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Bush Speaks Boldly, Confidently In Europe

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By JENNIFER LOVEN

The Associated Press

Published: June 14, 2008

PARIS - Roaming across Europe on a glamorous weeklong goodbye, President Bush does not sound like a man with dismal poll ratings, dwindling influence and just seven months left in office.

At stop after stop, from Slovenia to France, he is throwing out bold declarations about all that he thinks can be accomplished before he exits the world stage come January.

Outlining grand goals on the international front, Bush appears to have forgotten how little he has been able to accomplish at home. His rhetoric often has exceeded his reach.

When he won re-election in 2004, Bush declared that his victory, despite its small margin of just 2.4 percentage points, gave him political capital to achieve big goals.

The biggest plans of his second term - partially privatize Social Security, overhaul tax laws, extend expiring tax cuts, legalize millions of illegal immigrants - went nowhere.

That was the case even when Bush's fellow Republicans controlled Congress for the first two years of his second term.

Now, with the clock running down, he has a foreign-policy wish-list that is not small stuff, either.

It is heavy with problems that have defied solution: Middle East peace; a global free-trade agreement; an international emissions-reduction treaty; stopping Iran from its suspected plan to build a nuclear bomb; a long-term deal with Iraq to govern the large continuing U.S. presence there.

Bush is talking in Europe as if these things are will-dos, not might-dos.

Never mind that most of the world, including the Europeans whose help he dearly needs, have a history of disagreeing with Bush and are focused beyond him on the campaign for his successor.

"I don't think most of it is very realistic," said Reginald Dale, Europe program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Most of those problems remain very difficult and there's been no sign of a breakthrough, for example, on Middle East peace."

He said the global trade talks, to take another example, were in big trouble, made more difficult by a new farm bill that increases subsidies for U.S. farmers.

Despite the long odds and many doubters, Bush appears undeterred.

•"I firmly believe that with leadership and courage, a peace agreement is possible this year," Bush said in Paris. He was referring to his desire to forge a deal between Israelis and Palestinians, who are locked in one the world's longest-running and most intractable disputes.

•"I think we'll end up with a strategic agreement with Iraq," Bush said Wednesday in Germany.

•"I think we can actually get an agreement on global climate change during my presidency," Bush said at the opening of his trip in Slovenia. In his Paris speech, Bush confidently pronounced U.S.-Europe relations the "broadest and most vibrant" ever and said this "new era" of unity is already being used to more aggressively look outward to solve problems, and will only be more so in the future.

This best-ever characterization seemed a stretch, but there is no doubt that the election of new leadership in Europe and the passing of most Iraq war disagreements have produced much better cooperation on many more issues than earlier in Bush's presidency.

It must be understood that Bush takes the approach that public confidence from a president - even if not always privately held to the degree he suggests - can actually breed success.

Still, there is something about Europe and bold declarations that have bombed for Bush. As he concluded a trip to the continent almost exactly a year ago, Bush made a cowboy promise about the immigration overhaul that he badly wanted from Capitol Hill.

"See you at the bill signing," he said, somewhat testily, in Sofia, Bulgaria, last June, despite a derailing of the legislation in the Senate.

Just 17 days later, Bush, looking uncharacteristically morose, conceded the effort was dead.

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