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Bush Defends SCHIP Veto, His Relevancy

President Bush holds a press conference on Wednesday defending his decision to veto the SCHIP bill, and addresses his fight to remain relevant and relations between Russia and Iran.

On SCHIP, the president says he vetoed the popular children's health-care bill on principle. Bush says the State Children's Health Insurance Program bill was too big, urging the Democrat-controlled Congress to send him a bill proposing a much smaller expansion of the program.

Bush also took the opportunity to stress his relevancy going into the final year of his presidency.

Bush downplays recent photos of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Gonyea says. The pictures show the two leaders smiling during a meeting on Tuesday. Despite Bush's assertions that such friendly photos are common when leaders meet, the White House was not happy about the pictures.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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You're most likely to find NPR's Don Gonyea on the road, in some battleground state looking for voters to sit with him at the local lunch spot, the VFW or union hall, at a campaign rally, or at their kitchen tables to tell him what's on their minds. Through countless such conversations over the course of the year, he gets a ground-level view of American elections. Gonyea is NPR's National Political Correspondent, a position he has held since 2010. His reports can be heard on all NPR News programs and at NPR.org. To hear his sound-rich stories is akin to riding in the passenger seat of his rental car, traveling through Iowa or South Carolina or Michigan or wherever, right along with him.
Madeleine Brand
Madeleine Brand is the host of NPR’s newest and fastest-growing daily show, Day to Day. She conducts interviews with newsmakers (Iraqi politicians, US senators), entertainment figures (Bernardo Bertolluci, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ricky Gervais), and the everyday people affected by the news (an autoworker laid off at GM, a mother whose son was killed in Iraq).
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