NYT/AP: Bush Can't Hide From Mounting Woes
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 14, 2007
MERIDA, Mexico (AP) -- President Bush's trip to sunny Latin America was no day at the beach. He was buffeted by complaints about immigration laws, ethanol tariffs, the Iraq war and accusations that the United States was ignoring its southern neighbors.
And back home, the problems continued to pile up.
The revelation of close White House involvement in the firing of eight federal prosecutors sent White House aides into full damage control mode on Tuesday -- from afar.
Instead of following their scripted plan of celebrating a shoring up of diplomatic ties with Mexico, White House aides found themselves backing and filling on why the prosecutors were axed.
This came on top of revelations of shoddy outpatient care at Walter Reed Medical Center, an affair that has resulted in top-level Army resignations; the conviction on perjury and obstruction charges of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby, and the FBI's acknowledgment that it broke the law to ferret out personal information about Americans....
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Fred Greenstein, professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, offered one explanation for why Bush was finding trouble at every turn: ''When you're down, you're a target. It's the blood-in-the-water phenomena. The story becomes the shortcomings of the administration. I know that's happened in other presidencies. Things that might have been passed off suddenly become very important.''
But the larger, overarching context is the war in Iraq and public discontent with it, Greenstein said. So missteps in other areas ''look like the same story: This is a guy who's not up to the job. The administration has managed to be globally unpopular. Iraq is the great connecting tissue that does pull all the dots together.''...
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Bush-No-Escape.html