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NEWS ANALYSIS Bush's goal: regaining the political initiative
International Herald Tribune -- WASHINGTON Since Sept. 11, President George W. Bush has confidently led the war on terrorism, abroad and at home, with strong public support and only the faintest criticism from congressional Democrats. Yet when he went on national television to urge the creation of a department of homeland security, Bush was struggling to regain the initiative. That is because over the last month the debate on terrorism has shifted. By all evidence, Bush retains the confidence of an overwhelming majority of Americans, but his administration is no longer immune to questions or criticism about what happened before Sept. 11 and whether everything is now being done to make the United States safer. In recent weeks, Bush has faced the first sustained scrutiny since those terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. He and his aides have watched the embarrassing spectacle of bureaucratic infighting between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency play out on the front pages of major newspapers. And he has felt growing pressure from Congress to do what his administration seemingly had been resisting, which was to elevate homeland security to cabinet status. As a result, there are signs of declining public confidence in the government's ability to combat terrorism. Thursday night's prime-time speech was designed to respond to those calls - and to show that Bush and his closest advisers have absorbed the lessons the country is just now learning about what went wrong before Sept. 11.

posted by West 10:15 AM