The First Year of the Bush Administration: Preview of the State of the Union Message

MR. MANN: Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be back. I feel like a regular at the Foreign Press Center. We have a new year. It's time for me to come back. Thank you for having me.

Listen, I have to admit to you at the outset that I'm as confused about our politics as everyone else. We have so little in the way of historical analogies to draw on because the last 14, 15 months have been buffeted by events no one could have possibly forecast. It has altered, at least temporarily, the standing of the president, the character of our politics; but whether that will endure, whether the changes will be long-lasting, whether six months from now it will look anything like it does today is a bit of a mystery.

I'm going to be looking tonight for evidence on one major question, which is, has President Bush changed in his fundamental beliefs and views and policy orientations, both foreign and domestic, or does he show signs of basically wanting to use his extraordinary new popularity to advance his long-held views, foreign and domestic? To me, that is the most interesting question as we approach the State of the Union speech.

Think for a moment about the events that have transpired. Arguably the most controversial presidential election in U.S. history, in which the president lost the popular vote and won Florida and the Electoral College as a result of a 5-4 Supreme Court decision. It never played out on its own according to our constitutional and statutory provisions. After a stunning victory on his tax cut, he lost the Senate as Jim Jeffords became an independent, and the whole agenda-setting power of Congress, which had been in Republican hands, and with the White House, the first unified Republican government since the Eisenhower years suddenly was split with the Democrats, and Tom Daschle was in the driver's seat, not in terms of enacting policy, but in setting the agenda in the Senate and shaping the nature of deliberations.

The last Gallup Poll taken in early September, concluding on September 10th, showed the president with 51 percent job approval ratings, with a highly polarized reaction to his first months in office, with Democrats not having moved an inch since the November election, while Republicans were quite enthusiastic about him.

Then came 9/11, whose effects are still reverberating in our personal lives and in our public life here in America. Within 48 hours, the president's approval ratings were in the 90s, the low 90 percent. Now, he hadn't had a chance to perform sufficiently to account for the 35 to 40 percent jump; it was clearly a rally effect by the president. But those persisted over time, suggesting that the president responded well, in the view of the American public. And unlike some previous rally effect, these have been longer and the high ratings more enduring.

We learn from the recent round of polls that the president, no longer in the 90s, but in the low -- certainly low 80s and in one in the high 70s. It's come down five to 10 points; still remarkably high. And it affects how people view his handling of almost everything, including the economy in times of recession.

Which brings us to our sort of, if you will, fourth event after the 2000 elections, the change in control of the Senate in mid- session, and 9/11, that was a shift from a decade of prosperity and go-go markets to a recession and the bursting of NASDAQ. It was a time of dramatic shift from surpluses as far as the eyes can see to budget deficits. An extraordinary change that has now been transformed into sort of public pessimism about the economy. It took some time.

The final event, of course, was the collapse of Enron -- the largest major corporation to fail, to go bankrupt. Not only that, it won awards as the most innovative, the highest quality American company for three years in a row. And now it seems to have been a Ponzi game, a scam, in many respects, raising not, in my view, serious questions about quid pro quo and the Bush administration, but much more profound questions about the adequacy of various public policies having to do with transparency of financial statements, of the protections of shareholders and retirement fund owns.

Well, I mean, what's the next event going to be?

I mean, that's extraordinary -- to have those five things happen roughly in the first year of a new administration.

If you play the "What if" game, wondering what if in fact the court hadn't intervened, the clerk of Palm Beach County hadn't invented the butterfly ballot, Al Gore had won Florida by 40,000 or 50,000 votes, and the election; how would the response to terrorism have proceeded; how different would public policies be; similarly, what if 9-11 had not happened; my own guess is, if the president was at 51 percent on September 10, he would be closer to 41 percent today, with the economy tanking and Enron, and we'd be talking about the difficulties that he faces.

But that is not the reality. George Bush is the president. He is extremely popular. He has an agenda very different from Al Gore. The campaign against terrorism is of paramount importance to this country. The surplus is gone, and a whole new set of concerns and, in a sense, a new seriousness has, I think, pervaded American politics.

But the sort of question is, how fundamental has the shift been as a result of 9-11? Are the president's extraordinary standing and positive views by the American people -- and the Republican Party's advantage -- likely to remain in a country that in recent years has been divided almost evenly -- the 50-50 politics, as we call it? Is the whole notion of political capital a credible concept? Is -- does the president have an opportunity to take his popularity and his standing as commander in chief in the campaign against terrorism and use it to achieve his other objectives, both domestic and in foreign policy? That is, is there any evidence from history suggesting the president -- presidents can transfer that capital?

I've searched history for an example -- maybe James Polk in the 19th century. But in general, presidents have found it extremely difficult to translate that rally-effect popularity into leverage with the public and with the opposition party.

In fact, you could argue the best opportunity comes with their own party. That is, their standing gives them an ability to ask their own base to permit some maneuvering that might not otherwise be possible.

So what we're come down to, then, in conclusion, is looking for signs -- the way I've been describing it and the way Broder put it in the paper this morning is this -- is this an occasion for George W.

Bush to become the contemporary Teddy Roosevelt, who -- to sort of see changes in the context of foreign and domestic, and alter his policies and views in a way to address the contemporary concerns and build a broader political coalition, or rather is it an opportunity, as the president views it, to stick with his agenda, which is built around further tax cuts in the domestic arena and, if you will, a multilateralism of convenience on the international side, retaining American prerogatives to act in ways that we view as advancing our interests and our views of what's best?

That's the question. That's what I'll be looking for this evening. Given the previews that we've been treated to by selective leaks and statements, I think I know which wave is coming down, but one never knows. And I'll be interested in learning more in the speech. And I'd be happy to respond to any questions that you might have.

MODERATOR: Your questions, ladies and gentlemen.

Ben (sp)?

Q Yeah, my name is Ben Banguram (ph), Washington correspondent for (Daily ?) News, and you mentioned 50/50 politics. And Bush himself, coming to Washington, vowed to change that culture -- the culture of (interest ?), the culture of bigotry, whatever you call it. Has he accomplished anything during this -- (inaudible)?

MR. MANN: Well, there's sort of two ways of dealing that. One is, has the sort of underlying division of opinion in the country and the Congress changed in any profound way? And secondly, has the tone of relations and discussions, deliberations altered at all?

I'd say on the first score, there's not much sign of any transformation of the political arena. I mean, we have polls. We have election results. We saw the election results in 2001. Democrats and Democrats recently turned Republican were the victors in those races. Different factors were involved, but we saw no sign of any underlying shift advantaging the Republican party. There's been a slight movement in the direction of more people identifying as Republicans rather than Democrats, a slight increase in the generic vote for Republicans, but my view is that that is so caught up in the president's very high, historically high job approval ratings that those will diminish as the ratings come down. My own view is they have no place to go but down. It's simply impossible to sustain ratings of this sort.

The Senate is controlled by one seat, the House by six seats. The stakes in the 2002 elections are extremely high. The politics surrounding redistricting has been intense. The parties are raising a lot of money to focus on marginal seats, so the partisan politics of this year will be intense, because everyone knows that control of both houses of Congress is up for grabs and the control of many governorships and state legislatures is up, as well. So I see no blunting or dulling of partisan edge there.

As far as relations between the parties and the nature of civility, I'd say the president began with good words, but his actions belied the bipartisanship on the tax cut. He rammed that through on a partisan basis. Democrats were angry. But he then pulled other Democrats into negotiations on the education bill.

I would say, though, that things were very testy initially. Daschle had not a single meeting with the president about the budget or taxes before the tax bill was signed into law. There were no really meaningful bipartisan leadership meetings. But that changed on 9/11, and I think we ushered in a different era. I think politicians of both parties led by the president feel the responsibility to have the leadership of the country work together in responding to the terrorist threat. And they've maintained that degree of civility, but it hasn't prevented the parties and the president and Congress from fighting aggressively on matters of real dispute: for example, over the stimulus bill late in the Congress. The parties really disagree on this. They are principal differences. They ought to fight that out. But it seems to me they're doing it with an eye toward cooling the rancor, the ugliness that's going on.

The final bit of evidence is the Enron scandal has precipitated the most active and aggressive set of congressional investigations in a long while. Obviously we had unending investigations during the Clinton administration, but we had them during Bush I and Reagan. I would say at this stage these are the most serious substantive investigations, that the members are being very careful not to turn it into a partisan food fight so far. And that suggests to me it's, first of all, a sort of bipartisan sense of vulnerability, but even more than that it reflects a new seriousness. This is a serious matter. This isn't the game of criminalization of partisan differences; this is about real matters that affect ordinary citizens. And I think the politicians are responding well to it. So in that sense there's been some change in tone.

MODERATOR: Omae-san, right here.

Q Hitoshi Omae, Nikkei Newspaper, Japanese daily newspaper. Somewhat related for, I mean, the last question. So observing after one year of the 2000 elections, Dr. Mann, how do you see the constituency? Because some people said 2000 election was actually very polarized, conservative and liberals. Other people say actually not polarization, actually they said huge swing voters and those voters pick up issue by issue. So right now January of 2002, how do you see the constituency, and how they effect for this year's elections?

MR. MANN: I mean, they're both true. We have ideological polarization between the parties that's most manifest at the level of elected officials and activists. They are the ones to tend to have the most polarized ideological views. As you move down to the electorate, you see less ideology and more pragmatism. Nonetheless, the public over the last decade has sorted itself out more by ideology and party than it had previously. We used to have a lot of conservative Democrats and liberal and moderate Republicans in the electorate. And that produced a sort of divided government oftentimes. We don't have as much of that, so I'd say we are more polarized as a country, but it tends to be most intense in government and among activists, so that when you have low turnout elections in congressional districts that tend to be safe for one party or the other, what you hear is -- the polarization, what you hear and see are the activists and the politicians appealing to the activists to try to turn out their base.

The money system is connected to that. You kind of tend to raise money from people who have the strongest feelings at one end or the other of the ideological spectrum.

Now, when you have a presidential race, you can't rely on just turning out your base, you have to fight for the swing voters, the moderates, the non-ideologues, the pragmatists. And so presidential candidates have a natural incentive to move to the center. But in congressional races, the incentive is often to move just in the opposite direction.

So my own sense is that because what's most immediately relevant is the mid-term elections, which could be low turnout, that mobilizing the base and, therefore, maintaining the differences between the parties will trump the efforts to find middle ground in the center.

Q (Name inaudible) -- NRC Handelsblad, the Netherlands. Do you think Enron will lead to some serious campaign finance reform, or are the vested interests in the current system too bipartisan?

MR. MANN: The vested interests in the current system are bipartisan. The labor movement is working aggressively against the Shays-Meehan bill in the House of Representatives, along with the National Right to Life Committee and the NRA and a number of business- related groups. So if you looked at those sort of core organized constituencies of the political parties, you'd say to yourself this is going to be another case of Lucy lifting up the football at the last moment, preventing Charlie Brown from kicking his field goal; that each time we get closer and closer, yet we, in fact, are just as far away.

My view is that sort of special interests can be trumped by broader interests when politicians feel vulnerable and when they feel an issue which may not now resonate with the public could potentially be used against them in the future. And I think Enron has changed the calculus. You see, in the past, the House has voted for versions of Shays-Meehan, McCain-Feingold, including a significant number of Republicans, but they did it knowing the bill would either die in the Senate or be vetoed by the president. That veto goes back to the first President Bush. This has been going on for years.

The problem is they have a record now, a public record, and for Republicans to backslide on votes for campaign finance reform in the era of the Enron scandal is to make themselves exceedingly vulnerable.

For the Democrats to backslide is to basically lose any potential advantage from the whole Enron scandal, and to right now concede any potential ability to claim that they are the party of political reform. Gephardt understands this and has worked harder than ever before on this issue.

My own view is that it will be tough.

The discharge petition, that reached the magic 218 last week, is actually a very complicated procedural rule that allows the underlying Shays-Meehan, the Ney substitute but also another substitute by the Republican majority, and it allows the Republican majority 10 amendments, up to 10 amendments, and five each for Shays-Meehan and the minority leadership. You can imagine the strategies now being devised to try to break off support for the underlying bill.

A key new player is the National Association of Broadcasters, which was sleeping when McCain-Feingold passed, the Torricelli amendment that guaranteed the lowest unit rate for non-preemptable political ads. The political advertising has been a cash cow to the broadcasting industry over the last couple of election cycles. This is big money. And the NAB will fight that provision. So it's perilous, it's difficult, and it may be foolhardy in view of my analogy to Lucy and Charlie Brown.

But I actually think that the discharge petition was going to be signed without Enron, but thought it was going to be a very difficult fight on the House floor. Now I think the chances of a bill passing that will be acceptable to the Senate and therefore avoid conference is now the most probable outcome. I'm not saying it's 80-20 or even 75-25, but I'm pushing toward 60 percent probability that it will -- that they will be able to sustain their coalition, beat off damaging killer amendments and substitute -- take a bill to the Senate, and that an effort to filibuster it there will fail, and that the president will be accorded an opportunity to sign a campaign finance bill. And if he is, I think there's a 95-percent probability that he will sign it.

MODERATOR: The gentleman in the back in the gray shirt.

Q Paddy Smith, Irish Times. You've said that there isn't really evidence that September the 11th has changed voters' attitudes to issues. I was wondering whether you see any evidence that it might have changed voters' attitudes to politics more generally, and whether Bush can increase the level of voter participation. And would that help him?

MR. MANN: There's actually little evidence of any decrease in either the reality of or the possibility of increasing turnout. In fact, the evidence in the off-year elections in 2001 suggested there were turnout declines, and they came in pretty rapid succession after 9-11.

Listen, the public responded in a way that brought out feelings of patriotism, of national unity, of sense of commitment, of connection to neighbors and friends and work mates and community more generally. It increased social trust.

It made people feel more trusting about government. It was really quite extraordinary. But it takes something to translate that into more permanent changes in the civic culture and in the polity.

The president this evening apparently is -- will address this issue of how this new sense among the citizens can be institutionalized into activities that would have us as citizens connect up with government and with a national campaign to deal with terrorism.

But most of that will be voluntary. I don't see any real big, new initiatives. I don't see any call for mandatory national service, alternative service. I don't -- therefore, I'm dubious as to whether we're going to do enough to -- that actually connects people and takes advantage of this extraordinary opportunity.

You know, the fact is, the military campaign is still pretty remote. It doesn't require any sacrifices on our part. We're told to go shopping. We're told we need another tax cut and we need to speed up the tax cut that we have. We're not being asked to sacrifice. We are told to sort of be active in our communities, but you know, we're already active, to some extent, in our communities. Among young people, the one-on-one volunteering has been there for a long time. The question is, can we link that up in some more substantial way? This is defined now as the major threat to our security, and yet to most Americans, it's becoming increasingly remote as the horrors of 9- 11 begin to fade.

So I'm not very optimistic about a surge in turnout, unless we seize the initiative, the president sort of captures the imagination and gives us a new agenda that can excite a broad range of Americans. I don't think the old party agendas will do the trick.

MODERATOR: The young lady in black.

Q If you were to advise the president -- I'm Christine from Norwegian television. If you were to advise the president, would you tell him to mention Enron in his speech tonight? Why and why not?

And how damaging do you think this collapse is to his administration, particularly the president and the vice president?

MR. MANN: Listen, I figure my advice is not something the president needs. He's got high-powered political advisers.

But I have to tell you a little story. The -- a reporter for the Wall Street Journal was working on an Enron story, and he called me and asked about the response. And I said, "Listen, the president had such a favorable reaction to his visceral response to 9-11. People sensed that he would give some great intellectual rationale for it. He responded in a way that Americans could understand."

But I said, "There's no response anything like that on the Enron matter, and yet Americans can see, you know, the big boys got away while the ordinary people suffered." I said, "Where's the outrage?" And this was in a story in the Wall Street Journal. And the reporter left me a voice mail saying, three days later, "The president said he was outraged." (Laughs.)

(Laughter.)

Listen, I -- if I were advising, I'd advise not just mentioning it, but to mention it, but not to -- to then have a sort of -- a really a sort of aggressive agenda and priority to try to keep this from happening, to ward off other things, to talk about the importance of transparency and oversight.

To really take it on would be a mistake. That is, if he's prepared to be Teddy Roosevelt on this, then yeah, not only address it, but make it a centerpiece along with the war on terrorism. But all signs are he's not going to do that.

He's going to talk about being appalled by the unethical behavior of corporate leaders and describe it largely as a problem of corporate ethics rather than public policy. In which case I think he's best not mentioning it at all. Either take it on and make it a crusade, or don't make anything of it.

Let me just say, I do think his highest priority tonight, by far, is to sort of reignite the public connection to the campaign against terrorism, which is inevitably cooling as time goes on, and it becomes more complicated as the military targets look less attractive and the campaign moves underground. He's going to have to once again raise the stakes for the American people in a thoughtful, robust, aggressive campaign against terror abroad and at home, and be very persuasive on it. I do think that is his highest priority.

Q Dr. Mann, you just mentioned that Bush got his approval rating boost and also his leadership consolidated from the anti- terrorism campaign. But where is the new momentum, since it has gone on for, you know, a long time, and we saw a lot of problem in Governor Ridge's leadership, and we saw that there are internal debates on how they should treat the prisoners from Afghanistan or Taliban.

MR. MANN: Yeah.

Q So, do you see that there is a diversified or a -- you know, an internal conflict now in Bush's administration, and how he could continue this campaign, where he got the new momentum?

And the second question is, personally, what's your approval rate for President Bush for the first year? Thank you.

MODERATOR: And introduce yourself, please.

Q Nadia Tsao with the Liberty Times. Thank you.

MR. MANN: Okay. I mean, you have identified a real challenge for the administration, you know, how to maintain the momentum in the campaign against terrorism; how to move from a war footing to -- which carries with it an expectation about triumphant victories and end points and exit strategies, and instead shifts to what will be, and what the president has told us will be an ongoing, continuous, unending campaign against terrorism.

You know, even if you -- if you sort of look at the targets, it turns out other targets that harbor terrorists of international scope or reach, our tough-minded response in Afghanistan has probably begun to create the environment in which we can accomplish a good deal through negotiations with leaders of some of this country, and to have our greatest effect by sending advisers. You know, these are not the same as the bombing raids and the insertion of large number of Special Forces and regular Army units and the rest.

Obviously, the two mega-targets are Iraq and Iran -- Iraq certainly highest on the list of many administration officials, Iran probably the supporter of most terrorism. Iraq has been largely contained in the immediate term but has the potential of eventually wielding weapons of mass destruction, and that's the basis of them being targeted.

And yet any military move against Iraq would be enormously complicated by the fact that we probably have to do it alone. We get little cooperation from our European allies or from neighboring states. And part of the basis of public support for a move against Iraq is an understanding that it would be like the Gulf War again -- that the coalition would be there. Americans don't quite understand how much opposition there is to this in the rest of the world. And so it's a tricky business. Most everyone in this country and among our allies would love to see Saddam Hussein gone, but they are not convinced that we can do it in a way in which the benefits will outweigh the costs.

As far as Iran is concerned, no one is arguing for military action there. It's a much more complicated situation with a hope that eventually the political reform underway will eventually trump the religious fundamentalism that dominates the country.

So I think it gets really tricky as to how to sustain the military operation. And that's why I think you're going to see a much more aggressive focus on the homeland in the State of the Union speech. The president is devoting a large sum of money to this effort. I think he's really going to try to convince Americans that we have vulnerabilities, that no priority is higher than providing for the security of the citizenry, that we have to devote resources and energy to this, and it's part of our campaign against terrorism.

I also think he's going to be linking the campaign against terrorism to virtually everything else that he talks about. The economy problems will be linked to terrorism, the appearance of deficits will be linked to terrorism, and the effort will be to say, "Listen, as a nation, we've got to stick together. It has foreign and domestic dimensions. Sometimes the foreign will be hot; sometimes it will be cooler. Here's how we think it may unfold" -- without being very specific -- "of the next year or two, but all the while, that effort is underway. We have much work to tend to at home."

So I think that's what he's going to do.

I mean, grades are very difficult. I believe presidents can't be judged, you know, until they're finished. That, you know, I would have Clinton about four different grades along the way in his first two years, and think of how many he would get over the course of his eight years. I'd give -- I gave Bush a kind of C-plus for the first months in office, largely because I think he didn't respond in what I viewed to be appropriately -- an appropriate way to the extraordinary nature of the election and sort of try to take that into account, and, as a consequence, lost the Senate, was really in a position of thinking fast. But since September 11, I would give him an "A." I think he's really done a superb job on the campaign against terrorism. But I have no idea what his grade in the first six months of 2002 will be. There are sort of signs of promise and signs of trouble.

MODERATOR: But we're glad you asked.

This gentleman?

Q (Name inaudible) -- with Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan. How do you think the Democrats are doing at this moment? I mean, right now they are criticizing the administration for not releasing the Enron documents. And also, they show they're united in terms of the fight against terrorism, but criticize the president for everything else, for domestic policies. And does the strategy win them both houses in the fall election? And do you think they can come up with a strong candidate, strong enough in the 2004 election?

MR. MANN: Democrats are having a very hard time in this environment. And they were salivating in late summer, early fall. On September 10, they felt really good about how the battles were shaping up. They felt that the agenda was theirs, that Clinton had repositioned the Democrats more toward the center, bread and butter issues that Democrats cared about. You started seeing -- and this is true on a range of issues -- the economy was slowing, the concerns -- remember lockbox, the politics of the lockbox? It vanished, and probably a good thing, too; that is, the term, not the shift from surpluses to deficits.

But Democrats were sort of on top of things. They felt that the public was largely indifferent to the tax cut and the president was on the defensive. But since 9-11, they have been on the defensive, and they are having a very difficult time making the transition.

Initially I think they did what they should have done, which was to be constructive and patriotic, but they also, I thought, along with Republicans, were insistent on not just being rubber stamps, and they altered the character of some of the initial terrorism legislation. And that was appropriate.

But after a number of months had passed, they'd begun to return to a series of domestic issues. But they're caught with the problem of how to deal with the tax that was approved last spring. Twelve Democrats in the Senate, a number of whom are running for reelection in 2002, voted for that. It makes it very difficult for the Democrats to champion a pause or -- in those rates taking effect, even those just at the upper 1 or 2 percent bracket. It makes it very difficult.

And frankly, while the public basically would favor that, rhetorically it's very hard to explain what you're doing and counter an argument that Democrats just want to raise taxes. So they are gun- shy on this issue. Let Teddy Kennedy get out front, but they're looking for a way of avoiding it.

And frankly, it puts them in a difficult position, because the president is calling for huge increases in domestic security and defense. He's pumping more money into education. And then he'll try to sort of slow spending in other areas, but basically acknowledging we're going to have deficits.

And so Democrats are in a difficult position. Green eyeshade accounting is not a(n) attractive political strategy. We used to say, in the days of deficits, that no good deficit reduction deed goes unpunished by the American people. That is, whenever some politicians in Congress would get together to help try to reduce the deficit, you know, the public, rather than rewarded them, sort of ended up punishing them, because it usually involves unpalatable choices and decisions.

So they're in a very awkward position, and what they have decided to do, basically, is the old strategy of Muhammad Ali, which is called "rope-a-dope," which is to move more into a defensive crouch and to allow the economic slowdown, the new deficits, the Enron scandal to play out, and simply say, "Well, Mr. President, what are you going to do about this, about that, and about that," and try to have the midterm elections, to the extent they have any national component, be framed on how has -- have the Republicans managed our domestic affairs, our economy and the oversight of the private sector, and at the same time be champions of a(n) aggressive campaign against terrorism.

That's what they've decided to do. It's not an optimal strategy, but there aren't many alternatives. And they've decided, at least for now, to play it relatively safe.

Q (Off mike.)

MR. MANN: I'm sorry, 2004, just -- the second part of that question.

It's too far away.

Listen, we could be -- I have no confidence in forecasting, in the forecasting of economists of where our economy will be. Some tell us it's turning around already and by the second quarter we'll -- (audio drops for five seconds) -- at a level that -- in which we have increasing unemployment and then a plateau with no decline for a while. We could have -- given the drag from the rest of the world and the overinvestment that we had and the high debt held by consumers, you know, we could have a period of very slow growth for a while. If that's the case, then as we approach the presidential season, then, you know, then there's going to be a lot of interest in opposing President Bush. But if the first forecast works out, we return the high growth, the president makes an effective transition to a continuous campaign against terrorism, we feel more secure, and he combines -- he threads together the, you know, tax cuts for the base with softer, compassionate conservatism for the center, he's going to be hard to beat by any Democrat.

So I don't know. But I would say, you know, in my mind the sort of two most interesting, promising Democrats are Tom Daschle on the one hand and John Edwards on the other. But I suspect John Kerry of Massachusetts, you know, could well be a factor, and I expect that Al Gore will not run and Joe Lieberman will. But how that plays out is anyone's guess. And I'm saying that just on the basis of Al Gore taking such an extended withdrawal from public life and the general sense among Democrats -- preference that he not run. I mean, he would be the front runner in a race, but I think it would be dispiriting to Democrats even though most of them believe he won in 2000.

MODERATOR: Over here.

Q I am -- (name inaudible) -- from Korea Economic Daily. The congressional investigating arm GAO is likely to go to the court because the White House is -- they are resisting turning over some document and information of the energy task force. Do you think this conflict will tarnish the President Bush high popularity? Which side will have the support from the people?

MR. MANN: Yep. It hasn't yet penetrated the public opinion. But I think the politics are all working against the administration. Dick Cheney has long held strong views about executive prerogatives. This goes back 30 years. This is heartfelt on his part. And he has proposed aggressively resisting congressional demands for information that he thinks should be privileged in the executive branch. So I don't question the authenticity of his claim, the belief, his belief in his claim. But I think the law works against him, precedent works against him. The GAO will go to court. It will take a while to work its way through the court. But everything we know about executive branches and presidents trying to retain information that's connected in -- potentially connected in any way to a scandal is that eventually they conclude that they have to release the information.

And it would have been better to do it earlier rather than later.

But Cheney feels strongly, and Bush agrees with him and backs him up, and so that drives this. Now, there may also be a perception of political vulnerability here because of the nature of the meetings. I noted earlier on they had no trouble releasing the names of a couple of environmentalists who met with the task force -- (chuckles) -- so it's sort of selective disclosure. They obviously will see that it's, you know, energy industry people that had the overwhelming number of meetings with the task force. And, given the Enron scandal, you know, that will be embarrassing. But I'll tell you, getting that out early will not surprise any members of the public, but now digging in is going to -- is going to cost them politically.

MODERATOR: Well, Dr. Mann, I want to thank you very much for a great discussion. And I want to thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for some very good questions. And we hope that this series of expert briefings will continue apace. Thank you very much.

MR. MANN: Thank you.