Just three summers ago, George W. Bush took the stage at the Republican
National Convention in Philadelphia and made America a solemn promise.
As president, he said, he would change the tone in Washington and change
the nature of the Republican Party. Of Bush's many failures in office,
breaking that promise is the most telling. His acceptance speech turned
out to be the archetype for his presidency: a picture-perfect and exquisitely
choreographed lie.
The best measure of any president is neither his poll ratings nor the
latest closing of the Dow. Anyone who asks America for a second term in
the Oval Office should be judged by his promises. Has George W. Bush been
the kind of president he promised to be?
Let's examine the record, using Bush's own words in Philadelphia.
He promised to "usher in an era of responsibility," but instead
has presided over an era of fiscal and corporate irresponsibility.
He promised everyone "an equal claim on this country's promise,"
but instead has waged the most sustained assault on progressive taxation
ever.
He promised to "change the tone in Washington," but instead
has taken partisanship to new heights.
He promised "to confront problems, not pass them on to others,"
but instead has passed a greater financial burden onto future generations
than has any administration in history.
He promised a new Republican Party based on "compassionate conservatism,"
but instead has spurred his party to historic depths of corporate cronyism.
He promised "to leave this nation greater than we found it,"
but instead is well on his way to placing America in greater peril, with
more sworn enemies and fewer friends, than any time since the darkest
moments of the Cold War.
He promised to "uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which
I have been elected," but instead time after time has been willing
to say one thing and do another.
Twelve years ago, The New Democrat published a cover story on
"the collapse of Bushism" -- the realization that after three
years of the first Bush presidency the conservative movement had given
up trying to solve the problems -- crime, welfare, government spending -- on
which its very existence was predicated. Now the second Bush presidency
is a darker, more ominous story. The new conservatism is radical enough
to reverse America's two-century-long march toward greater opportunity
for the broad middle class, and brazen enough to seek the middle class's
support for it. This time, the collapse of Bushism is the moral implosion
of a presidency that promised to be so much more than it has been, and
is determined to make the promise of America so much less than the American
people deserve it to be.
When one measures the president against his Philadelphia acceptance speech,
one finds myriad ways in which he has turned out not to be the different
kind of Republican he promised to be. Bush will be vulnerable to a Democrat
willing to take back the vital center precisely because the contents of
his presidency are so glaringly at odds with the packaging.
But first we must review an even greater vulnerability: This administration's
values have turned out to be as hollow as its promises. Throughout our
history as a nation, the one value that has bound our fortunes together
has been the relentless expansion of opportunity -- with each passing
year, the chance for more Americans to make the most of their God-given
potential. The basic bargain of America has been that anyone willing to
work hard deserves the chance to get ahead. The engine of our economy
has been a booming middle class.
As president, George W. Bush has embraced a different set of values.
He's not interested in expanding the middle class: On his watch, the middle
class is paying a greater share of the tax burden even as its incomes
have stopped going up. President Bush rejects the fundamental American
value that hard work is the way to get ahead. He has tolerated a business
culture that lets those at the top help themselves at the expense of those
who do the work and play by the rules. And he has pursued an economic
doctrine that says wealth matters most and work matters least. The ultimate
goal of Bushism is an America where the only people left paying taxes
are the ones who do the work.
That is not the American way. As Andrew Jackson said, we are a nation
of "equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none."
We believe in rewarding work and responsibility, not wealth and influence.
In time, this perversion of our values may prove to be the soft underbelly
of the Bush leviathan. We will never be as strong as we must be in the
world if our most cherished values of work, opportunity, and responsibility
are under siege here at home.
The Job Killer. In his Philadelphia speech, Bush promised to make
"prosperity a tool in our hands," and charged that the Clinton-Gore
administration had "coasted through prosperity." He said "a
prosperous nation is ready to renew its purpose and unite behind great
goals." He said he would "extend the promise of prosperity to
every forgotten corner of this country."
Now the prosperity is gone, and no one feels it more than those who work
for a living. Since Bush took office, 3.1 million private sector workers
have lost their jobs (by comparison, the Clinton-Gore administration added
nearly 21 million private sector jobs over eight years). At this point,
President Bush is on track to become the first president since Herbert
Hoover to produce a net job loss in his first term of office, and the
first president since Eisenhower to produce a net job loss over any term
of office.
The unemployment rate has risen from 4.2 percent in February 2001, to
6.4 percent in May 2003. In addition to the 9.4 million officially unemployed
Americans, 4.6 million are working part-time because they can't find full-time
work, and another 4.5 million have given up looking for work.
The $10 Trillion Hole in the Budget. In his Philadelphia speech, Bush
said the federal budget surplus was "the people's money." He
said it shouldn't be spent and suggested it should be used to "strengthen
Social Security and Medicare" or be liquidated through tax cuts.
Bush broke the Social Security and Medicare promises in record time,
and he got rid of the surplus even faster.
When Bush took office, the 10-year budget of the United States forecast
a surplus of $5.6 trillion dollars. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan
Greenspan even worried publicly that the federal government might retire
the national debt too fast. That's one problem the president has decisively
solved.
After two big sets of tax cuts, and a variety of spending increases,
the 10-year budget now projects deficits of about $4.5 trillion. That's
an $10 trillion deterioration of the country's fiscal condition -- an
amount nearly equal to the nation's gross domestic product. The deficit
this year is expected to hit $450 billion.
Because we are now adding to, not subtracting from, the national debt,
the Bush administration is also violating its promises to strengthen Social
Security and Medicare. Indeed, in Philadelphia, Bush said of the Clinton-Gore
record on retirement security for seniors: "This administration,
during eight years of increasing need, did nothing. They had their moment.
They have not led. We will."
But look at the record. When President Bush took office, the budget set
aside $2.5 trillion in surpluses to pay down the nation's debts and strengthen
Social Security. Instead, by 2003, more than $1 trillion in Social Security
surpluses have been raided to pay for the president's tax cuts, even though
the baby boom generation will begin to retire this decade, creating a
Social Security and Medicare solvency crisis. As noted above, the president
has rammed through tax cuts that will force trillions of dollars of new
public borrowing.
In his Philadelphia speech, Bush said: "Greatness is found when
American character and American courage overcome American challenges."
Prior to then, President Clinton and members of Congress from both parties
had found the character and courage to overcome the challenge of chronic
budget deficits and put the country on the road first to a balanced budget
then to a steady retirement of the national debt. It took more than 30
years for the federal government to get back into the black. Now it has
taken fewer than 30 months for the Bush administration to put Uncle Sam
deeper in the red than at any time since World War II. That's leadership,
all right-in the wrong direction.
A Shift in the Tax Burden from the Wealthy to the Middle Class.
In his Philadelphia speech, Bush promised: "We will reduce tax rates
for everyone, in every bracket. On principle, those in the greatest need
should receive the greatest help." But the president has completely
violated the pledge to make the size of tax cuts proportional to need.
Recall that the tax code Bush inherited was in place during the boom
years of the 1990s when the country created a vast number of new millionaires,
the first mass upper-middle-class in human history, and big increases
in after-tax income at every level, along with giant budget surpluses
and improvements in every major social indicator -- crime, teen pregnancy,
welfare dependency, home ownership, and others. What was wrong with this
picture?
According to candidate Bush, the problem was excess federal income. And
while there is nothing wrong with tax cuts targeted to achieve social
or economic aims, it seems the only thing the Bush tax cuts would boost
is the after-tax income of the wealthiest Americans. The Bush formula
turns fairness upside down and offers middle-class taxpayers crumbs or
nothing at all. "Conservatives and liberals alike agree that Bush's
tax policies have shifted more of the tax burden to the middle class,"
wrote The Washington Post.
There is no dispute that taxes on the richest Americans will fall the
most over the next decade.
The latest Bush tax cut left out 36 percent of American families. Despite
a public relations campaign by the administration to claim cuts in taxes
on corporate dividends mainly helped "granny," more than one-half
of seniors were left out entirely. More than one-half of U.S. families
received less than $100 in benefits. And the top 1 percent of households
got more benefits than the bottom 84 percent.
Meanwhile, the president's fiscal policies have contributed to what the
National Governors Association calls the worst fiscal crisis facing states
since World War II. Thirty-two states have increased net taxes and fees
a total of $16.2 billion, raising costs in the process for that great
engine of social mobility, a college education.
A Progressive Policy Institute study of seven states (see Blueprint,
Vol. 2003, No. 3) shows that because of Bush's federal tax cuts, middle-income
families will typically pay more in higher state and local taxes and fees,
plus higher public college tuitions, than before. These extra taxes will
more than wipe out the small federal tax cuts they receive as part of
Bush's massive borrowing binge.
And state taxes are still rising. State governments still face immediate
budget shortfalls of $75 billion to $85 billion, leading 22 governors
to propose further tax increases.
Ignoring a New Health Care Crisis. In his Philadelphia speech,
the sum total of Bush's wisdom on health care policy was a pledge to place
Medicare "on a firm financial ground, and make prescription drugs
available and affordable for every senior who needs them."
Thirty months into Bush's presidency, Medicare is in no better shape
than when he took office. The Bush administration's one Medicare reform
proposal, a vague plan that was later withdrawn, would have apparently
staked the entire future of Medicare on encouraging participation in private
health plans that would reduce costs by reducing coverage. In hopes of
achieving a political victory, Bush has cynically supported a Medicare
prescription drug plan that would abandon the longtime conservative principles
of choice and competition. The plan has drawn bipartisan fire for being
unfair and unworkable, and for undermining employer sponsored drug plans
for retirees.
Meanwhile, the broader problems of the health care system are being ignored.
Despite Bush's rhetoric in Philadelphia about refusing to pass these
problems on to our children, as of 2001, 41 million Americans had no health
insurance, 8.5 million of them children. During 2001, two million Americans
lost their health insurance. For those lucky Americans with private health
insurance, premiums rose nearly 13 percent in 2002, the largest boost
since the last year of the first Bush administration, and the second straight
year of double-digit premium increases.
The administration's overall economic and fiscal policies have already
helped push states into reducing health care coverage under the Medicaid
and SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) programs, with an
estimated 1.7 million likely to lose coverage as a result of the current
nationwide state fiscal crisis.
And the administration has responded to this crisis perversely, by proposing
to turn the Medicaid program -- now a federal-state partnership -- into
a state block grant that would give the states a short-term "loan"
to help balance their books in exchange for an abandonment of the federal
guarantee to help pay for health care for poor people.
Education: The Soft Bigotry of Broken Promises. In his Philadelphia
speech, Bush spoke at length about education. And he made some valid and
important points: "Too many American children are segregated into
schools without standards, shuffled from grade-to-grade because of their
age, regardless of their knowledge. This is discrimination, pure and simple -- the
soft bigotry of low expectations. And our nation should treat it like
other forms of discrimination -- we should end it."
That's the promise Bush made on the education of disadvantaged kids:
not to pass a bill or make a few big speeches, but to deal with the problem
definitively, as the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. That clearly
has not happened.
President Bush did support and sign the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001,
which served as a good starting point for a new partnership among federal
and state governments and local school boards based on strict accountability
for results and greater resources and flexibility to raise achievement
levels for poor schools and poor kids. But his leadership seems to have
ended on the day he signed the bill.
As states and schools struggle to meet the timetable for implementing
No Child Left Behind, the administration has failed to give them guidance
and refuses to give them the promised resources. Meanwhile, the administration
has done nothing to deal with a growing parental backlash against standardized
testing and a dire shortage of qualified teachers to help students meet
higher expectations. The president personally continues to waste time
and attention on side issues like vouchers that excite the conservative
base but offer no real solutions for public education.
As Bush said in Philadelphia, "Those who spend your tax dollars
must be held accountable." President Bush should be held accountable
for fumbling his top domestic priority by failing to follow through on
his own legislation and his own commitments to its success.
Empty Promises About Compassionate Conservatism. In his Philadelphia
speech, Bush's claims to represent a new, "compassionate conservatism"
were front and center, critical to the makeover of the GOP's image. Endlessly
repeated during the campaign, the promise to deal with entrenched social
problems through civic activism became a rationale for administration
decisions to cut back investments in more traditional social programs.
"Big government is not the answer," said Bush in his acceptance
speech. "But the alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference.
We will support the heroic work of homeless shelters and hospices, food
pantries and crisis pregnancy centers -- people reclaiming their communities
block-by-block and heart-by-heart."
Well, not really, it seems. The compassionate conservatism agenda of
the Bush administration has been characterized by big promises followed
by tiny initiatives that were soon abandoned.
Consider the so-called Faith-Based Organizations Initiative, aimed especially
at expanding "charitable choice" and allowing religious social
services providers to compete for federal grant dollars. The president
let House Republicans write a bill that destroyed bipartisan support by
undermining anti-discrimination laws.
During the 2000 campaign, Bush promised more than $80 billion in new
tax cuts to promote more gifts to charity. But despite nearly $3 trillion
in tax cuts targeted to the wealthy, the administration actually reduced
its proposal for charitable tax cuts by three-fourths. Meanwhile, the
administration's successful proposal to eliminate (at least for 10 years)
the federal estate tax is being widely interpreted as a major blow to
charitable giving.
Another big aspect of compassionate conservatism has been Bush's rhetorical
support for mentoring, volunteerism, and national service. In his 2002
State of the Union address, President Bush promised to create a USA Freedom
Corps to help with homeland security tasks, and also called for a 50-percent
increase in the size of the AmeriCorps national service program. The USA
Freedom Corps turned out to be nothing more than a re-branding of existing
programs. And most notably, the president stood by while a combination
of Congressional Republican hostility and administrative incompetence
nearly shut down AmeriCorps.
In some areas, the rhetoric of "compassion" seems to have literally
no connection with administration policymaking. In Philadelphia, for example,
Bush promised to "encourage after-school programs that build character."
But then his administration pushed through funding cuts that will cause
500,000 children to lose after-school opportunities, with Bush budget
officials claiming such programs are a waste of time and money and should
be eliminated altogether.
The Philadelphia speech also promised an effort to make "the next
bold step of welfare reform." But the president has kept this issue
on a back burner, and is refusing to support an expansion of support for
child care services even though his welfare reform proposal calls for
tougher work standards for mothers on welfare.
In general, the Bush compassionate conservatism agenda looks like a bait-and-switch
exercise, offering micro-initiatives as a rationale for big cuts in public
programs that help Americans in need.
An Aroma of Corporate Cronyism. In a litany on the "responsibility
era," Bush said in Philadelphia: "Corporations are responsible
to treat their workers fairly, and leave the air and waters clean."
That's true, but there's no evidence the Bush administration has taken
these corporate responsibilities seriously. The Bush administration ushered
in an era not of corporate responsibility but of government partisanship
toward corporations. Emblematic is the administration's approach to environmental
policy. Bush appointed industry insiders to important posts, and once
in office, they began easing regulations and standards.
When the Enron and WorldCom scandals broke, reflecting and contributing
to a loss of investor confidence that cost Americans trillions of dollars
in nest eggs for retirement and college, the president quickly got in
front of the posse demanding reforms and signed the Accounting Industry
Reform Act. But within hours, the administration began undermining the
law by narrowly interpreting its provisions, including a section that
offers federal protection to corporate whistleblowers who present Congress
with evidence of fraud. Today the president and his administration are
celebrating their continued advocacy for corporate interests with the
most extensive and expensive political fundraising campaign in history.
National Security: Are We Safer? National security is the hardest
area in which to evaluate the promises Bush made in Philadelphia more
than a year before September 11.
Most of Bush's references to national security dealt with an alleged
erosion of our armed forces. Yet Bush employed that same U.S. military,
whose enhanced firepower, technology, communications, and Special Forces
were mostly developed during the Clinton administration, to achieve brilliant
victories in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He deserves credit for those victories,
but so do his predecessors.
President Bush has clearly risen to the occasion in many aspects of his
reaction to September 11, including the destruction of the Taliban and
the toppling of Saddam Hussein's thuggish regime. But in many more serious
and lasting ways, Bush and his advisors have actually weakened America's
security, and left our preeminence vulnerable to lapses in leadership.
So far the administration has failed to consolidate the military victories
in either Afghanistan or Iraq -- victories for which our troops risked
and gave their lives.
Despite the rising challenge of terrorism, the administration has been
passive about the need to secure weapons materials before they fall into
dangerous hands -- especially the huge stockpiles of vulnerable nuclear
materials in the former Soviet Union.
The administration has also been famously reckless in its dealings with
our allies, weakening the "coalition of the willing" and undermining
a host of global and regional institutions that have served U.S. interests
very well for decades. Although America has never enjoyed more power,
we have rarely possessed less influence. And while the president is willing
to use U.S. military power, he has been largely unwilling to deal with
the economic, political, and cultural underpinnings of U.S. preeminence,
neglecting challenges that have no simple military solution and failing
to promote democracy unless it can be supervised by U.S. occupation forces.
But, has the president made America safer? Bush's record on homeland
security has been and continues to be dangerously erratic.
The administration has been focused on the nuts and bolts of creating
a cabinet-level department, which is ironic, since the president opposed
Democratic proposals to do just that for nine months after September 11,
before abruptly reversing himself and taking credit for the idea. But
in many areas, the actual tasks associated with improving homeland security
have either been ignored or performed very poorly.
One of the most obvious and uncomplicated tasks is the integration of
terrorist "watch lists" maintained by federal agencies. There
were nine separate lists on September 11, and there are nine separate
lists today, which reflects a simple lack of leadership at the top of
the federal government.
A more complicated but equally urgent task is to integrate federal, state,
and local law enforcement databases related to terrorist threats. But
even though the federal government spends $50 billion per year on information
technology, none of that money is being devoted to information sharing.
And when it comes to analyzing the intelligence that the federal government
does possess, the administration is dragging its feet in implementing
a central thrust of the Homeland Security Act -- the creation of a new
independent entity for analysis and dissemination of intelligence -- as
existing federal agencies have fought to control it.
There remain big holes in the system for aviation security, with background
checks on airport personnel and inspection of passenger cargo representing
especially glaring problems that aren't being solved. New technologies
for border control, for tracking visa holders, and for basic identification,
are no further along than the drawing board.
And there are also dangerous gaps in procedures to secure targets of
opportunity for terrorists. But the biggest lapse of all is in the administration's
cavalier treatment of the state and local government role in homeland
security, which includes "first responders" like police, firefighters,
and hospital and emergency workers, along with vast law enforcement resources
that could help prevent terrorist attacks. The Council on Foreign Relations
recently concluded a report on first responders thusly: "The United
States is drastically under-funding local emergency responders and remains
dangerously unprepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil,
particularly one involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear,
or high-impact conventional weapons." The report tallied the five-year
cost of meeting unmet needs at $98.4 billion.
The administration has taken few, if any, steps to set up a system for
information sharing on terrorist threats with state and local governments,
and in fact has not even completed its own unique task of preparing a
national threat assessment to guide state and local efforts. State and
local governments remain unclear about their own roles in homeland security,
and the administration has fought tooth and nail against significant financial
assistance to help them do their jobs -- first opposing assistance,
then delaying it, then trying to increase it by cutting other federal
law enforcement assistance programs, and finally limiting it to costs
incurred many months ago. In fact, the combination of administration demands
for a state and local focus on homeland security with cuts in law enforcement
assistance is creating a "cop crunch" around the country that
is sapping security against crime, even as crime rates begin to go back
up after nearly a decade of steady declines (see Blueprint, March/April
2003).
Changing the Tone for the Worse. In his Philadelphia speech, Bush
first sounded one of the truly central and very effective campaign themes:
a pledge to "change the tone" in Washington after the bitterly
partisan decade of the 1990s. "I don't have enemies to fight,"
he said. "And I have no stake in the bitter arguments of the last
few years. I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility
and respect."
That's one promise he will be unlikely to repeat in 2004, having presided
over an era of bitter partisanship even worse than the 1990s.
With the exception of the No Child Left Behind Act, and more recently,
a poorly designed bipartisan prescription drug bill, the president has
done little or nothing to reach out to Democrats, other than to ask them
to endorse his initiatives or face White House-instigated challenges back
home.
The president's party in Congress, which has been slavishly subservient
to him when he's made any demands on them, is setting new lows in partisanship,
especially in the House, where Democrats are routinely denied opportunities
to even offer amendments. Meanwhile, businesses and trade associations
are openly told to fire Democratic staff and hire Republicans or lose
access to the legislative process. Whatever the president's personal feelings,
he has not lifted a finger or sacrificed an ounce of his political capital
to encourage other Republicans to keep a lid on partisan passions. At
a time when Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress,
the continued deterioration of bipartisanship must be laid at their doorsteps -- and
at that of their leader.
A Growing Credibility Gap. In his Philadelphia speech, Bush's
most important theme concerned his own character and his absolute commitment,
with hand held up in simulation of the Oath of Office, "to uphold
the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help
me God." He said, "I do not need to take your pulse before I
know my own mind. I do not reinvent myself at every turn. I am not running
in borrowed clothes. When I act, you will know my reasons. When I speak,
you will know my heart."
Fine sentiments indeed, but you don't have to doubt the president's personal
integrity to seriously doubt the Honest Abe nature of his administration.
This administration has reinvented itself on many occasions by suddenly
embracing positions it has opposed in the past (from the Department of
Homeland Security, to national service, to a stand-alone Medicare prescription
drug benefit, to name just a few). It's clear now that George W. Bush
ran in the borrowed clothes of an agenda he never pursued. As we know
from constantly changing rationales for tax cuts targeted to high earners,
his actions constantly leave doubts about his reasons. And as we know
from those occasions when he speaks without a text, President Bush's heart
is a lonely hunter for understanding.
As for simple truthfulness, the truth is nowhere as simple as the president's
promises in Philadelphia. The administration's fiscal policies have been
loaded with misstatements so gross and continuous that they must be deliberate.
In seeking to parry Democratic claims that the president's various tax
cut proposals are targeted to the wealthy, for example, the president
and his spokesmen have consistently misused the term "average taxpayers."
The ploy is to figure out the "average tax cut benefit" by dividing
the total tax cut by the total number of taxpayers, and then attribute
it to some fictional middle-class family. But as many critics have pointed
out, averages are by definition misleading: When a billionaire enters
a room with 50 middle-class people, the average wealth of people in the
room skyrockets into the tens of millions. This hasn't for a moment stopped
the president himself from trotting out "average taxpayer" numbers
on every possible occasion.
Even more mendacious is the administration's habit of using slow phase-ins
or abrupt "sunsets" to disguise the cost of tax cuts. Indeed,
this particular stunt represents a veritable cluster bomb of mendacity.
By proposing slowly phased-in tax cuts, as in the tax rate reductions
enacted by Congress in 2001, the administration simultaneously understated
their full impact on federal revenues and created a rationale for accelerating
their implementation in the next tax proposal. And by insincerely proposing
sudden "sunsets" or terminations of tax cuts down the road,
which the president has done in each of his tax cut proposals, the administration
has understated their cost while creating a rationale for making tax cuts
"permanent" in the next tax proposal.
The Philadelphia Story we now tell is an effort to judge the president
by the fairest standard available: his own promises. Clearly, the most
damning condemnation of Bush's presidency comes from his own words. Let
the reader, and quite soon, the American people, judge him by that standard
in 2004.
