Clinton, and it's been devastating in terms of the substantive agenda.

KING: Mr. Bush gets high marks so far. In a Gallup poll last week, 62 percent of Americans approved of how Mr. Bush was handling his job as president; just 21 percent disapproved.

KENNETH DUBERSTIEN, FORMER WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF: The American people clearly see that George W. Bush has taken the opportunity to open the barn doors at the White House and get some of the odor out.

KING: But the budget debate is the president's first big challenge, a test of his sway over an evenly divided Congress and a test of how far he has come in healing the wounds of the extended presidential campaign.

HART: People don't know that he's totally up to the job, people aren't sure about him substantively. All of the things that people worried about have not been erased.

KING: The White House views tonight's speech and Wednesday's budget blueprint as critical early benchmarks, and the president plans regular travel to sell his budget and tax cut plan.

DUBERSTIEN: You have to explain frequently why it makes sense to your pocketbook, how it helps you with your kids' college education, how it helps you buy more food to put on the table. Why it's important for you to have it in your pocket and not in the pockets of the bureaucrats in Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TelePrompTers set up inside the White House this morning -- top aides say the president will go through two full-length rehearsals of his speech tonight. It's expected to run about 45 minutes. They release that budget blueprint tomorrow. The president then will hit the road, visiting five states in two days to promote his tax cut and budget agenda, aides saying the vice president, Mr. Cheney, will also take part in that sales pitch, as will at least six members of the Bush cabinet -- Kyra.

PHILLIPS: John, article on the front page of "The New York Times" this morning talking about Social Security surplus -- what can you tell us about that: Is that expected to create some controversy?

KING: It certainly will. What the president will say, and he'll touch on it in his speech tonight; the details will be in the budget on Wednesday morning -- we're told what the president will say is right now the government has about $3.2 trillion in long-term debt. The president proposes paying down $2 trillion over the next decade. He will say it is irresponsible to pay down the other $1.2 trillion, because those bonds have not yet matured, and the government would pay a penalty if it tried to pay them off early.

What Mr. Bush's critics will say, though, is that he doesn't want to pay off that final $1.2 trillion in debt because he needs the money to pay for his big tax cut. So that will be one of the key debates now, as the president tries to sell his big budget plan -- Kyra.

All right, John King, live at the White House, thank you -- Leon.

LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: All right, now, looking over some parts of the president's budget plan as it is now composed, it anticipates huge budget surpluses, estimated at $5.6 trillion; calls for raising federal spending on education by some $4.6 billion, or 11 percent, there; it proposes paying down the national debt by $2 trillion over the next 10 years; and makes room for a $1.6 trillion tax cut.

Joining us now from Washington, our senior political analyst Bill Schneider with some more on this.

Bill, what do you make of what's in this speech?

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well basically, the president is staking his position on the tax cut. That's the centerpiece of his agenda. He ran on that issue, he never wavered from it. To the delight of conservatives, once he became president, he stuck to that message, and he's going to stick to it tonight.

The Republicans really are defined as the party that believes that you can preserve prosperity best by cutting taxes and giving surplus back -- some of it back -- to the taxpayers. The Democrats have staked out a different position, which President Clinton defined in his farewell speech: fiscal responsibility, we can pay down the debt. He said, in his last remarks to the American people, we can eliminate the debt entirely in the next 10 years, and Al Gore ran on that platform.

The question is which way do Americans really want to go. They were split in the election, and Bush is going to stake out his message.

HARRIS: Any, I guess, idea whether or not that split has changed right now, any idea what the American people want to see and hear?

SCHNEIDER: Well, what they want to do, basically, is make sure that the important programs, like Social Security, Medicare, education, that those things are protected. What they want to hear is that the tax cut is a nice idea -- Americans are for the tax cut -- but they want some reassurance that we can really afford it, and Bush is going to have to give that tonight.

And they want to make sure that Bush takes seriously the questions that people have about the direction of the economy: Are we going into a recession, are things flattening out? It would be nice if they heard that he had something in mind that would simulate the economy, just to reassure people that things are going to continue going on as well as they have been going for the last few years.

HARRIS: Yes, so much said in the last few days, even in the last couple hours, here on this network, about Bill Clinton's shadow and how it may be affecting George W. Bush. And now on the eve of this big speech he's got to make tonight, what's your sense of whether or not it is having impact?

SCHNEIDER: Well, of course, there's the spotlight problem that was referred to a minute ago. Namely, he and President Bush, a new president, have been sharing the spotlight, which is quite amazing. Bush is going to try to grab it tonight and get his program going, because Bush has to create his own mandate.

That's basically why he needs the spotlight. He didn't come in with a very strong popular mandate. There's no crisis in the country. So he's got to go out there and sell his program to the public in order to convince Congress to pass it.

The second part of it is Clinton's record, which is still very strong. Americans like Clinton's record, but they wanted a change of leadership in the country -- not a change of direction. Bush is proposing a change of direction in our economic policy, and he's got to sell that too, to tell Americans that he has something better to offer than President Clinton did.

HARRIS: Speaking of Mr. Clinton, we're finding this hour -- at this particular point, at least -- what do you make, then, of the shadow: Is this nothing more than preoccupation of a media that has nothing else to think about, or refuses to move off of him and move on to George W. Bush, or what? SCHNEIDER: Someone once described Bill Clinton as a walking feeding frenzy for the media, and I think there's some truth to that. But yet, the pardon were considered by many Americans -- are considered by many Americans -- a serious abuse of power. They'd like to find out exactly what happened and why. I don't know that they can change the process -- it's in the Constitution -- but certainly, there is some investigations going on into criminal wrongdoing. So I don't think it's a trivial preoccupation.

On the other hand, the president has got to jump-start his agenda here, because he's got to get the public support behind it. President Bush's problem isn't so much -- isn't simply that Bill Clinton is preoccupying the attention of the press, but that he didn't come in with a clear, strong mandate with huge coattails, the way Ronald Reagan did in 1981, when he passed his tax cut, and there really is no economic crisis facing the country the way there was when Reagan came in, the way there was when Clinton came in -- which produced a tremendous pressure on Congress to do something, do something to resolves the problems facing the country. That pressure just isn't there right now, and that's Bush's biggest problem.

HARRIS: All right, finally, let's get back to Mr. Bush and his speech for tonight. I know this may be jumping the gun some because he hasn't given the speech yet, but is it clear that Democrats have an answer for what he's going to propose tonight?

SCHNEIDER: Oh, no I don't think that's clear at all. The Democrats are trying to figure out what kind of answer they can come up with, and they've got to figure out who's going to speak for them, because right now, you know, Clinton is not exactly the best leader and spokesperson for the Democratic Party -- nor is Gore, nor is Mrs. Clinton, nor is Clinton's man who's the head of the DNC, the Democratic National Committee.

The Democrats have to figure out on what grounds do they want to oppose Bush's program. Is it because the tax cuts he's proposing aren't fair, is that their main line -- that sounds like class warfare? Is it because they want to devote everything to debt reduction? Well, the president's going to argue tonight that we can't reduce the debt 100 percent; that's unnecessary and unrealistic. Do they want to say that his -- the cuts in services that he's proposing in certain programs, like justice, and programs for the homeless, and environmental protection, somehow are dangerous or unfair.

Right now, they're trying out all these lines of attack, but they've got to settle on the one that makes the most sense.

HARRIS: All right, thanks much, Bill Schneider, in Washington.

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