In a week when the anthrax crisis has overshadowed the faraway war in the American consciousness, the Bush administration has started to feel old-fashioned political heat for the first time since the crisis began.
The health and human services secretary, Tommy Thompson, took a pummelling in the New York Times Thursday for his handling of the anthrax issue -- the latest phase in a term of office strewn, said the paper, with "mis-steps, mis-cues and mis-statements."
The talk around the country's saloons, water coolers and coffee machines has begun to shift from a generalized sense of national unity to specific grumbles about the sluggishness and unevenness of government reaction to anthrax: rapid enough when politicians were involved but apparently relaxed about the danger to mere postmen.
Those in charge have compounded the problems by sending out confused messages. Was the anthrax weapons-grade or not? Should Americans be alarmed or relaxed? Has US President George W. Bush himself been tested? The signals keep changing. Thompson suggested early on that Bob Stevens, the first anthrax victim, might have drunk from an infected stream.
There were some indications that the criticism originated inside the administration and that Thompson might have been chosen as a possible scapegoat. He arrived in Washington with a high personal reputation for the innovative welfare programs he introduced as governor of Wisconsin. But he has irritated colleagues for apparently refusing to accept that he is no longer his own boss, and put off the public with his verbosity.
Anthrax has struck just at the time that the war news has become slightly more uncomfortable. The daily Pentagon briefings have consisted less and less of smug and illustrated accounts of precision bombing and more and more of explaining accidents, doubts and uncertainties -- reflected Thursday in the admission by the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that capturing Osama bin Laden would be "very difficult."
The first hint of influential dissent about the conduct of the fighting emerged earlier in the week when the Democratic Senator Joe Biden, chairman of the foreign relations committee, said the US risked looking like "a high-tech bully" in its bombing of Afghanistan and said he did not know how long "the unquestioning period of unabashed support for the president's policy will continue." He soon discovered it was not going to be over yet, as Tom Daschle, his party leader in the Senate, quickly distanced himself from the comments, and there was a deafening silence from other Democrats.
Senator Biden was a serious presidential candidate in 1987 but is now considered to be on the eccentrically unpredictable wing of his party. Nonetheless, these were comments that would not have been politically possible a fortnight ago.
President Bush himself has been putting himself about, delivering pep talks to the nation at factories and schools, but these have been disappearing further and further down the news bulletins. He has even irritated some of his own party strategists by pulling out of a Republican fundraising function in Washington last night and sending US Vice-President Dick Cheney instead.
This was one of those judgments that inextricably link low politics and high statesmanship. It is considered right for both the nation and the Republican party that the president should maintain his stance of being above it all.
But it is not universally accepted as the correct decision. One Republican told the Daily News, he needs to watch out: "Look at his dad -- 90 per cent favorable after the Gulf war and he still lost a year later."
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