Not Measuring Up
Dismal grades on three tests
JOHN O'SULLIVAN
With the nomination of Harriet Miers, FEMA's absence in New Orleans, the galloping incontinence of the federal budget, and the continuing insurgency in Iraq, President Bush has seemingly entered a time of troubles. His opinion-poll ratings are falling and there are faint signs that Republican congressmen are distancing themselves from him in preparation for the November 2006 elections. The specter of a failed presidency looms.
George W. Bush has presented himself as a strong and principled conservative. Mutual enemies such as conservatives and the media originally accepted his self-portraiture, but conservatives now complain that over-spending, federalizing emergency services, and another Souter is not what they voted for. They cry treason or at least timidity. Is Bush now letting the conservative side down? And does he deserve its criticism and even hostility?
Such questions are rarely answered honestly by partisans. They tend to pick and choose the criteria for judging success or failure. If they like the president, they tend to choose those issues — the John Roberts nomination, the tax cuts — on which he has done well or at least not badly. If they hold him in low regard, they highlight those issues — see the first sentence above — on which his performance has been, ah, mixed.
Let me confess that I, alas, am no different. My reason is, as Macaulay said of Burke, the slave of my passions. On the topic of the Bush presidency, however, I labor under a difficulty that prevents me from simply selecting my criteria to suit the conclusions I want. Rashly, never thinking that this would come back to haunt me, I laid down my standards for judging the success or failure of the Bush presidency in advance. A month or so before September 11, I wrote an NR commentary in which I suggested that all presidencies succeed or fail on a handful of big issues.
What were the big things that Bush 43 had to get right? I suggested three: halting the advance of the regulatory state; restoring national unity to an increasingly balkanized America; and preventing the rise of an anti-American united Europe that would divide the West.
It would be hard to maintain with a straight face that these goals have been achieved. Rather they have receded. We are farther from achieving them today than in 2001. And the threats they were meant to meet are accordingly more dangerous.
Take, first, the test of whether the Bush administration has either halted the advance of the regulatory state or subjected it to more effective democratic control. If this is interpreted narrowly, the administration's record is not bad. According to a very balanced survey by James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, the administration has issued fewer new regulations — and the cost of those regulations is significantly lower — than its recent predecessors.
But Bush has a much weaker record of eliminating earlier regulations. The total cost of the hidden tax of regulation remained as high as $843 billion in 2004 — or, in Gattuso's words, "almost as heavy as the burden of income taxes." And many of the regulations — such as the airport checking procedures — are worse than useless. Still, credit where credit is due, Bush has a reasonably good record on regulation and deregulation as such.
Unfortunately, that narrow record is dwarfed by the overall growth of government. Domestic discretionary spending has risen faster since 2001 than under any other president since LBJ and Nixon. Federal spending now accounts for over 20 percent — and the federal deficit about 3 percent — of America's GDP. New and expensive entitlements, such as the prescription-drug benefit, will swell that spending in the future, as will unexpected problems like Hurricane Katrina. Much of this runaway spending has been directly urged by the president. None of it has he even attempted to veto.
That leaves the tax cut as the president's principal claim to have restrained the advance of government. Tax cuts, as well as stimulating growth, are supposed to restrain government spending. Since spending has not been restrained, however, Bush's tax cut will eventually provoke a fiscal crisis. And the most likely outcome of such a crisis is the reversal of the tax cut in whole or in part. Leviathan would then sprawl uncontrollably outwards as if George W. Bush had never been born.
The second test was whether Bush would be able to halt the drift — or rather "government-enforced stampede" — toward an America balkanized into ethnic, cultural, and linguistic tribes. In 2001 I speculated that maybe Bush was on the wrong side of this issue since he had equivocated on racial preferences and supported bilingualism. He has since removed all doubt on that score. Spending on bilingual education has risen sharply. He is vigorously pushing an immigration policy that would amnesty existing illegal immigrants and admit as many new immigrants as businesses wanted to employ without limit. Above all, when finally given the chance to end the un-American regime of racial preferences, the White House refused.
The pity of it is that September 11 gave Bush the perfect opportunity to stress the common interests and destiny of all Americans and to forge a new politics of unity and assimilation. "United We Stand" was the all but universal sentiment. It needed only to be given political content. Both Roosevelts would have instinctively exploited this national mood to move away from ethnic separatism and to shape an inclusive Americanism subtly tied to their own parties. They would have warned against any anti-Muslim sentiment, as Bush did, but they would also have sought expressions of loyalty from Muslim leaders. Instead, the Bush administration went into full "diversity" mode. Most notoriously, it insisted that its airport checking procedures would be rigorously neutral as to sex, age, ethnicity, and common sense.
The third issue was whether Bush would entrench America as the leading world power or preside over the gradual emergence of a multipolar world in which the United States would be, at best, first among equals — and among some pretty hostile equals at that. That boils down in practice to whether Europe will develop as a loyal U.S. ally, or as a rival superpower. A Machiavellian statesman would presumably recommend lavishing elaborate compliments on the Europeans while quietly discouraging their unification. The Bush administration has done the reverse with a kind of perverse consistency. It has continued the traditional State Department policy of encouraging European unity — most recently when Secretary of State Rice praised the European Union constitution on the eve of its referendum defeats — while every now and then snubbing or sneering at the Europeans. A wave of serious anti-Americanism is now sweeping Europe, which, despite earlier assurances, is developing a defense system separate from NATO.
We have been saved from the worst consequences of this policy, however, by the French and Dutch voters who have at least temporarily derailed the European project and thus delayed any emergence of a united anti-American Europe. Indeed, they have done more than that. They have focused attention on a series of European crises — the Turkey crisis, the Ukraine crisis, the demographic crisis, the structural economic crisis, the post-referendum legitimacy crisis — that probably cannot be solved within a purely European framework. That gives the Bush administration the chance to offer to help Europeans solve these crises in a new and wider Atlantic architecture. In the course of doing so, Washington would be able to influence the kind of Europe — decentralized, deregulated, inter-governmental, Atlanticist — most congruent with long-term U.S. interests. But this is the Bush administration's last chance on Europe.
On my three tests, then, the Bush presidency has not gained even one passing grade. If it has not actually failed, that is because the time limit has not yet run out. And with only three years to go, the president has to hurry. He needs a positive conservative agenda that can be successfully enacted in a relatively short time. Even if Harriet Miers turns out to be a more distinguished jurist than well-informed conservative critics like David Frum predict, her nomination is still a very slim reed on which to hang a legacy.
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