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CNN Saturday Morning News

Reporter's Notebook: Bush's First 100 Days

Aired April 28, 2001 - 09:50   ET

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

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JASON CARROLL, CNN ANCHOR: All right, we've been talking about it all morning, so now we want to turn our attention to a detailed assessment of President Bush's first 100 days in office.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us in our discussion, from Crawford, Texas, our CNN White House correspondent, Kelly Wallace, and in our Washington bureau, senior political analyst Bill Schneider. Hi, guys.

KELLY WALLACE, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Hello.

PHILLIPS: Hi. Well, let's get right down to business here. This e-mail comes from Will, and he wants to know, "Which president from the past has Mr. Bush's agenda really resembled?" Bill, you want to start?

SCHNEIDER: Well, in some ways, I think President Reagan, because President Reagan started off calling for a big tax cut. It was his signature issue. George Bush did the same thing. He ran on it, he's sticking to it. There's only one difference. When President Reagan started, the nation was in a terrible economic crisis, a catastrophe, coming out of the Carter years.

Right now, a lot of Americans wonder, where's the crisis? And they say to themselves that a tax cut sounds like a solution for which there's no obvious problem.

PHILLIPS: Kelly, what do you think? And do you think he resembles his father at all?

WALLACE: Well, Kyra, it's interesting, I think he's learned some lessons from his father, and aides will admit that. Certainly his father was criticized as not kind of taking care of the conservatives in his own party. And you've seen this president definitely reaching out to the conservative wing right off the bat, taking some steps, certainly on the environment, certainly when it comes to tax cuts and other issues, to try and shore up his conservative base and make sure he has that support, and then reach out to moderates.

So I think he's learned some lessons from his father. But as Bill said, it looks like he's modeling his administration after Ronald Reagan, focusing on tax cuts, shorting up the military. And also focusing on just a few messages, a message a week, we saw from the very beginning, another approach that the Reagan administration put forth in its first term as well.

CARROLL: OK, let's bring up the second one here for you. It comes from Spencer in Fargo, North Dakota. He says, "How has this president managed to acquire a 63 percent approval rating, higher than Clinton's 59 percent at this point in his term?" Either one of you want to take a stab at that one?

SCHNEIDER: He hasn't made any huge blunders. I mean, one of the first things that President Clinton did was talk about gays in the military, which shocked a lot of people. Where did that come from? It actually came from his campaign, but nobody was listening.

Bush has managed to get through the first 100 days of his campaign. There were some obvious mistakes and controversial moves, but no serious policy blunders. And I think especially his patience, his ability to withstand a lot of pressure to do something rash on China earned him very good marks.

WALLACE: I just wanted to add to that too, one thing that the president has definitely said is, he likes that the expectations were low when he came into office. As we know, we had certainly the five- week election battle. There were lots of very low expectations that this president would be able to get anything done, that he would be able to lead and have relations with members of Congress.

So certainly this White House appears to be benefiting from the lowered expectations going into its beginning administration.

PHILLIPS: Well, Kelly, the administration -- or certain administration officials have told you about how there are areas of improvement. They've admitted to that, right?

WALLACE: Absolutely. And a big area is certainly the environment. As we've seen, many Democratic lawmakers, environmentalists, criticizing the president's record on the environment. The president going back against a campaign promise, deciding not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. President also not supporting a global warming treaty.

So the president receiving lots of criticism. And aides saying, while they stand by these -- the president's decisions and his record, they think they could have done a better job getting the message out about all the things they believe the president is doing to protect the environment.

So they think on this one, they may have lost control of the message for a time, and they tried to get it back before Earth Day.

SCHNEIDER: You know, they made the same mistake that the Republican Congress made. One of the first things that they did was assume they could carry out a retrenchment policy on the environment, and they discovered that this is an enormously sensitive issue at home and abroad. When the president said the Kyoto Treaty, global warming, that was no longer effective, there was a tremendous reaction, negative, abroad, things like arsenic in drinking water.

The voters are enormously sensitive to environmental issues, and Republicans learn that again and again.

PHILLIPS: Well, here's another issue, fuel prices. Randy asks this question, "Will anything be done with the cost of rising fuel prices?"

Now, Vice President Cheney, you know, hit on this when he was talking with Larry King. What more can you tell us, Bill?

SCHNEIDER: Supply and demand is the problem. The administration, no government can regulate supply and demand. This government says the answer is to increase supply, but that'll take some time. In the immediate future, I think there's going to be a serious problem with gas prices. The administration can try -- I mean, they're not going to release, I don't believe they're going to release strategic petroleum reserves. It's not a national crisis like a war.

But they do have some long-term proposals, which are interesting ones, some of them controversial, like drilling in the Alaska wildlife preserve. They say that'll increase the supply, but it's a very sensitive issue. Again, that's the environmental issue.

CARROLL: All right, Kelly, very quickly, we have another question here from Brett Stone, Studio City, California. "Who decided to put such importance on the first 100 days of a new presidency?" I was wondering about this just a few minutes ago.

WALLACE: Well, as we know, this is really sort of been a historical benchmark going back to previous presidents, looking at a 100 days to sort of basically describe and get a benchmark for how the administration is proceeding. What we've seen from this White House, Jason, is that they would like to use the 180-day benchmark. They believe that that's a better measurement of how the president and the Congress are achieving things and getting legislation passed into law.

So they prefer 180 days. They're going with the spirit of 100 days, though, as history has shown.

SCHNEIDER: It was really Franklin Roosevelt. In his first 100 days, he carried through a tremendous burst of legislation defining the New Deal. But remember, like Ronald Reagan, he came to office in a period of crisis. So he said, We're going to act, and we're going to act fast. And he had a huge mandate.

Now, it's assumed that every new president has that kind of mandate. You know what? They don't.

PHILLIPS: Bill Schneider, Kelly Wallace, always a pleasure. Thanks to you both.

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