Four years ago, the then governor of Texas, George Bush, attacked the budget-cutting plans presented by his fellow Republicans in Congress. Referring to a proposal to slash tax credits, he suggested: ‘I don’t think they should balance their budget on the backs of the poor.’
The comments were immediately seen as an early indication that just as Bill Clinton had run as a self-proclaimed ‘different kind of Democrat’ in 1992, so Bush planned to distance himself from the arch-conservatives who held sway over the Republican party in Washington. Over the next year, Bush attempted to stick to the middle of the road as he first secured the Republican party nomination and then raced Al Gore to a photo finish on general election day.
Of course, those voters who had paid a passing interest to the campaign would have been under no illusion that the Texas governor was a liberal. A death penalty enthusiast, Bush advocated a sweeping tax cut, school vouchers, and a greater role for the private sector in the provision of America’s Social Security pension system.
Nonetheless, what was most striking about candidate Bush was the distance he put between himself and the image most Americans had of his party. After a decade of deep partisanship in Washington as the Republicans attempted to reverse two defeats at the ballot box with a concerted campaign to destroy the Clinton presidency, Bush pledged to ‘change the tone’. Promising to bring ‘civility and respect’ to Washington, Bush pointed to his record in Texas of forging bipartisan coalitions and declared: ‘I know it’s going to require a different kind of leader to say to both Republicans and Democrats “let’s come together”‘
In place of the radical rightwing agenda of Congressional Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott, Bush offered himself as a ‘compassionate conservative’. Unusually, a concern for the plight of the poor was front and centre of the Republican presidential campaign. Attacking Bill Clinton and Al Gore for ‘coasting through prosperity’, the Texas governor declared that ‘a prosperous nation is ready to renew its purpose and unite behind great goals’. One of these ‘great goals’ would be to ‘extend the promise of prosperity to every forgotten corner of this country’. Here, then, was a truly radical departure: a Republican candidate attacking a Democrat administration for an insufficient concern for the poor.
Throughout the campaign, Bush endorsed and, in some cases, pledged to extend key Democrat programmes. Of Lyndon Johnson’s medical care for the elderly, Medicare, Bush said: ‘it does more than meet the needs of our elderly; it reflects the values of our society’. The Republican nominee went on to join Gore in promising to extend the programme to cover prescription medicines. Promising to cover all pensioners, Bush highlighted the plight of the poorest, who ‘have to choose between food and medicine’.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security received a similar treatment. ‘To seniors in this country,’ Bush declared, ‘you earned your benefits, you made your plans, and President George W Bush will keep the promise of Social Security – no changes, no reductions, no way.’
Thus it was that securing the long-term future of Medicare and Social Security were two of the three priorities that Bush promised would be the beneficiaries of Clinton’s golden economic legacy – a ten-year budget surplus estimated at $5.6 trillion. Bush was in the fortunate position of knowing in 2000 that, unlike all of his predecessors for the past thirty years, he could expect to inherit a large budget surplus if he made it to the Oval Office.
But Bush gave even his third priority – tax cuts – an unusual twist. While making the case that the budget surplus was, in fact, ‘the people’s money’ and should be returned to ‘everyone, in every tax bracket’ the governor promised that ‘on principle, those in the greatest need should receive the greatest help’.
The closeness of the election and the highly disputed manner in which Bush found himself in the White House, coupled with narrow Republican majorities in both the Senate (where Bush’s party were dependent on the casting vote of Vice President Dick Cheney) and the House of Representatives, led many to believe that the new president had little option but to govern as he had campaigned - as a moderate ‘compassionate conservative’, who would seek bipartisan solutions to America’s problems.
Nobody can blame George Bush for the fact that the tragic events of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ have forced the president to spend much more time on foreign policy than his campaign rhetoric implied that he intended. Indeed, the first eleven months of his presidency suggest that indifference to the world beyond America’s shores may well have characterised the Bush presidency had al-Qaida not struck at the US.
How then can we judge the promises that Bush might reasonably have been expected to keep? Even Bush supporters, such as The Economist, admit that ‘Mr Bush is as partisan a president as America has had.’ The magazine made its comments shortly before the 2002 mid-term elections, and the manner of Bush’s campaigning epitomised the lie that the president planned to ‘change the tone’ of US politics. Bush ruthlessly exploited the opportunities that the ‘war on terror’ has presented him with to tarnish and undermine his political opponents. While continuing to present himself as above party politics - ‘we must act, first and foremost, not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans’ - the president repeatedly attacked the Democrats as ‘not interested in the security of the American people’.
To back up his charge, Bush pointed to the opposition of Senate Democrats to the creation of a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security. What the president failed to mention, of course, was that the department was actually the brainchild of Democrat senators like Joe Lieberman. After arguing against the plan for nine months, Bush did an about-face and endorsed the proposals. However, when he presented his plan to the Senate, the president included a clause to deprive the new department’s employees of civil service protection. The clause was a clever ploy: forcing the Democrats to vote against legislation which they’d actually pioneered and thus allowing Bush to paint them as soft on national security (see box).
Bush’s behaviour at the mid-term elections was, in fact, simply the logical conclusion of the manner in which he has conducted domestic policy ever since he took the oath of office. With a few exceptions - Secretary of State Colin Powell, for instance – Bush’s cabinet is stuffed with ideological hardliners, perhaps symbolised by the anti-abortion and gay rights attorney general, John Ashcroft.
But what of the president’s domestic policies? Without a doubt, the central focus of the Democrat campaign against the president next year is likely to be his economic record. Instead of spreading prosperity, the Bush presidency has been characterised by a remarkable downturn in America’s economic fortunes after the boom years that characterised Clinton’s time in the Oval Office. That ten-year budget $5.6 trillion surplus has become a $4.5 trillion deficit. In 2003, the annual deficit is expected to rise to $450 billion.
Since Bush came to office, over three million private sector jobs have been lost (Clinton’s eight years in office saw the creation of 21 million private sector jobs). Unemployment has risen from 4.2 percent in February 2001 to 6.4 percent in May 2003. Clinton’s prosperity has been replaced by rising poverty. The ‘jobless recovery’ of 2002 saw an additional 1.7 million Americans fall below the poverty line, bringing the total to 34.6 million.
As a response, ‘compassionate conservatism’ has proved sadly lacking. Indeed, the president’s big promises have been followed by tiny initiatives. And, there’s not much compassion in the funding cuts Bush supported that will see 500,000 children lose their access to after-school programmes, or in the president’s proposal to toughen work requirements for single mothers on welfare while refusing to expand childcare services.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the greatest beneficiaries of the huge tax cuts that Bush has pushed through Congress - $1.35 trillion in 2001 and a further $350 billion this year - have not been those ‘in greatest need’. The latest tax cut left out 36 percent of American families altogether. More than half of families received less than $100. The top one percent of earners got more benefits than the bottom 84 percent. The Economist labelled the 2003 tax cuts ‘disingenuous and risky’ and warned ‘unless he changes tack, Bush could leave a terrible mess behind him’.
Bush’s promises on healthcare and Social Security have been discarded. During 2001 a further two million Americans lost their health insurance, pushing the number of uninsured above 40 million. Eight million of these are children, yet the president is proposing a plan which would effectively end the federal government’s guarantee to help, alongside the states, pay for healthcare for the poor through the Medicaid programme. Bush’s recently passed Medicare proposals do, as promised, offer new benefits for prescription drugs for pensioners. At the same time, though, they are likely to reduce the degree of choice recipients get over their treatment and doctors. And instead of strengthening Social Security, more than $1 trillion has been raided from the pension fund to pay for tax cuts - in the very decade when the ‘baby boom’ generation will begin to retire.
Ever since he entered the White House, ‘Dubya’ has been obsessed with avoiding the fate of his father. Learning from Bush Senior’s alleged mistakes, he has assiduously courted the rightwing core Republican vote. In so doing, George W may well have ensured that he will not face a damaging challenge from the right during the primary season. The cost, however, is that, unlike in 2000, the president has little chance of convincing America he’s a ‘different kind of Republican’.