My guess is that part of the picture is that Bush knew he had a good shot at getting this through. The political group that was most likely to oppose this—fiscal conservatives—was unlikely to choose this hill to die on. It was still fairly soon after America was attacked on 9/11, and I think that made Republicans less likely to go after their own party’s president. Of course, the optics—that actively opposing $3B a year for people with AIDS in Africa would look terrible when one was supporting the Iraq military action—may have helped too . . .
ETA: This is a good example of a downside of being too closely linked to one side of the political spectrum. If only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Bush could have gotten PEPFAR through Congress without investing too much political capital.
My guess is that part of the picture is that Bush knew he had a good shot at getting this through. The political group that was most likely to oppose this—fiscal conservatives—was unlikely to choose this hill to die on. It was still fairly soon after America was attacked on 9/11, and I think that made Republicans less likely to go after their own party’s president. Of course, the optics—that actively opposing $3B a year for people with AIDS in Africa would look terrible when one was supporting the Iraq military action—may have helped too . . .
ETA: This is a good example of a downside of being too closely linked to one side of the political spectrum. If only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Bush could have gotten PEPFAR through Congress without investing too much political capital.