United States President George Bush will attempt to relaunch his presidency in January but has ”lost some of his confidence” in his three closest advisers — Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Andrew Card — a US magazine reported on Sunday.
The Bush administration is attempting to recover after a devastating week in which the 2 000th American soldier died in Iraq, the president’s supreme court nominee was forced to withdraw, and a powerful White House official, Lewis Libby, resigned after being indicted for lying about an intelligence leak.
According to Time magazine: ”Top advisers have all but written off the rest of the year as a loss.”
The White House will instead attempt to salvage the presidency with a relaunch in January’s State of the Union address, with a new agenda and possibly some new staff, the report said.
”The problem is that the president doesn’t want to make changes,” an unnamed White House adviser told Time, ”but he’s lost some of his confidence in the three people he listens to the most.”
The indictment of Libby, the vice-president’s chief of staff, has provoked critical scrutiny of Cheney and his role in building the case for the Iraq war on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Rove, the president’s closest political adviser, is still under investigation in the same case — the leak of the identity of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, in a possible attempt to discredit her husband, a prominent critic of the WMD evidence. Rove is reported to have assured the president he was ”absolutely not” involved.
Card, the president’s chief of staff, is being blamed for two other disasters, the response to Hurricane Katrina and the unpopular nomination of the White House counsel, Harriet Miers, for the supreme court. Miers withdrew on Thursday.
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said on Sunday the White House should apologise for the Plame affair. ”This has gotten way out of hand,” he said, adding that Bush and Cheney ”should come clean with the public”. – Guardian Unlimited Â