With the Democrats bashing away on this point and Bush’s own right wing exploiting it in the America First theme with all its hideous historical resonance, Bush clearly has decided that something has to be done. But what? The White House’s early reactions to the election in Pennsylvania, to the Duke campaign, to the evidence of voter discontent and to the oddity of columnist Patrick Buchanan’s reported interest in a primary run against Bush have been fitful and frantic. Bush is never worse than when he is trying to come across as tough-angry; it invariably comes out exasperated instead, sort of twitty and unconvincing.
It is for this reason that I do not buy the hypothesis, widespread among political analysts, that he will be able to do very well in countering criticism of his deficient domestic policy by continuing to attack Congress. It’s not that everyone is just crazy about Congress these days. It’s that Bush doesn’t gain altitude but loses it in this pursuit: unlike the proverbially patronized angry woman, he is not ,,so cute" when he’s mad, and in addition to that he becomes vulnerable to embarrassing questions. For example, what is his alternative to the program he is denouncing.? And, if Congress’s tax-subsidized perks and comforts are so expensive and so shaming, why are not the infinitely more generous executive-branch perks and comforts he and his aides enjoy even worse?
So it’s back to the drawing board. There are some enclaves within the administration that produce domesticpolicy departures. But these have their problems. Some, such as certain innovations favored by William Reilly at EPA or Jack Kemp at HUD, have been deemed politically unpalatable by powerful elements within the White House and among the president’s political keepers. Others are largely right-wing fat-cat stuff, breaks for those who need them least, dressed up to look like something else. A number of these have come out of Vice President Quayle’s Competitiveness Council, a group whose name I can’t even hear any longer without conjuring up the image of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, all tucked up under the coverlet and wearing the old lady’s white ruffled nightcap. In the theoretical name of every kind of fairness and balance and opportunity, they have been letting favored industries off the regulatory hook, or at least trying to.
This brings us to another political problem: the wolf-in-grandma’s-nightclothes thing has a limited efficacy. There are two reasons. One is that almost all deregulation efforts of necessity hit one constituency hard if they help another. For example, undoing or impeding environmental law may be pitched to one sector of society, but it will also invariably generate anger and a sense of danger in another. The second reason is that some of these efforts require a kind of simulated class identification that just doesn’t work well in this administration. Bush & Co. can affect from here to breakfast a natural empathy with the workingman and -woman–the logger, the dirt farmer, etc.–but it is a visually and tonally implausible stance, contradicted every time they speak. For all their love of privilege, the Reaganites and even Nixon and Agnew were more credible in the inverted, phony class warfare that marks contemporary politics, in the GOP assertion of solidarity on cultural and economic grounds with the working class. The Bush people just don’t look (or walk or talk) the part.
By my analysis this leaves Bush the alternative of actually developing a serious program, of caring about it and pursuing it. I do not know if he could ever transfer the much superior quality of performance he brings to almost everything to do with national-security matters to the domestic scene. It has never been his strong point, but has rather seemed a realm in which he ceded authority to others, accepted what was thought politically smart no matter how cynical or harmful, “Out there,” as we say in Washington, there seems to be a good deal of rage about this. But I think Bush could recoup with the right positive programs and decisions. These, however, would require two precious commodities.
The first is a willingness to do really hard things at home, to make choices about bare-bones values–about what is indispensable and must be done in a time of hardship and shortage. It involves political risk and will generate political heat. There is no fake or costfree way out of our health-care and schooling problems, and there is no standing-ovation way to decide which Americans’ claims deserve attention first when all cannot be met. The second precious commodity is, of course, money, of which there is none. It has been fashionable in conservative government to say that you can’t solve problems by throwing money at them. But you can’t solve problems by throwing denial or sarcasm or highflown speeches at them either.
In the past several years we have all read George Bush’s lips and his hips and all his other signals, but we still are waiting to hear the answer: what does he intend to do to address the growing social and economic troubles at home? If the right Democrat with the right program and the right moves came along, there would be a big opportunity. But that, of course, is a whole other problem.
