What Did Bush Know—And What Does It Mean?

Judging from the headlines of the nation's newspapers, it looks like Karen Hughes got out of Washington, D.C. just in time. The former top presidential confidante and adviser has managed to avoid what is being billed as the most serious p.r. challenge to George W. Bush's presidency since he first squeaked into office under a different sort of dark cloud. This current imbroglio stems from a White House acknowledgment that the president had been briefed last August about al Qaeda plans to hijack American passenger planes.

"Bush Aides Seek to Contain Furor," "Lawmakers seek inquiries amid cries of politics," "Bush Team on Defensive in Threat Inquiry"–these are hardly the headlines that any president wants to read. (Indeed, Bush must be grateful to that great font of liberal media bias, The New York Times, for its restrained headline, "No Hint of Sept. 11 in Report in August, White House Says .")

"This government did everything that it could," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told the press. "There was nothing specific to which to react. Had this president known of something more specific, or that a plane was going to be used as a missile, he would have acted."

Politically motivated conspiracists such as U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.) notwithstanding, Rice's explanation is commonsensical and convincing on the matter at hand. Yet such matter-of-factness is unlikely to dispel the downward slide of Bush's approval ratings, which had started before this latest story came to light. Fully two-thirds of Americans think the president should have publicly discussed the August warnings earlier, a sentiment that Democrats will certainly exploit to the hilt (in fact, they already are). And if the War on Terror continues mostly as a crawl line on cable news shows, with fewer and fewer conclusive victories and no end in sight, its early successes in Afghanistan will loom less and less large.

Perhaps more important, today's story, regardless of its accuracy, resurrects the ghost of the pre-9/11 George W. Bush–the political greenhorn, the bumbling fool, and, most damaging of all, the secret meeting-holder. Those associations–along with Bush's embrace of pure pork-barrel spending, which frustrates his limited-government pals–may well leave the president increasingly isolated. Will any of this affect pending legislation? The midterm elections? Races in 2004? It's far too early to tell. But as the president must surely know from his father's own Oval Office experience, sky-high ratings posted after an ostensibly successful military operation have a way of falling back to earth with all the fizzled impact of a Scud missile.