President Says He’ll Continue to Forge Ahead With Agenda

WASHINGTON —  Coming off a string of unexpected setbacks at the hands of Democrats and Republican moderates in Congress, President Bush insisted Tuesday that he would be persistent in pressing his agenda.

Bush is facing challenges in Congress on his efforts to overhaul Social Security, to expand the search for oil and other energy sources, and to win confirmation of conservative judges and a United Nations ambassador. But at a Rose Garden news conference, he turned aside questions on whether his momentum was slowing and his clout was weakening.

“It’s like water cutting through a rock,” Bush said in describing his efforts at one point, referring to his campaign to allow younger workers to divert a portion of some of their Social Security taxes into individual investment accounts. “It’s just a matter of time. We’re just going to keep working and working and working, reminding the American people that we have a serious problem and a great opportunity to act, not as politicians, but as statesmen and -women to solve a problem.”

News conferences have become a monthly feature of Bush’s second term, an effort that administration strategists hope will help him to continue to set the agenda. The president’s words Tuesday, however, reflected the stark contrast between his declaration after the November election that he had won a mandate to spend “political capital” and the realities that now exist, less than six months into his final four years in office.

Moves in Congress last week illustrated his challenges, as Senate Democrats surprised the White House by securing enough votes to temporarily block approval of John R. Bolton as U.N. ambassador. Senate moderates struck a surprise compromise on judges that did not give Bush the guarantee he wanted of an up-or-down vote on all of his judicial nominees, and the House voted to loosen restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, defying a veto threat from the president.

In a flurry of recent surveys, Bush’s approval ratings have been among the lowest of his presidency -- below 50% in nearly every case. In one poll, conducted by Gallup May 20 to 22 for CNN and USA Today, a majority of those surveyed disapproved of Bush’s handling of the economy, the Iraq war, Social Security and foreign affairs. Only on handling terrorism did Bush win approval from more than half of respondents.

Bush seemed to concede Tuesday that victory on his top priorities would not come as swiftly as did some of his legislative wins in his first term, such as his tax cuts and the “No Child Left Behind” education law.

“Things just don’t happen overnight,” he said. “It takes a while. And one thing is for certain: It takes a president willing to push people to do hard things. Because, keep in mind, we haven’t had an energy strategy in this country for over a decade. And the Social Security issue hasn’t been on the table since 1983 -- I mean, seriously on the table.”

“And I’m optimistic,” he added, “when it’s all said and done, that we will have come together and have helped solve some of these significant problems.”

In the 51-minute news conference, Bush responded to questions on domestic and foreign policy.

He dismissed as “absurd” a report issued last week by Amnesty International, a human rights group, that said the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was “the gulag of our time.” The report urged Bush to shut down the camp because of alleged mistreatment of detainees being held as part of the war against terrorism.

“It’s an absurd allegation,” Bush said of the Amnesty report, echoing earlier comments by Vice President Dick Cheney. “The United States is a country that is -- promotes freedom around the world. When there’s accusations made about certain actions by our people, they’re fully investigated in a transparent way.”

Bush said he believed that the organization had wrongly relied on the allegations of people being detained who “hate America, people that had been trained in some cases to disassemble -- that means not tell the truth.” He appeared to have intended to use the word “dissemble.”

Responding to Bush’s remarks, William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement: “What is ‘absurd’ and indeed outrageous is the Bush administration’s failure to undertake a full independent investigation, and that completed reports into human rights violations in these prisons remain classified and unseen.”

On Iraq, Bush said insurgents had stepped up a campaign of violence after suffering a setback with the Jan. 30 national election, but that Iraq’s new government was “going to be plenty capable” of dealing with the attacks. He cited the interim government’s recent operation using 40,000 Iraqi security forces to root out militants in Baghdad as an indicator of its willingness to shoulder greater responsibility for its own security.

Despite the lack of progress in efforts to negotiate with North Korea over the future of its nuclear program, Bush rejected the idea of military action against Pyongyang. He said that “while all options are on the table, we’ve got a ways to go to solve this diplomatically.”

But it was Bush’s ability to press his domestic agenda -- and the backdrop of his rocky few weeks with the Republican-led Congress -- that hovered over Tuesday’s Rose Garden event.

That rocky relationship now has Bush poised to issue, potentially, the first two vetoes of his presidency: one of the stem cell measure that passed the House last week and the other of a highway bill that spends far more than the White House has proposed.

Bush repeated his promise to veto the stem cell legislation, which would expand the pool of embryonic stem cells that can be used in federally funded experiments. But the president, who argues that such research is morally wrong because embryos are destroyed in the process, sidestepped a question about what should be done with embryos that are created at fertility clinics but never used.

“I understand the folks that are deeply concerned for their -- a child who might have juvenile diabetes,” Bush said, acknowledging the hopes of people who believe that expanded embryonic stem cell research might yield new treatments for disease. “I know that the moms and dads across the country are in agony about the fate of their child. And my message to them is, is that there is research going on and hopefully we’ll find the cure. But at the same time, it’s important in the society to balance ethics and science.”

On the question of judges, Bush heralded last week’s Senate approval of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla R. Owen as the newest member of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. But he poked fun at the recent agreement among Senate centrists that seemed to preserve the filibuster as a tool for Democrats to block his judicial nominees in “extraordinary circumstances.”

“I guess it was vague enough for people to interpret the agreement the way they want to interpret it,” he said. “I don’t know what that means.”

With a likely Supreme Court opening in the near future -- Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has cancer and is widely expected to step down this year -- Bush told reporters that he was “obviously going to spend a lot of time reviewing the records of a variety of people and looking at their opinions and their character.”

He pledged to consult with senators about the matter. Some senators, including Republicans, have urged Bush to consult more closely with them before making judicial appointments. But Bush said Tuesday that he had done so.

Times staff writer Tyler Marshall contributed to this report.