After a dismal week, what's next for Bush?

updated 4:27 p.m. ET Oct. 29, 2005

WASHINGTON - George W. Bush hopes to find the path to recovery from a week of bad news that staggered his presidency in a nuts-and-bolts focus on governing.

The week that was: conservatives in the president’s own party hounded him into withdrawing Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination; the U.S. death toll in Iraq surpassed 2,000; and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff was indicted by a federal grand jury.

The aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, is accused of lying about his role in blowing the CIA cover of an Iraq war critic’s wife. The charges grew out of an investigation that was the product of the fierce debate two years ago over Bush’s contention that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Rove's fate still in question
Cheney and Libby were two of the administration’s leading lobbyists for the U.S.-led invasion, and the indictment could remind Americans increasingly unhappy with the war that the president’s primary justification for it turned out to be false. A Libby trial could see the famously secretive vice president called as a witness and asked to answer embarrassing questions.

Though top presidential adviser Karl Rove was spared for now, the future of one of Bush’s most powerful advisers also remained in jeopardy.

Already, Bush was struggling with his lowest-ever approval ratings, dragged down by high gas prices and a bungled response to Hurricane Katrina along with the public’s growing unrest over Iraq.

Miers’ nomination was only the most recent example of Republicans’ willingness to distance themselves from the president. Bush’s signature domestic priority for the year, a Social Security overhaul, was shelved after an aggressive push by the president yielded little support for action even among Republicans. Just this month, California’s GOP governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, skipped a Bush fundraiser in Los Angeles and Jerry Kilgore, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, stayed away from a presidential speech in Norfolk on Friday.

‘Conscience and conviction’
Some are calling for bold strokes — a broad new agenda, a purging of the president’s tired and perhaps overly insular and loyal staff — to jolt the White House past its troubles.

A former White House official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official still provides regular advice, said Bush needs “moves of conscience and conviction” that evoke the leadership abilities that helped get him re-elected.

Some Republicans inside and outside the White House were angered by Bush’s handling of Libby’s exit. They viewed it as a missed opportunity to restore badly needed credibility because the president neither condemned the aide’s actions nor acknowledged that White House spokesman Scott McClellan had said categorically in 2003 that Libby was not involved in the leak.

Bush and his aides considered the political benefits of such statements, according to a senior administration official, who spoke confidentially so as to not be seen discussing internal deliberations. But the idea was rejected out of concern the president’s words could influence the legal process. Bush instead merely called the charges “serious” and urged against a rush to judgment. He and Cheney both praised Libby for his public service.

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