MSNBC / Fineman: "That Bush Political Capital Thing"

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7641678/

WASHINGTON - You’ve got to hand it to the PR geniuses at the White House. There’s nothing like back-to-back Texas photo ops with Crown Prince Abdullah and Rep. Tom DeLay to give Americans a visceral sense that the Boss is on top of the gas-price situation and desperate to save working folks cash at the pump. Just kidding, of course.

Actually, it’s hard to imagine two political events LESS likely to win the president points. George Bush held hands and pecked cheeks with Abdullah in traditional desert fashion – but the prince gave him the back of his hand on the issue of the moment: oil supply and prices, which the Saudis essentially control. Then the president welcomed the embattled DeLay into his photo space in Galveston. That was no energy-issue coup, either. Until lobbyist Jack Abramoff came into the picture, DeLay’s best-known corporate ties were to corporate titans such as Kenneth Lay of Enron in his home town of Houston.

Yes, Bush has been down politically before, and recovered smartly. He’s a fighter, and has the ability to ignore the gloom and doom around him. Yes, the Democrats don’t have much of an answer to him other than to shout “no” on a host of issues. Still, despite Republican control of virtually every lever of power in Washington – in a way because of that very fact – Bush finds himself playing defense.

In Austin in 1999, he told me and my NEWSWEEK colleagues over lunch one day that he had learned from his father’s experience: if you accumulate “political capital” –as his dad did as Liberator of Kuwait in 1991 – you have to “spend it” on bold action. Well, this Bush chose Social Security – a brave, fundamental and far-sighted choice in many ways. Maybe Karl Rove is right that sweeping reform is the route to a permanent majority of a GOP-led “ownership society” of shareholders. But, in the short run, Bush’s Social Security crusade has bought him nothing but trouble, and diverted his attention from other problems.