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George W. Bush's first year is a tale of two presidents

George W. Bush's first year in office is basically a tale of two presidents, the one who served before Sept. 11 and the one who emerged afterward.

Until Sept. 11 Bush was ambling along, focused on domestic policy, spending a lot of time at his Texas ranch and increasingly considered an easy target by Democrats itching for payback over the disputed election he won over Al Gore based on a Supreme Court decision.

Then came the worst attacks ever on US soil, and the president's world turned upside down. Possibly a target himself of the attackers, he became a war leader virtually overnight. Having largely ignored the bully pulpit to that point, he stood on a crumpled firetruck at New York's "Ground Zero" and vowed to fight back. His popularity soared.

"In a strange way, we've had two presidents and two presidencies," said Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, who has been an adviser to four presidents.

Nobody at the White House is willing to say that Bush himself has changed because that would imply he was someone different before Sept. 11. Aides say the US is seeing the same person who took power last Jan. 20 -- only the agenda has changed.

"The nation's priorities and the president's priorities have significantly expanded since he was first sworn into office," said Bush communications director Dan Bartlett. "We are now a nation at war, a nation that is fighting off a recession."

But it is clear the terrorism challenge has made him more focused. He botches the language in his public remarks much less frequently and sometimes speaks extemporaneously at length, instead of reading carefully from his notecards.

Before Sept. 11, Bush was inclined to look more inward than his foreign policy-oriented father, former president George Bush.

He wanted to solidify relations with US neighbors to the north and south, but did not mind being criticized by Russia, China and US allies in Europe in his drive for a national missile defense system.

The terrorism crisis and the international coalition that rose in response to it forced Bush to look more outward. Foreign leaders are now trooping in steadily to sit beside him in the Oval Office. Once on the 2000 campaign trail he failed to recall the name of the Pakistani leader when asked. Bush now calls Pervez Musharraf a key ally and can talk about internal Pakistani politics.

Bush has been tough and unyielding in his drive to punish those responsible for the attacks, a quality that aides say the president displayed during an earlier crisis that was dramatic at the time but now pales in comparison -- China's seizure of a US surveillance plane and its 24-member crew last April on Hainan Island after it collided with a Chinese jet.

During tense negotiations, Bush agreed to say the US was "very sorry" the US plane had to land on Chinese soil, but he refused Chinese demands to apologize for the collision, since from the US side it seemed the Chinese pilot provoked the incident.

The incident ended peaceably, apparently without doing significant damage to US-Chinese relations. In fact, Bush is going to Beijing next month for talks with Chinese President Jiang Zemin (江澤民).

"I think that was a significant early test," a White House official said.

The White House is happy as well about Bush's ability to maintain a working relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin while announcing the US intention to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty to allow testing for a missile defense system.

Americans seemed to have low expectations of Bush and did not know what to expect when he took office, after the acrimony of the post-election legal battle for the White House.

Many Americans did not think he was the legitimate winner of the election, in which he lost the popular vote to Gore. Even though Bush's job approval ratings are more than 80 percent, respondents in a recent Fox News poll were divided about whether they would vote to give him a second term.

Having achieved two signature domestic issues -- a US$1.35 trillion tax cut and education reform -- Bush is pushing this year to have Republicans solidify their slender grip on the House of Representatives and retake the Senate.

He will be running against history: The party in the White House during midterm congressional elections usually loses seats.
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