Losing the Script and Finding His Voice

By Mike Allen

"He was a great President. But boy, they mistreated him. He did what he thought was right."

George W. Bush's entry for himself in some future history book? Actually, it was the President describing Abraham Lincoln last week during an epic 100-min. question-and-answer session with 9,000 soldiers and students at Kansas State University. Bush hastened to say he was not comparing himself with that iconic wartime President: "I would never do that." But that's how this President sees himself, according to friends. And last week he began reminding us, selling himself with more vim and certitude than at any other time since he was re-elected 15 months ago.

Buffeted by Katrina, the CIA leak and Iraq, Bush was teetering on the edge of irrelevance after a largely wasted 2005. But he found his voice in an improbable place: at the center of what looked like a serious scandal. Bush had personally tried to keep the New York Times from revealing the existence of a White House--authorized program to tap calls coming into and going out of the U.S. without a warrant if they involved a suspected terrorist, and just last week he told the Wall Street Journal, "I'm sorry we're talking about it."

But the eavesdropping controversy turned out to offer a foothold. "If somebody from al-Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why," Bush declared, while polls showed Americans weren't particularly concerned about warrantless wiretapping if authorities were using it to try to fight terrorism. When a new threat on tape from Osama bin Laden emerged, Bush was set up to return to the stage as Protector in Chief, the Republicans' award-winning role in the past two elections.

Starting Feb. 6, the Senate will plunge ahead with hearings on eavesdropping, and Bush could face trouble if facts come out indicating he has described the program inaccurately or incompletely. After Bush delivered his war-on-terrorism defense of the program, however, Democrats seemed to have lost their stomach for battle. "I'm not sure that's a winning issue for Democrats," party strategist Harold Ickes said. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid preferred to focus on Medicare snafus and what he called G.O.P. corruption.

Still, Bush faces some grim facts. A new TIME poll puts his approval rating at just 41%. Iraq remains unstable; senior citizens are having trouble with the Medicare prescription plan; and the government announced last week that the pace of economic growth in the final quarter of 2005 was the slowest in three years.

Inside the White House, though, aides were smiling again. Low poll numbers aren't worth agonizing over because many party strategists believe Bush has a ceiling of 52%, says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. "It's hard to imagine anyone who didn't vote for his re-election would approve of his job performance." And aides felt the President had aced his recent appearances. The strategy--a latter-day version of "let Reagan be Reagan"--was to get Bush out of rigid, scripted settings and have him adopt a looser, more self-deprecating style so that people would see the casual side that had originally won the country over.

The transformation began in December when Bush started giving what aides considered "realistic" speeches about Iraq, took audience questions and appeared on camera nearly every weekday. He has been emphasizing humor, telling a woman in Kansas, "I couldn't hear the question, so I'll put the words in your mouth." The President was enjoying himself so much, he had no idea he had taken 13 questions from the audience, throwing off his tight schedule.

As Bush began sounding sharper and feeling better, friends said, he began to look ahead, conscious of the 2009 finish line. In Kansas he told the soldiers and students to pray, exercise and "be optimistic." He choked up talking about the First Lady, made a rare reference to his twins ("The girls still love me") and called Barney the Scottish terrier "the son I never had." He has been reading When Trumpets Call, about Theodore Roosevelt's life after the White House. Aides insist, however, that this President, as an ex, will not go on safari or write opinion articles tormenting his successors.

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, MICHAEL DUFFY, Karen Tumulty/Washington