In spite of widespread calls by bloggers and some Republican members of Congress for the forced resignation of United Nations general secretary Kofi Annan, President Bush, through outgoing UN Ambassador John Danforth, has emphatically backed Annan's continuing on the job for the duration of his term.
It's interesting to speculate about what this means.
One possibility is that the President, anxious to mend fences with a world community significantly at odds with him over the war in Iraq, has decided that this was a battle he'd rather not fight. Many other countries had already expressed, if not confidence in Annan, at least a willingness to see how investigations into his handling of the Oil for Peace program and other matters until making judgments about his future.
This is also the second time in a matter of days that the President has gone against the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The other instance was his ultimately strenuous support for the Intelligence Reform bill. Without Mr. Bush's support for that legislation, it likely would not have passed this session of Congress.
The President may be gambling that in Congress in the coming session, he will need the support of moderate Republicans and Democrats to get some of the legislation he wants through the Congress, while feeling that most of the more conservative members of his party will have no viable alternative but to support him. If this is the case, it's the mirror image of Bill Clinton's strategy as, confident that Democrats in Congress would back him in spite of preferring more liberal legislation, he reached out to moderate Republicans.
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