WASHINGTON: Weakened by election losses and hemmed in by time, President George W. Bush is using what he has left: a bully pulpit, a veto threat and a sudden interest in working with Democrats.

With two years left in his presidency, Bush likes to talk about a sprint to the finish. One goal of that race is to remain relevant, and he tried to demonstrate on Wednesday that no one should count him out.

“The Congress has changed. Our obligations to the country haven’t changed,” Bush said in the Rose Garden at the rear of the White House with his Cabinet at his back. On the eve of a new Democratic Congress, Bush’s intended image for the cameras was clear: My team is ready to act.

He challenged lawmakers to control spending, targeting their pet projects as never before. Then he promoted other familiar priorities: making tax cuts permanent, defeating terrorists, reforming governmental behemoths such as the Social Security pension programme.

No slowdown here.

To assert his voice, Bush went so far as to spell out an entire agenda for Congress.

It came on Wednesday, a day before Democrats assume power in Congress, in the form of an op-ed column in The Wall Street Journal, the nation’s voice of economic conservatism. The headline: “What the Congress can do for America.”

“He wants to regain the initiative and put them on the defensive,” said Norman Ornstein, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute who specialises in the presidency and Congress.

“He wants to create a sense in the country that he still has a substantial role to play in setting priorities and that he’s on his toes moving forward, not on his heels moving back.”

The president has a lot of forces working against him.

For the first time in 12 years, Democrats control both chambers in Congress. The war in Iraq marches toward its fourth anniversary as Bush seeks a fresh solution. Also, history shows a loss of relevance by lame-duck presidents-- so called because presidents are restricted to two terms and, like a lame duck, can no longer fly.

“There’s a reason why you don’t read any books about the last two years of a two-term president,” said Paul Light, a public policy professor and presidential historian at New York University. “The last years are focused almost entirely on the upcoming election. By the last year, he’s almost completely irrelevant. It’s gloomy, but it’s realistic.”

Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Dwight D. Eisenhower all faced the same problem, Light said. But at least they had residual influence because their vice presidents wanted the top job, which is not the case this time. Eisenhower was the first president elected after the Constitution was amended to bar third terms.

Bush has taken the defeat in the last election and reframed it.

Now he sees it as a chance to get things done with Democrats.

“We now have the opportunity to build a bipartisan consensus to fight and win the war,” Bush said. Democrats say they welcome his new approach, then point out there was nothing stopping him before.

“We certainly want to work with the president,” said Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the Senate Democrats’ campaign chief. “We hope that when the president says compromise, it means more than do it my way, which is what he’s meant in the past.”

The comment underscores the Washington theme these days-- healthy doses of both hope and skepticism.

Republican Bush and Democratic leaders see genuine opportunities to work together on issues people care about: the minimum wage, energy alternatives, education, immigration and health care. If they do, both sides can benefit.

Bush also has warned Democrats not to send him bills to sign into law that amount to political statements, or they will end in stalemate. Bush used his veto power only once, on stem cell research, when Republicans ran Congress.

Accomplishing his agenda will require Bush to give up some ground on major issues, Ornstein said.—AP

SACRAMENTO (California): Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger will propose that all Californian children, including those in the state illegally, be guaranteed medical insurance as part of the healthcare overhaul he intends to unveil next week, according to officials familiar with the plan.

If enacted by the Legislature, his proposal would affect about 763,000 children who now lack insurance. Although the administration has not revealed details of how it would pay for such a programme, officials estimate that extending insurance to all children could cost the state as much as $400 million a year.

That would be a small piece of Schwarzenegger’s stated goal: to ensure medical coverage for all of the 6.5 million Californians who now have none. Experts say that could cost upward of $10 billion a year.

If successful, the governor’s effort to cover all children would be a substantial political feat. Only a few states guarantee coverage for all those under 18. Schwarzenegger himself vetoed a measure to cover all children in 2005, complaining that lawmakers offered no way to pay for it.

California’s Republican legislators, who blocked a more modest effort to extend healthcare coverage last year, are sure to rebel against a plan that includes children of illegal immigrants.

Schwarzenegger is scheduled to announce his full health plan on Monday. His office is still finalising many parts of that package, but aides have made clear that it will be an ambitious effort to restrain healthcare costs and reduce the state’s uninsured population.

All sectors of the healthcare industry, including hospitals, insurers, doctors, patients, businesses and government, would pay some of the costs under Schwarzenegger’s plan. People familiar with the proposal say that it includes new requirements for businesses to cover employees, though the details were unclear. The more cost shouldered by employers and workers, the less the state would have to spend.

“There is no final health plan,” said Adam Mendelsohn, Schwarzenegger’s communications director.

“We believe Californians do not want to reward illegal behaviour,” said Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines of Clovis. “There are so many here (legally) who are hurting and trying to make ends meet, we’ve got to focus on them first.” —Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service

MADRID: Armed Basque separatist group ETA intended Saturday’s bombing at Madrid airport to show the Spanish government their frustration at a sluggish peace process -- but it went wrong after at least one man died, analysts say.

“ETA surely did not want to kill,” Basque journalist Gorka Landaburu, director of the Cambio 16 weekly magazine, told AFP, noting the three warnings prior to the blast at the airport carpark.

“The attack was in the context of the group’s standoff with the government and saw (ETA) get its fingers burned -- but we are long way from being able to affirm that ETA is going to start killing again as in the past. That is for it to say,” Landaburu said.

Senior editor of the regional news agency Vasco Press, Florencio Dominguez, said that “ETA will surely present it as a one-off attack and not the start of a campaign” of violence.

For Dominguez, ETA probably considered the attack as a response to the arrests of members of its logistical apparatus in France in December.

The group has also voiced anger with the government, accusing it of failing to keep to certain commitments, including a truce on police and judicial pressure being brought to bear on pro-Basque independence circles.

Underpinning the thesis that the blast was not supposed to break off the whole peace process, is the fact that ETA has not issued a statement confirming it has consciously shelved the ceasefire it declared in March last year. Previous ceasefires in 1989 and 1999 both ran into the sand as ETA resumed killing in its campaign to win an independent Basque state covering the northern Spanish region and parts of south-western France.

ETA founder member Iulen de Madariaga, now a member of the non-violent Aralar pro-independence group, who says he largely blames “a lack of gestures on Zapatero’s part” for the return to violence, says he thinks the attack was “a tough signal which went beyond the limit”.

But he added he did not see signs of ETA splintering into factions, as previously happened with the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland.

According to El Pais newspaper ETA’s main strategist Josu Ternera, an architect of the peace process, had his mandate restricted in the absence of the face-to-face dialogue the government had said would start during the summer.

“Ternera would surely not have elected to carry out an attack himself,” Landaburu said. “One should not forget that ETA is a monolith: decisions taken by the majority are always respected.” Blaming what he termed Zapatero’s “disastrous management,” De Madariaga accused the prime minister of having “marshalled the process on his own like a sheriff” and not producing any gestures to keep ETA on the non-violent path.

“He wanted to gain time to win the elections” scheduled for 2008, he said. “But if ETA truly shows one day it intends to end the violence it will be necessary to pick up negotiations. —AFP