A Post-Sept. 11 internal doc discusses the perils of Bush being a divider and not a uniter.

In the chaos following the September 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush's advisers scrambled to put together a stimulus package to keep the economy from stumbling. Within days of the attacks, long before the fallout could be assessed, Larry Lindsey and some Republican congressmen had come up with their stimulus plan: another deep tax reduction, this one an immediate cut of $150 billion. As the proposal was about to be launched in Congress, Mark Weinberger, the assistant secretary of the Treasury for tax policy, wrote a Sept. 17, 2001, memo to Secretary O'Neill, detailing his reservations about a tax cut plan that seemed to carry forward an ideological, anti-tax agenda. Weinberger objections were not so much to the substance of the bill, but how the White House was angling to ram it through Congress in the wake of a national tragedy. By pushing the stimulus too aggressively, he wrote, "we risk causing more national harm than good." Doing so, he felt, would endanger the sense of unity following the attacks. "I believe that any large tax cut proposal that is not a product of consultation with Democratic leadership will begin to unravel the fragile trust and bipartisanship we are currently experiencing," Weinberger wrote. After opposition from O'Neill, Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to acting before facts about post-Sept. 11 economic effects became clear, a cut of $48 billion was passed six months later. But an internal administration debate about whether the Sept. 11 attacks should be used to carry forward a partisan agenda had begun.