A man never benefits from going to a psychiatrist if the only reason he's there is because of his wife. You have to want to change from within. |
Changing the subject will not work. Giving more speeches about Iraq or the state of the economy doesn't have the weight that action does?. It's dangerous for the country to have a disabled president for three years, and we're getting close to seeing that happen. I worry that they [Bush and his aides] are in denial. |
Don't just listen to the lawyers. You know in your heart it's time to get this behind you, avoid the nightmare of more proceedings up on the Hill. |
For a two-term president after the November elections in the middle of your second term, things start going downhill and you really do start quacking like a duck. |
He (Rove) is the president's right arm, as we all know. And the president's in a deep hole and it's very hard to climb out of a hole without your right arm. |
He didn't call for a lot of new things on the domestic front. He had a lot of rhetoric, but the proposals were quite modest. And on the foreign policy front, he didn't break a lot of new ground. |
I don't think there's any other president in the modern era that has seen this kind of stability. |
I still think this president would be served by having someone fresh come in. It would be a matter of making room at the table. |
I think he has to calibrate it very carefully. The White House says it is going to be a very optimistic speech. But I think people are not feeling very optimistic at the moment. |
I think he still has time to recover politically, and I think it's likely he will. He's good at this. You'll see a better Bush during the next few days, in charge and compassionate. But if he doesn't, there's going to be a serious political price to pay. |
I think the president has raised the stakes for himself. He has raised the stakes for his presidency, so that if there are more explosions in the next few months ... his approval ratings will suffer some more. |
I was in the Nixon White House during Watergate, and we pretended that we were all about business as usual. And we had a president who was talking to the portraits. It was not business as usual, but you have to say it. |
I'm told by some people close to him that this will not be a Kerry-bashing speech. But he's not going to simply rally around Bush. Indeed it's going to be the story of an immigrant coming to this country and finding a country that's embraced him and a party that's embraced him. |
If Karl Rove were indicted, that would be like George W. Bush losing his right arm at a time when he needs every limb he's got to climb out of the hole he's in and to rebuild his presidency. |
If people stay that long, group-think can set in, and that's dangerous for a president. |