WASHINGTON - US President George W Bush, who has
made it his mission to avoid his father's political
mistakes, appears poised to repeat them in spite of
himself.
His surprisingly defensive State of the
Union Address on Tuesday, which was long on
determination and defiance but exceedingly short on
program detail and new initiatives, underlined how
firmly his course has been set and how little he can or
is willing to do to change it.
Indeed, by
announcing that the next four years will be very much
like the last three, Bush, like his father George H W
Bush before him (president from 1989-93), has become a
fixed target for next November's elections, a point
brought home by an uncharacteristically aggressive
Democratic Party response after the president finished
his speech.
Bush's father, who loved
international diplomacy above all, failed to understand
that most voters in 1992 were more concerned about job
losses caused by corporate downsizing and overseas
competition. He missed the wisdom of his presidential
successor Bill Clinton's political adviser, James
Carville, who observed succinctly, "It's the economy,
stupid."
Bush Sr's defeat that year by Clinton
was also made easier by his self-confessed lack of "the
vision thing" - something that would offer his fellow
citizens a sense of national purpose, beyond safely
"managing" world affairs and promoting volunteering in
community charities.
In addressing these
deficiencies, the elder Bush was hobbled not only by his
own preppy aloofness - a problem the younger Bush does
not suffer - but also by the fact that the yawning
fiscal deficits of the Ronald Reagan era had emptied the
Treasury. To the fury of his Republican Party's
increasingly powerful right wing, Bush Sr was forced to
raise taxes and had nothing new to offer because the
cupboard was bare.
Unlike his father, the
younger Bush inherited a huge surplus that, as a result
of tax cuts and the enormous increase in defense and
other spending related to the "war on terror", has been
transformed once again into a deficit, a shortfall that
now seriously threatens the country's fiscal health. So
depleted are the nation's coffers that "it is actually a
cruel hoax to pretend that Washington can afford to do
anything new", noted the New York Times on Wednesday.
Thus, like his father, Bush has no choice but to run on
his record.
"Extraordinarily backward-looking,"
noted Andrew Sullivan, a conservative commentator for
The New Republic weekly about the lack of new proposals
in Bush's speech.
"It struck me as a speech that
comes out of a political cocoon, from a president who
doesn't grasp that he is in fact politically vulnerable,
and who intends to run not on what he plans for the
future but on what he has done in the past," wrote
Sullivan, who praised the foreign-policy sections of the
address. "That's a high-risk strategy."
Bush's
speech was also notable for its extraordinary stress on
foreign policy, which took up the entire first half and
constituted mainly a defense of his "war on terror" and
the US-led attack on Iraq. The president even insisted,
despite the total lack of evidence to date, that former
Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's "programs" for weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) constituted a "serious and
mounting threat to our country".
Bush said his
aggressive pursuit of war against Iraq was responsible
for Libya's recent decision to dismantle its own WMD
programs voluntarily and for ongoing, although
uncertain, negotiations involving North Korea and Iran.
"America is committed to keeping the world's most
dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world's most
dangerous regimes," he declared.
Although he
cited the contribution by 34 other countries of troops
to the US-led occupation in Iraq as evidence that
Washington had not isolated itself internationally as
Democrats have charged, his biggest applause line was
red meat for unilateralists: "America will never seek a
permission slip to defend the security of our people."
Bush also insisted that the world was safer as a
result of US actions, but also warned against
complacency and called for extension of the
controversial USA Patriot (Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to
Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act, which is opposed
by many libertarians in his own party. Citing terrorist
attacks from Casablanca to Jakarta, he noted that "the
terrorists continue to plot against America and the
civilized world".
The president ended the
foreign-policy section of the speech with the kind of
"vision" statement - "America is a nation with a mission
... Our aim is a democratic peace" - that his father
failed to articulate, although his only concrete new
proposal was to double funding - to US$70 million - to
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a small
agency that provides money and expertise to
civil-society and business groups abroad.
On
domestic issues, Bush asked to enshrine tax cuts made in
2002; called for enactment of his guest-worker program
for otherwise illegal immigrants; proposed private
savings accounts for Social Security; offered modest
packages for education; and suggested he might support a
constitutional amendment outlawing homosexual marriages.
The latter move brought praise from leaders of
his core constituency, the Christian Right, but is also
certain to fuel the anger of many Republican
libertarians, who believe that Bush has unduly increased
the power of government to police private activity.
Remarkably, according to the Los Angeles Times, the
president appears to be narrowing, rather than
expanding, his base as the campaign gets under way.
But the speech was also notable for what it
omitted. Bush made no mention, for example, of the
ambitious moon and Mars exploration program he
introduced with much fanfare one week ago, a proposal
that clearly bombed with a public that is increasingly
anxious about the mounting deficit. He also failed to
address the environment, global AIDS, and, despite the
focus on Iraq and the "war on terrorism", the roiling
Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the elusive leader of
the al-Qaeda terrorist group, Osama bin Laden.
Indeed, what modest new programs he cited
prompted hand-wringing even among some of his strongest
supporters. Victor Davis Hanson, a prominent
neo-conservative and frequent dinner guest of Vice
President Dick Cheney, for example, worried that Bush's
existing projects for tax cuts, war, Middle East
reconstruction and drug entitlements "do not add up, but
result in rates of deficit spending that are
unsustainable".
That assessment is increasingly
shared by Republican lawmakers, who have expressed
growing anxiety about the huge costs being incurred in
Iraq, and a growing consensus that a very expensive but
overstretched army needs to be expanded by at least two
divisions. The latter would boost annual defense
spending past $500 billion, at a time when 8 million
Americans are without jobs.
In that connection,
the New Republic's Sullivan said he was "amazed [at
Bush's] lack of any recognition that job growth is
lagging" behind economic growth.
"There was no
statement of concern for those struggling in the
economy, no rhetoric of empathy. That surprised me. It
leaves a huge opening for the Democrats, who will argue
that the president is out of touch."
Just like
Bush Sr.
(Inter Press Service)
Jan 23, 2004
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Busted
treasury drains 
