Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.wpost From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: The Two Bush AdministrationsBy Peter Milius Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 05:02:45 EST Message-ID: <27.1992Nov16.050246@AmeriCast.com> The Two Bush AdministrationsBy Peter Milius It's true that George Bush was denied a second term, but there have already been two distinct Bush administrations. The memory of the first has been obscured by the record of the second, but in 1989-90 the new Republican president and Democratic 101st Congress produced an impressive array of compromise and achieve- ment. In part they were simply catching up in areas that the Reagan administration had neglected. The list of their accom- plishments nonetheless gives the lie to those who see divided government as a formula for gridlock; you didn't hear the word then. The two sides greatly increased federal aid to the working poor (by releasing the frozen minimum wage and sharply increasing in the earned-income tax credit that supplements the wages of the working poor with children); approved a new federal child-care program; adopted long overdue strengthening amendments to the Clean Air Act; extended full civil rights protection to the dis- abled; approved an underappreciated new plan for controlling phy- sicians' fees; and in 1990, a bare few weeks before the election, defied conventional wisdom by approving a budget agreement that contained both tax increases and what have turned out to be en- forceable spending restraints. Not bad, but in Bush II - the last two years - the domestic leg- islative switches went from On to Off. Aside from a few exten- sions of major aid programs - highway, higher education, housing, the sorts of things that even warring presidents and congresses can do in their sleep - the record has been relatively barren. The barrenness was in turn a factor in the election; the public got the sense, with cause, that the government had ceased to function. The questions now for the defeated Republicans, but not just the Republicans, are what happened, and what are the lessons to be drawn. The administration, not surprisingly, has offered a series of explanations that put the blame elsewhere, on factors largely beyond its control. Thus the president is said on the one hand to have been the victim of his own supposed strength in the field of foreign affairs. Operation Desert Storm consumed and distracted him even as it boosted his popularity. The collapse of the Soviet Union likewise is viewed as having cost him a step; he gained a victory but lost a threat and an issue. The chessboard was no longer the one with which he was familiar. Bush is said as well to have been a victim of bad luck in the form of a renascent business cycle and the recession, neither the advent nor the stubbornness of which his advisers say could have been foreseen. But recessions don't occur in vacuums; in part they are produced by policy, and policy can also ameliorate them. To say that he was bitten by recession is a little like saying that he was bitten by reality. The third explanation is gridlockian, which is to say that, as the election approached, Bush became the victim of an obdurate and increasingly partisan Democratic Congress. There is also a tactical school that holds, as often happens in losing efforts, that the problem wasn't the product being sold but the method of selling it - that the abstraction called "the campaign" was at fault and the outcome would have been different if only the "mes- sage" had been earlier refined, or the convention had been better staged, or the president had "gone negative" earlier or had not gone negative as much, and so on and on and on; you've heard it all. There's a bit of the truth in all these circumstantial explana- tions, but what's interesting about them is not so much"The eclectic first Bush administration got things done; the reactive second had no real agenda." what they reveal as what they leave out, which is any real mention of the president's program. The fact is that after Bush I, he didn't have one, not one that amounted to much anyway. It wasn't exactly the case that he was out of ideas, but he had exhausted his agenda. His then-chief of staff John Sununu said it famously in 1991: As far as the ad- ministration was concerned, Congress could simply pass the annual appropriations bills and go home; the administration had nothing else for it to do. Partly this was a matter of ideological preference, partly a political miscalculation. The administration feared, among other things, that any limited initiative it proposed would be taken by an expansive Congress to a place where it didn't want to go, that the president would then have to resist and would end up looking like the heavy in an un- dertaking that he himself had begun; no profit there. Early in the 102nd Congress there was talk of overhauling the Clean Water Act in somewhat the way that the Clean Air Act had been overhauled on a larger scale in the Congress before. It would have been a constructive step, and a useful accomplishment for Bush to be able to cite in the campaign, but the administration chose in part for defensive reasons to let the opportunity pass - and there are many other such examples. It's true that in contemplating a program Bush was as hampered as his successor will also be by the combination of an outsize defi- cit in a weak economy - doubly so in Bush's case since it was awkward for him to denounce a deficit that he and his predecessor helped to create. But he had more maneuvering room than he either sensed or chose to use. The right approach to recession may indeed have been (and still may be) steady-as-you-go, as his advisers told him. That didn't preclude an effort to ameliorate the recession's harsher effects - but it took the Democrats to force him to agree to extension of unemployment benefits to those who had exhausted their basic coverage. It was not until after the nominating conventions this year and under pressure from his Democratic opponent that he proposed a serious work force program - job retraining, defense reconversion - and then declined to say how he would pay for it. He chose not to use his enormous popularity after Desert Storm to mount a needed further attack on the deficit, taking refuge in- stead in elixirs and abstractions - a call for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution (to take effect only after he was safely out of office), a proposal for a generalized cap on of- fending entitlements without saying which entitlements. He was equally late and lite on the subject of health care reform, wait- ing until the spring of his fourth year in office to propose even a limited program under (again) political pressure while declin- ing (again) to say how he would pay for it. The pallid urban aid program he proposed after the Los Angeles riots consisted mostly of retreads. The unaffordable further tax cuts he outlined in his acceptance speech at the convention were last-minute add-ons - and they weren't paid for, either. The debate within the Republican Party since the election (as be- fore) has been partly ideological. The president is said by part of the party to have lost because he abandoned conservative prin- ciples variously defined (but mainly defined as: Keep taxes low, and let the rest of government tag along as best it can). The rest of the party suggests that he lost because he didn't dis- tance himself enough from certain aspects of conservative doc- trine. The conservatives say that the party can only re-energize itself and win again if it turns right; the moderates want it to move to the middle. But George Bush's problem was simpler than that. It was not that he couldn't choose between right and center; he had no program that he seemed much to care about from either right or center. The eclectic first Bush administration got things done; the reac- tive second had no real agenda, moderate or conservative, except reelection and living happily ever after. And people understood that.