Bush Stands Pat

[Dover]

Bush Stands Pat

Yesterday's New York Times had a classic dog-bites-man front-page headline: "Bush Campaign Plans No Rest In Next Month." We all know George W. Bush likes his vacations, but an embattled president who's potentially 100 days away from a permanent vacation should probably clock in for work every day.

But the subheadline of this article was truly intriguing: "President Is to Set Out Agenda for 2nd Term." And then last night the president told a Republican fundraising dinner in Washington that big things were on the way. It raises an important question: Given his record and his political strategy for re-election, what sort of second-term agenda could Mr. Bush credibly offer?

Many of the fervent conservatives who form the core of the president's plan for victory undoubtedly would recommend his second term focus on proposals like: stacking the Supreme Court with jurists committed to overturning Roe v. Wade; accelerating the shift in the federal tax burden from wealth to work; stridently denouncing global climate change as an environmentalist hoax; and of course, deliberately engineering budget deficits so large that the federal government is disabled from pursuing any do-gooder impulses for decades to come. But we doubt any of these positions poll very well.

The president could take partial privatization of Social Security off the back burner, but unfortunately, his fiscal policies have made it a tad implausible to come up with the trillion dollars or so of transitional costs that his own administration has estimated would be necessary to make such a proposal work.

Theoretically, Bush could simply recycle his 2000 campaign promises, which have yet to be redeemed: changing the tone in Washington, fighting poverty, making "humility" the hallmark of American foreign policy, and introducing a "compassionate conservatism" that will mobilize civic forces to tackle the social problems facing the country. He could also declare a fresh effort to fulfill some of his more recent promises, like: providing the leadership and resources to implement the No Child Left Behind education reform legislation, making homeland security an integral part of the war on terrorism, or cracking down on the free-spending habits of the Republican-controlled congress. But this is a president who never admits mistakes, so acknowledging that his first term failed to meet the expectations that he set for it is probably a bridge too far for George W. Bush. That same characteristic, along with an obsessive focus on pleasing his party's conservative base, will undoubtedly rule out any "Nixon-to-China" shifts in his basic domestic and international policies.

The president's inability to come up with any new agenda was previewed earlier this year in his State of the Union Address, which featured a thrilling commitment to stigmatize steroid use in professional sports. His other big new initiative, a Moon-To-Mars mission, aroused such near-universal derision that it was dropped from the speech entirely.

The more you look at it, the only credible second-term agenda for this president is to keep on doing what he's been doing for four years. After all, the personal quality that Americans most firmly believe about George W. Bush is that he's a known quantity, never troubled by doubts, reflection, nuance, or even objective evidence of failure, and completely confident of the course he has set for the country.

Accordingly, he should resolutely tell the country that he thinks his policies have made America safer and stronger, and in the future, they can expect second and third helpings from the same menu......

http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=131&subid=192&contentid=252774