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(Courtesy of Eric Draper, The White House)
President George W. Bush holds the box after signing the Transportation Equity Act, with the help of Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., at the Caterpillar facility in Montgomery, Ill., Wed, Aug. 10, 2005. Also pictured from left are Congressman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., Congressman Bobby Rush, D-Ill., and Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill. A new book by The Examiner's Bill Sammon delves into the interactions between Obama and Bush after Obama won the seat in Congress.

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Filed under: Washington, D.C. , Bill Sammon , The Evangelical President – Excerpts and Reactions

Washington, D.C. (Map, News) - President Bush, for the first time, is predicting that Hillary Rodham Clinton will defeat Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries. "She's got a national presence and this is becoming a national primary," Bush said in an interview for the new book, The Evangelical President. "And therefore the person with the national presence, who has got the ability to raise enough money to sustain an effort in a multiplicity of sites, has got a good chance to be nominated."

But Bush is convinced the junior senator from New York will then be defeated in the general election by the Republican nominee.

"I think our candidate can beat her, but it's going to be a tough race," the president predicted in an Oval Office interview. "I will work to see to it that a Republican wins and therefore don't accept the premise that a Democrat will win. I truly think the Republicans will hold the White House."

Current and former Bush advisers sounded less certain.

"It's going to be a very close election," said Karl Rove, who until this month was the president's top political strategist. "We are at this very narrow divide in politics."

The election "could go either way," Vice President Dick Cheney told The Examiner in his West Wing office. "Right now, we're sort of in the area where we're pretty evenly balanced on both sides."

As for Obama, a senior White House official said the freshman senator from Illinois was "capable" of the intellectual rigor needed to win the presidency but instead relies too heavily on his easy charm.

"It's sort of like, 'that's all I need to get by,' which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "And a laziness, an intellectual laziness."

He cited an example from Obama's memoir, The Audacity of Hope, in which the senator complains that many "government programs don't work as advertised." Five days after the book was published last fall, Obama was asked to name some of those government programs by Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"And he can't give an example," the official said. "Look, if you wrote the book, you should have thought through what it was. But he's sitting there, fumbling around."

Obama did tell Russert that "we don't use electronic billing for Medicare and Medicaid providers." But the White House official said the vast majority of such transactions are indeed billed electronically.

In Audacity, Obama also recalls his first meeting with Bush, who invited newly elected senators to the White House in 2005 to hear about the president's second-term agenda. Bush took the opportunity to pull Obama aside and give him some friendly advice.

The president cautioned the newly minted senator that his enormous popularity would make him a target for rivals on both sides of the aisle. Obama thanked Bush for the advice and later recounted the episode in "Audacity." But in the same passage, Obama described Bush as a zealot whose demeanor was downright frightening when he laid out his agenda.

"Suddenly it felt as if somebody in a back room had flipped a switch," Obama wrote. "The president's eyes became fixed; his voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; his easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty. As I watched my mostly Republican Senate colleagues hang on his every word, I was reminded of the dangerous isolation that power can bring and appreciated the Founders' wisdom in designating a system to keep power in check."

When The Examiner quoted from this passage to Bush, the president seemed irritated to learn he had been taken to task by the senator he once counseled.

"I thought I was actually showing some kindness," Bush said. "And out of that he came with this belief?"

The president added with a bit of a scowl: "He doesn't know me very well."

Nor does Obama know his facts very well, according to the senior White House official. The official said in March, Obama was flummoxed by questions about his health care plan at a Democratic forum in Las Vegas. Two months later, the candidate drastically overstated the death toll from Kansas tornadoes.

"Ten thousand people died," Obama told an audience, when the actual death toll was 12.

"Over time, we'll see other things like that," the White House official said. "I'm going to be validated on Barack. He's not done the hard work necessary to prepare himself. And it's too late to do it."

Since that prediction, Obama has made a series of foreign policy gaffes that has allowed Clinton to cast herself as the candidate of experience.

But, paradoxically, she may have too much experience, according to White House aides. They suggested that voters would be weary of her by November 2008. After all, by then Clinton will have eight years under her belt as an unusually high-profile senator, plus another eight as an unusually high-profile first lady.

"This process is not going to serve her well," a senior White House official told The Examiner. "Think about it. She's going to be essentially saying: 'Elect me president after I've spent the last 16 years in your face. And you didn't like me much when I was there last. Give me eight more years so I can be a presence in your life for 24 years. And Bill will be back in.' So no, I think this is not a helpful process for her."

Some polls show that a majority of Americans already have a negative view of Clinton. The White House official predicted these high negatives will make it difficult for Clinton to win the general election against "a fresher, newer face" from the GOP with "slightly better numbers than that."

The official said there are signs that Clinton has already begun to wear out her welcome on the campaign trail. For example, she was accused of faking a Southern accent during a speech at a Baptist church in Selma, Ala., in March.

"She will do more things like that," the White House official said. "There will be more equivalents of the accent at the southern religious group - sort of those charmingly enduring moments that she continually provides."

bsammon@dcexaminer.com

About 'The Evangelical President'

The articles in this series are adapted from "The Evangelical President," a book appearing this week from Regnery Publishing. Author Bill Sammon, The Examiner's Senior White House correspondent, reports on how President Bush is evangelical not just about his deeply held Christian beliefs, but also about the liberation of Iraq and the broader war against terrorism. Sammon interviewed Bush, Vice President Cheney and their closest confidantes about the president's religion and its impact on public policy. Sammon is the author of four previous books on the presidency, all New York Times bestsellers.

Read other excerpts: Part 1 | Part 2 | | Part 3 | | Part 4 | Part 5

Read other stories by Bill Sammon.

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