For three decades, Ray Fair, an economist at Yale with a jones for predicting the future, has been forecasting the winners and losers of American presidential elections.
In the mid-1970s, after poring over economic data, Fair developed a mathematical equation that factors in economic growth rates, inflation and an incumbent’s general record on economic matters to arrive at an estimate of the popular vote on Election Day. His model rests on a simple truth — the prevailing economic conditions of an election year provide an excellent guide to voters’ behavior in November — and it is stunningly accurate. Fair’s equation predicts the popular vote to within 2 or 3 percentage points for almost every presidential election since 1920. He forecast the toss-up in 2000, the reelections of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush’s victory in 1988, and Jimmy Carter’s loss in 1980. And based on the current health of the U.S. economy, Fair predicts an easy win for George W. Bush in November.
But this year’s economy is different from all the others. After nearly four years of Bush’s presidency, many experts believe the United States is facing an unprecedented situation: The economy is recovering, but the number of jobs, and in particular, good jobs isn’t. Could this be the year Fair’s crystal ball breaks?
By historical standards, the U.S. economy is growing reasonably well, and as the incumbent president, Bush is well-positioned to benefit. The total economic output was up 3.1 percent in 2003; by way of comparison, in 1995, the year before Clinton’s reelection, growth was 2.5 percent. In 1996, the economy grew by 3.7 percent, and analysts predict that output will grow by at least that much this year. Moreover, inflation and interest rates are currently low, and the stock market is up.
In campaign events across the country, the president is aggressively selling this record. “The last six months of growth have been tremendous,” Bush declared in Florida Feb. 16, attributing the gains to his tax cuts. “Things are looking better for America.”
If some of this sounds like news to you — Why doesn’t it feel like things are looking better for America? — your skepticism is understandable. On paper, Bush’s election-year economic record might look like a winner, but to voters, the situation seems much less certain. On Tuesday, for example, the Conference Board, a business research group, reported that consumer confidence “weakened significantly” in February. Recent polls show Americans to be tremendously dissatisfied with Bush’s stewardship of the economy. They are worried about a host of issues, including budget deficits and rising healthcare costs, but they are mainly concerned with the dismal employment market. (Other polls suggest Bush will face a tough election fight. For instance, a Gallup poll taken at the end of January shows John Kerry beating Bush by 53 to 46 percent; according to Gallup, Gerald Ford was the only other postwar president to trail his challenger in January of the election year. Ford, of course, lost to Carter.)
The current situation has many economists baffled. Employment usually rises in an economic recovery, but in the last few months, despite strong economic growth, few jobs — and fewer good jobs — have been created. Some economists point to globalization, others to structural changes in the U.S. econonomy, but most agree that we’ve never been in a situation quite like this before, and they’re not sure what will come next.
The lackluster employment market is the Bush administration’s main economic weakness, and it is trying desperately to convince Americans that good times are just ahead. To that end, on Feb. 9, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released its annual Economic Report of the President, predicting extremely optimistic job growth this year. Despite the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2003, the CEA said that at least 3.8 million new jobs would materialize in 2004.
The White House seems to have expected the public to embrace its rosy jobs numbers. Instead, the pie-in-the-sky projection backfired, and economists across the political spectrum criticized it as being ridiculously out of touch with economic reality. Many wondered whether the report, which is prepared by economists, had been the victim of a “sexing up” by White House political operatives.
Administration officials are now backing away from the prediction. “I think we are going to create a lot of jobs. How many I don’t know,” Treasury Secretary John Snow told reporters on Feb. 18. Bush, too, refused to answer reporters who asked him whether he stood by the CEA’s estimate.
It’s obvious why the White House might have wanted to fool the public into thinking job growth would be stratospheric in 2004. As pundits are fond of saying, Bush is on track to become the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss in jobs during his term. While many economists say that powerful economic forces like globalization and technological innovation are slowing down employment growth during the economic recovery, many also fault Bush’s policies, especially his tax cuts.
“Those were not tax cuts structured for short-term job growth,” says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank.
Still, if the White House hyped the jobs projection, it will prove to be an idiotic political strategy. That’s because if Bush gets even modest job growth this year — which is in line with what economists predict — that won’t be so bad for an election year, so why raise expectations?
It’s not at all clear how much the president’s jobs record (and, to a lesser extent, his deficits) will damage his chances for reelection; with an expanding economy, it might not hurt him at all. Experts say there’s no historical election-year analogue of today’s growing, yet jobless, economy. “We haven’t observed it in the past,” Fair says. But James Campbell, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who also forecasts presidential elections based on economic conditions, doubts that weak employment will be so bad for the president.
When “there’s economic growth, somebody’s benefiting from that, and usually there are enough voters benefiting from it” that it helps the incumbent, Campbell says. A growing economy tends to put the public in a forgiving mood. “The impact of the economy can’t be interpreted as a just dollars and cents kind of thing,” says Campbell. “Economic growth conditions the public mood about everything. If the audience is fat and happy, they are more than willing to listen to your explanations for weapons of mass destruction or tax cuts or whatever it is.”
But Campbell’s analysis makes the CEA’s predictions even more perplexing. The Council of Economic Advisers is a three-member panel of economists charged with providing a president with objective economic analysis. The CEA’s work is generally thought to be divorced from politics, and panel members are often selected from academia. Bush’s CEA is headed by N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor and the author of several popular introductory economics textbooks. Mankiw is well-regarded in the profession; even critics of the White House have kind words for him, and few feel comfortable asserting that Mankiw’s optimistic job-growth numbers were the result of political, rather than economic, calculations. But many have their suspicions.
What is clear is that CEA’s dizzyingly ambitious predictions seem completely divorced from sound economics. The panel predicts that in 2004, total employment in the United States will run at an average of 132.7 million jobs, about 2.6 million more than the average of 2003. The word “average” is important here. It’s been widely reported — even in papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post — that the CEA is predicting a total of 2.6 million new jobs, but that’s not correct.
As the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities — two left-leaning economic-policy groups — explain in their assessment of the CEA’s report, in order for the average number of jobs in the economy to rise to 132.7 million in 2004, there must be many more than 132.7 million jobs in the United States by December (since there are fewer than that many right now). The CEA, then, is predicting that more than 2.6 million jobs will be added in one year. According to the think tanks, for the economy to produce as many jobs as the CEA predicts, American businesses would need to hire more than 460,000 new people each month from February until December. That’s a whole lot of new jobs. In January, only 112,000 jobs were added, and that was the best month for jobs since 2000. Even in the economic boom of the late 1990s there were only a handful of months in which a half million jobs were created.
“It’s not going to happen,” Kevin Hassett, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says of the administration’s prediction. “My surprise meter will be at 100 if it did. The economy teaches us humility.”
Part of why we should expect tepid employment growth, says Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Economy.com, is that there are “some major constraints on employment” in the current economy. Zandi believes that some of Bush’s economic policies have made it more attractive for businesses to invest in equipment rather than new people. The Bush tax cuts were “improperly focused,” Zandi says. “They’re focused on making it cheaper for businesses to invest. They’re not designed to lower the cost of labor, to make the labor force more skilled, or to rein in the rising costs of healthcare premiums. One of the fruits of that is job loss.”
William Dickens, an economist at the Brookings Institution who worked at the CEA under Bill Clinton, also faults the tax cuts. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the tax cuts had an effect” on economic growth, he says. But “by directing the tax cuts at wealthy people who don’t spend as much money, the short-run impact was a lot less than it could have been” if the tax cuts had been more targeted toward poor and middle-class people.
Economists also say that the United States is undergoing major structural changes that are at least temporarily making the job market more difficult — but these changes can’t really be pinned on Bush. Zandi says that globalization is contributing to a steady loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, and “that’s only going to grow in intensity.” Dickens, of Brookings, disagrees, arguing that the hue and cry over “outsourcing” is overblown, and that it causes only a very tiny number of job losses in the United States — but he agrees that forces like technological innovation and international trade are altering the economic landscape and that these changes are affecting labor.
“Structural, long-term changes to the economy are probably what we’re seeing in these numbers,” Dickens says. As the economy shifts to adjust to innovations, people need to move between different industries, and that takes time.
There is one other explanation for the current bad job-growth numbers, put forward mostly by conservative economists: Our expectations are too high, they say. The current unemployment rate is 5.6 percent; we shouldn’t expect it to get much better. While this rate is significantly higher than the rate during the boom, when unemployment dipped as low as 3.8 percent in April 2000, it’s not that high in historical terms. Unemployment is in exactly the same place it was in January 1996, before Clinton’s reelection.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of unemployment in this recession,” says Daniel Mitchell, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. “For the person who lost their job it’s a dismal situation, but we weren’t up at 7.5 percent, we weren’t at the 10 percent that we saw in 1982. If you look at the unemployment rate of our major trading partners, most would give their left arm for what we have.”
With all of the obstacles in the way of a suddenly booming labor market, however did the CEA’s economists come up with a forecast of millions of new jobs? The panel won’t say. The CEA did not return Salon’s calls, and it hasn’t given any other reporters clues as to how it determined that 2004 would see incredible job gains. In this silence, economists suspicious of the White House have come up with their own ideas — the main one being that the jobs report was a political hack designed to make sure that the White House wasn’t predicting what many economists believe will be true, namely, that the administration will end its term with fewer jobs than when it started.
“When George W. Bush took office, the estimate of payroll employment stood at 132.5 million,” writes J. Bradford DeLong, a University of California at Berkeley economics professor whose popular blog has been buzzing with criticism of the CEA’s report for the past two weeks. The CEA’s report puts employment in 2004 at 132.7 million, because “a less optimistic employment forecast would make the 2004 number below the payroll employment number when George W. Bush took office.” This, DeLong stated, would have led reporters to write, “Bush administration forecasts that 2004 employment will be lower than at start of administration,” and “one must wonder if somebody, somewhere, sometime” decided that such sentences “should never be written, and that in order to keep them from being written the forecast had to have a 2004 employment number above the start-of-the-administration 132.5 million.” In other words, the report was massaged to prevent the media from reporting bad news.
“Statements by this administration,” DeLong added, “are simply not credible, and cannot be naively taken at face value.”
But concluding that the White House doctored the report to sidestep bad news raises more questions than it answers. “There’s something strange about that explanation because the truth would have come out eventually,” says Bernstein, of the Economic Policy Institute. “People will know whether the Hoover label sticks by the time the election comes around” — so if it is going to happen anyway, why doesn’t the administration want to take a political hit now? Why, instead, would it choose to raise expectations of huge job growth, only to have to see the economy continually fail to meet those expectations each and every month from now until the election?
“I would think that for an administration to play this game would be useless,” says Mitchell, of the Heritage Foundation, who stressed that he does not believe that the CEA hyped its report. “Saying that everything is going to be rosy, what does that get you? It’s politically smarter to underestimate these things and say, ‘We beat expectations.’”
The White House’s strategy seems especially silly when you consider that, according to most economists, jobs are poised to slowly flow back into the economy. Even though the number will likely be much lower than what the CEA predicted, a steady accretion of new employment from now until the election would surely bolster Bush’s campaign and hurt his opponent.
Lackluster job growth, says Hassett of the AEI, is “the best card the Democrats have” right now. Once job growth begins, though, the issue could slowly dry up. “I don’t think history suggests the approach will work for them,” Hassett says. “Most people have a job. We’ve got 8 million people who are unemployed. I really wish we can make their lives better than they are — but in a population of 270 million people are you going to base your whole election strategy on 8 million people?”
Democrats can take some solace in the fact that Ray Fair, the Yale election forecaster, has been wrong before. In the 1992 election, when the economy was just recovering from a recession and inflation was low — a climate not too different from today’s — Fair’s equation showed Bush beating Clinton. Of course, Clinton won that race with about 43 percent of the popular vote, compared to Bush’s 37 percent. But Fair’s model might have broken down only because of the odd candidacy of Ross Perot, who probably attracted many of Bush’s supporters. (Perot won about 18 percent of the popular vote.)
Some Democrats are starting to see that unemployment might not remain a winning issue as the country approaches Election Day. “The CEA may be proved right — the jobs situation is going to be better by November than it is now,” says Dickens, of Brookings. He suggests Democrats instead fight Bush hard on the issue of fiscal responsibility. “No one believes the Bush administration is going to cut the deficit in half in five years. That’s pure nonsense,” he says. “The only way they could get it to that is if they ignore the thing they want to do. It’s a joke — there’s no way in the world the administration is on a sustainable course.”
There are signs that voters appreciate hearing candidates advocate fiscal responsibility. In polls, people often say that reducing the deficit is a great way to boost the economy. Hassett says that in January, he traveled in New Hampshire with Sen. John McCain, who was acting as Bush’s emissary in the primary election there. During speeches, when McCain called for reducing the deficit, “there were amazing cheers. It seems like people themselves get nervous when they owe more money than they have coming in, so there’s a visceral response to it.”
Democrats would do well to take advantage of that response by explaining to voters the real dangers of running huge deficits, Dickens says. “The fiscal health of the country is in serious question, and that has to resolve itself somehow, and it could easily resolve itself in a crisis,” he says. “We have borrowed a whole heck of a lot of money from the rest of the world. If it looks like our interest rate is going to go up, that the dollar is going to depreciate further, if it looks like the economy is going to inflate, we could very well have a financial crisis. We could end up with sky-high interest rates and it could create a catastrophic situation in the country. That’s a serious possibility. It’s something that I would hope the Democratic candidates would talk about.”
Dear Applicant,
Thank you for expressing interest in attending an upcoming economic policy event with President Bush. Due to the high level of acceptance of these preemptive events nationwide, the coordinators of the White House Advertising Tour to Tout a Happy Economy (WHAT THE) are pleased to identify and monitor those of you who have submitted questions and suggestions. We hope that the following will prove helpful to furthering our agenda.
What’s it all about?
The purpose of these town-hall simulations is not merely to put lipstick on the ravaged body of the American economy, but also, with a little hand in the appropriate area, to make it sit up and smile. In the same vein, economic policy events alert our nation’s most gullible to the grave dangers that Democrats pose to the current unbelievable state of our fiscal health.
On what does the White House base its optimism?
Do the math. Using the Fibbin’atcha Principle, add the 1.7 million projected new jobs for 2003 that never materialized, subtract 439,000 jobs lost that same year, then eliminate the year 2003. Multiply the 2004 projection that the average number of jobs will be 2.6 million higher than in 2003 by the number of people willing to believe anything if you say it often enough, then backpedal at a rate equal to the average velocity of two runaway trains heading in opposite directions, and cancel the 8 million unemployed. Factor in the 19th presidential visit to Florida since the 2000 ballot controversy (to the power of 5 Supreme Court justices minus 4), then after inverting the significance of 19,000 actual unemployed in Tampa, assign a greater value to the theoretical “40 more workers” that a factory owner in the same city hopes to add, and extrapolate the least likely outcome in the form of a speech that contains the words “strong” (x4), “upbeat”(x4), and “optimistic” (x7). Carry the one, carry the b.s., and do the hoky-poky as you turn yourself about. Simple, really.
Who may attend?
It is our aim to allow as many of a small, select, pre-screened group as possible to tell a story in their own words, which will be provided for them. As the president pointed out in Tampa, “There’s the individual stories about hardworking, decent Americans worried about their families and what they do with the more money in their pocket.”
We want to know how your worries about what to do with “the more money” in your pocket have been resolved as a direct result of tax cuts weighted toward the affluent. Your willingness to act as an emissary of optimism (or, as you may be known to your neighbors, a lovable loon) will help us misguide the nation in a more timely manner.
But as an American, I’m free to disagree, right?
While acknowledging the continued existence of “freedom,” please note the president’s increasing tendency to drop this word in favor of “protection,” “safety,” “security,” “threats,” “gathering threats,” and “dealing with threats.” Tailor your remarks accordingly. For your own protection, safety and security, kindly limit any criticism to pointing out that the tax cuts need to be made permanent.
What if I’m an idiot?
We also hope to meet individuals who may have hallucinated seeing a man roaming Alabama in a flight suit, preferably carrying a Highlights magazine, circa 1972, on which the mailing address of the dental clinic is still legible.
Who writes the president’s speeches for these economic policy events?
The president does not make speeches at these events — he has “conversations” at small-business owners and their employees.
Who writes the president’s conversations?
You probably know him best for his philosophical treatise, “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” The metaphor of the spider, who makes upward progress from an indeterminate point of the spout only to encounter unexpected precipitation — which then sends the spider, in its quintessential itsy-bitsyness, on a downward trajectory along spout — afforded the president several parallels to the U.S. economic situation.
As he elucidated in Tampa, “When you have a recession it means the economy is going backwards.” The president then posited the notion that “the recession really affected us,” and meeting with no arguments to the contrary, revealed an economy that has been continually moving forward only to be moved backward as a prelude to moving forward again. In other words, although we were admittedly down the drain we will assuredly soon be up the spout.
Why does the president keep saying that jobs are being created? Aren’t jobs being lost?
Yes and no, and vice versa. Some people want jobs, and some people are clearly signaling that they do not want jobs. As the president has repeatedly said, he will not be satisfied until everyone who wants a job has one, and based on the president’s demeanor, it should be obvious to everyone where things stand.
Yes, the unemployment rate could soar as high as 9 percent, but this is only because of all the new jobs that the president’s tax cuts are going to create. Any day now. That’s the downside of job growth that you never hear about — if news ever got out that someone was hiring, then the next thing you know 23.6 million overlooked people could suddenly say, “You know, maybe I don’t want to live on air after all.” Then they’d swell the labor pool — and that’s just rude. So if the job news was more favorable, things would actually be worse. Fortunately, the job news isn’t favorable at all.
Why doesn’t the president talk about the federal deficit at these economic policy events?
As the president pointed out about corporate CEOs, “Some of our citizens forget to tell the truth.” Condemning forgetfulness in the most tepid terms possible, the president acknowledged that it had “affected the psychology of the country.”
So anyway, about the deficit?
The deficit is being dealt with, by means of a three-pronged plan:
Prong 1: Eliminate or cut back 128 programs that provide housing assistance, child care and other social services to the working poor. This will reduce the deficit by up to one (1) percent — yet without causing any adverse effects on voters earning as little as $500,000 a year or more.
Prong 2: Increase the number of people willing to say things like, “Deficits don’t matter. Whether it’s $500 billion up or down, it really doesn’t make any difference, because we will always have deficits.”
Prong 3: Stick a fork in us. We’re done.
When the president said, “The facts bear me out,” to what facts, if any, was he referring?
Thank you again, rejected applicant, for your interest in this event. We look forward to ignoring you many more times between now and November. You look tired. You should stay home then. It’s not like you have to go to work.
This week war hawks and Bush supporters have jumped all over former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s allegations that the Bush-Cheney White House started planning the invasion of Iraq the week it took control of office — long before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks transformed U.S. foreign policy. In some respects, O’Neill’s claims aren’t big news; it’s widely understood that throughout the 1990s key members of President Bush’s administration were eager to depose Saddam Hussein, unilaterally if need be. But O’Neill’s critics can’t seem to settle on whether he’s a smart but out-of-touch policymaker or simply a disgruntled former employee out for revenge.
Libertarian Republican blogger Daniel Drezner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a former international economist for the U.S. Treasury Department, says O’Neill may be somewhat off the reservation with his allegations but they still have “the ring of truth.”
“Paul O’Neill is a smart guy, but do bear in mind that he was a pretty lousy Treasury secretary when he was in charge. The day he left, I wrote the following:
“O’Neill’s fundamental strengths were his intelligence and his willingness to say what he thought even if it roiled markets and politicians. His fatal flaw was that he knew he was intelligent, and therefore never considered the possibility that he could be wrong…
“My point is not to claim that all of O’Neill’s criticisms can be dismissed in a single stroke. He’s clearly a smart person, and no doubt some of his criticisms have the ring of truth. My point is to remind people that O’Neill brings some baggage that he brings to the table — and that even smart people can let that baggage overwhelm them…
“[O'Neill's] revelations sound sexy, but they’re pretty overblown… In early 2001, peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth were not merely under discussion by neocons that might have wanted to invade Iraq, but by policy wonks across the board. At the time, the Washington consensus about the Iraq policy was that the status quo was an untenable situation…”
Drezner backs up his argument with firsthand experience:
“A lot of meetings were being held about ways to rejigger U.S. policy … as a sanctions expert, I participated in one such bipartisan meeting chaired by Richard Haass [former advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell] in the early days of the transition…”
But oddly, Drezner then turns completely against O’Neill:
“The larger point is that Haass and [Colin] Powell [who were working to ease sanctions against Iraq early in the Bush administration] had the upper hand on Iraq policy — until September 11th. Clearly, after 9/11, Bush changed his mind. But to claim that George W. Bush planned to invade Iraq from day one of his administration is utter horses&$t.”
Responding to Drezner’s post, one anonymous blogger laughs off O’Neill’s claims, adding that the former treasury secretary’s evidence of an early Iraq invasion plan inside the Bush White House doesn’t hold up.
“‘Ideology and electoral politics’ dominating the White House policy process? Shocking! I’ve always found that ‘ideology’ is a code word for ‘ideas that one doesn’t agree with.’ The other side in a debate is always mired in ideology, while one’s own P.O.V. is always based entirely on — what was O’Neill’s felicitous phrase? — careful reasoning based on the facts (I’m paraphrasing here)…
“O’Neill’s claims … really collapse when you examine that Iraqi oil document waved by Suskind in the ’60 Minutes’ interview. It’s part of a series of energy-policy documents analyzing oil reserves throughout the Middle East, including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Are Suskind/O’Neill claiming that Bush planned to attack them as well?”
(That blogger’s comment has a link to the right-wing “Power Line” blog, which in turn points to an analysis of the “energy-policy documents” in question by the American Enterprise Institute’s Laurie Mylroie. For her part, Mylroie was an ardent supporter of the Iraq invasion and long promoted the theory — yet to be proved — that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.)
Yet, O’Neill sounded oddly naive this week when he expressed surprise that the well-oiled Bush political attack machine would come after him once he went public with his allegations. Dallas-based conservative Bruce Bartlett, a former Treasury Department official and policy analyst during the Reagan and George H. Bush administrations, did exactly that, pummeling O’Neill’s track record and demeanor.
“Mr. O’Neill would have us believe that he was the only honest man in an administration of sycophants. Another interpretation would be that he was simply ill-suited to the job he had been given, too used to being the boss and incapable of taking direction, too interested in doing things his own way instead of the way his boss wanted them done, and too easily led to believe that outspokenness is the same thing as honesty.
“Even without the details made public in this book, we know that Paul O’Neill was not a very effective Treasury secretary. Looking through my files I find headlines like these from his tenure:
‘All Thumbs at Treasury,’ Washington Post (5-20-01)
‘Mr. O’Neill’s Gaffes,’ Washington Post (8-1-02)
‘Treasury Secretary Gets Into Hot Water on U.S. Cuba Policy,’ Wall Street Journal (3-15-02)
‘O’Neill Solidifies Maverick Status With Public Jabs at Bush Policies,’ Wall Street Journal (3-18-02)
“On Oct. 2, 2001, the New York Times had this to say: “Mr. O’Neill’s erratic statements have sometimes rattled investors and marginalized him as a policymaker and spokesman.”
Perhaps the headlines don’t tell the whole story, but Bartlett hopes to let that single line from the Times sum up O’Neill’s tenure:
“You get the idea. Yet O’Neill never improved. He continued to go out of his way to be out of step with the Bush Administration, both substantively and stylistically, right up until the end. The only question is why he wasn’t fired sooner.
“Mr. O’Neill may think he is getting revenge on a president he believes treated him shabbily. But I think that all he has really done is remind people of why he never should have been named Treasury secretary in the first place.”
It’s still the economy, stupid
In addition to his allegations about Iraq, Paul O’Neill blasted the Bush administration this week for its fiscal hubris. Not only did President Bush cave in to the “corporate crowd” when it came to fighting white-collar crime, he said, Vice President Dick Cheney shot down O’Neill’s warnings in November 2002 about the perils of big deficit spending. O’Neill said Cheney told him, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” O’Neill was ousted from the administration a month later.
While the flat-footed U.S. economy probably isn’t in bad enough shape at this point to do real harm to Bush’s reelection campaign (financial luminaries including Alan Greenspan have warned that over the long term soaring budget deficits can doom an economic expansion), it is precisely the administration’s exploding deficit that’s causing deep displeasure among some of Bush’s ostensible supporters. Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, says Republicans have resorted to cynical politics:
“At this point, I think that conservatives sold out their small government philosophy and replaced it with a philosophy of whatever will get them re-elected. Neither party is committed to smaller government and less spending. Those who are still standing for fiscal conservatism are frustrated. [We're] searching for ways to stop the spending spree [in Washington].”
For Edward H. Crane, president of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, the administration’s free spending goes beyond frustration — it’s an issue of betrayal, with long-term consequences.
“It’s safe to say that there is tremendous dissatisfaction and a kind of dawning on people that Bush is not interested in smaller government,” he said. Crane rebukes President Bush for “the philosophical collapse of the GOP,” noting that Bush campaigned for office in 2000 without promoting a single spending cut. “There is going to be a real battle for the soul of the Republican party in 2008, because the free-market types, the limited government types, realize they have been sold a bill of goods with Bush. And they are not going out without a fight.”
In the January/February issue of Mother Jones magazine, Stephen Moore, president of the anti-tax Club for Growth and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, also spanks President Bush for abandoning the Republican Party’s roots.
“We have succeeded in making Republicans anti-tax, but we haven’t succeeded in making them anti-big-government. [Bush] is worse than any president since Johnson on spending.”
And right-wing provocateur and GOP power broker Grover Norquist isn’t far behind Moore. He says one of his goals is to hack away at the federal government and “get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
Bush has said he’ll spend what it takes to get the job done in Iraq — but while Norquist concedes that “wars are expensive and dangerous” and “not political winners,” he warns that massive deficit spending could ultimately cost the president and the GOP their true conservative base. “At some point,” he says, “it becomes a deal breaker.”
Securing the nation’s borders, or securing the Hispanic vote?
President Bush’s new plan to grant visas to millions of illegal immigrant workers also riled conservatives this week — but again, there was dissent among the ranks. While a number of analysts and pundits have called the policy a calculated move to shore up the Hispanic vote for Bush’s reelection bid, others are applauding it as visionary, including New York Post columnist John Podhoretz:
“President Bush [has] proposed a far-reaching, innovative and compassionate revision of American immigration policy. It instantly drew predictable howls from those who fear the economic and social costs of immigration, and inadvertently comic howls from Democrats and moans of disappointment from liberal Hispanics who reacted with barely concealed rage at the prospect of Bush making profound inroads into the 2004 Latino vote…
“Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it appeared that President Bush was going to dedicate a significant amount of his foreign-policy time to building ties and economic relationships with Mexico — so that he would have a partner in trying to deal with the costs of illegal immigration here at home and the possibilities of a trans-border economic approach to the problem.
“Those foreign-policy ambitions were put on ice by the War on Terror. But it should surprise no one that Bush has returned to the issue of immigration. He believes what he said yesterday: ‘Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans are not filling. We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane.’
“And he believes deeply, and correctly, that a Republican Party that continues to lean toward a position of hostility toward immigrants and immigration is a party that will not prosper and prevail in the 21st century.”
But Washington Times columnist Diana West is much less sanguine.
“This sounds an awful lot like ‘amnesty’ for those who are here illegally, and ‘welcome’ to those who haven’t made the trip. The plan sends a ‘mixed message’ at best, as Michael Cutler, a former special agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, told CNN’s Lou Dobbs. ‘On the one hand, we don’t want you to run the border, but on the other hand, if you do, we’ll let you work here and we’ll do everything we can to make it convenient for you.’ He worries that a ‘human tidal wave’ will wash over our borders ‘if this becomes the way we do business.’
“All of which sounds like a good way to ensure that the government never gains control of the nation’s borders…”
Rather than address the much broader implications of officially folding millions of key workers into the U.S. economy, West trades on fear of terrorism to make her case.
“While victories in the war on terrorism have been won abroad, the threat remains at home. Extending this form of amnesty to illegal aliens in this country, not to mention increasing the numbers of foreign nationals eligible for entry, would only seem to elevate the risk to the country’s domestic security. As the 35 congressmen pointed out in their letter to Tom Ridge, Mahmoud Abouhalima was an illegal alien granted amnesty in 1986; he used his legal status to join the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. Not that amnesty is the plan’s only peril: What is to prevent Islamic terror networks, many of which are known to be operating in Latin American countries, from infiltrating the president’s guest-worker program?”
And the president’s plan caused Pat Buchanan, career xenophobe and columnist for the right-wing Web tabloid World Net Daily, to unleash a predictably racist, fear-mongering tirade.
“Bush is not only rewarding wholesale criminality, he proposes to legalize it. His amnesty will send this message to the world: The candy store is open, and the Americans cannot protect it. Now is the time to bust in.
“As there must be billions of people willing to come and work for a fraction of our minimum wage — and exploit our social safety net — the number who could come under the Bush guest-worker program is almost infinite…
“And every child born of a guest worker would, under our 14th Amendment, become an American citizen, automatically entitled to all the benefits of citizenship. Meanwhile, Bush’s amnesty will do nothing to halt the illegal invasion that continues to this hour. If you would know what America’s social, cultural and fiscal future will look like, take a ride through Los Angeles, capital of Mexifornia…
“Half a century ago, Dwight Eisenhower, informed there were a million illegals in the United States, most of them from Mexico, ordered them sent back. The project was called ‘Operation Wetback.’
“Ike was a strong president. But in George W. Bush, we have a leader unwilling to pay the political price of doing his duty and enforcing the immigration laws of his country, because he fears the reaction from the media elite and Mexican Americans.”
Following Diana West’s cue, Buchanan designates the president’s new immigration plan a greater threat to American security than even the war in the Middle East.
“When it comes to standing up to truly powerful ethnic lobbies — the Hispanic Lobby, the Cuban-American Lobby, the Israeli Lobby — Bush wilts and folds every time. Nor is it a healthy sign for the future of our republic when its president offers an amnesty to law-breakers, rather than doing his painful duty to protect his country from what has now become an unstoppable foreign invasion.
“The real threats to America’s survival do not come from the Sunni Triangle. They come from within, and unfortunately we have a president who either does not understand them or will not look them in the face.”
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Read more of “Right Hook,” Salon’s weekly roundup of conservative commentary and analysis here.
Take this simple health test:
Do you suffer from persistent recession?
Do you experience a burning sensation in the portfolio?
Have you ever had the feeling that someone wanted to keep records of your library books, tap your phone, or seize your property without cause?
Do you have hallucinations in which an Austrian bodybuilder is running for governor of the world’s fifth largest economy?
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, you may have contracted EDD, Economic Deficit Disorder.
Hi, my name’s Joyce McGreevy. I’m not an actor or I’d be running for office too. Three years ago, I was struck down by a debilitating catastrophe. It was November 2000, I’d left my options open, and someone brutally assaulted my national election. Overnight, my once happy life became a living nightmare. It cost me my livelihood, eroded my ability to experience civil rights, and even threatened the fiscal health of my children and unborn grandchildren.
I thought I was alone. Then I found out about a national network called Citizens Anonymous and met millions of people just like me. Just knowing that many of us suffered the same injuries boosted my uptake of serotonin. But it didn’t last. I just couldn’t hand my life over to a Higher Power. Besides, no one could decide if that meant John Ashcroft or Karl Rove.
So I left Citizens Anonymous and checked myself into the Elaine Chao Clinic for Infectious Unemployment. Like countless others on the donor list, I was hoping to qualify for a job transplant. What I witnessed there was not for the squeamish.
A 47-year-old college instructor was given the part-time hours of an 18-year-old Slurpee clerk. Thousands of factory jobs perished during a re-sect that left one CEO with a grossly enlarged bonus. A mom and pop of a former mom-and-pop bookshop were dragged out of bed every day and ordered to spend to keep their children from going into irreversible anti-consumerism. A 61-year-old woman was rushed in for a radical pensionectomy following loss of blood flow to her insurance agency. Countless others on the donor list succumbed to terminal bleakness when their jobs were airlifted to other countries.
Meanwhile, my condition worsened. Diagnosed with an occluded cash flow, foreclosure of the domicile, and a cyst on my résumé, I was treated with a mild application of disdain and released. With little hope of a cure, all I wanted was relief.
That’s when my spin-doctor recommended Taxium.
So easy to swallow it only takes 231 members of Congress to shove it down your throat, Taxium has a bitter aftertaste that lasts for generations.
How does Taxium work?
This miracle compound, now 99 percent compassion-free, coats the brain in a thick, protective layer that inhibits painful critical thinking and replaces it with irrational optimism. Just look at this abstract from the Journal of the American Maniacal Association: “With regular use of Taxium, patients who previously showed difficulty just trying to pronounce the word ‘nuclear’ developed ease in articulating such bromides as ‘We believe that the tax relief plan we have in place is robust enough to encourage job growth.’”
Before Taxium, I couldn’t even look at our nation’s disastrous economy without retching in fear. But now that I’m on Taxium, I’m able to see that offering no viable initiatives for improving the economy is actually the best federal policy since, well, since the hemorrhaging of one million jobs after the nation was pronounced “in recovery.”
That’s right, it turns out I was in recovery and didn’t even know it! Admittedly, I still can’t feel any sensation in the job sector, but thanks to Taxium, I occasionally get a phantom itch where the jobs used to be. And while some people dismiss that as cancer of the prospect, I say it’s a sure sign of impending growth.
“Jobs and growth, jobs and growth.” It’s the mantra I chant every morning as the medicine courses through my deteriorating infrastructure. Thanks to Taxium, I feel confident that any day now the pattern baldness of the national economic landscape will start sprouting jobs faster than you can emerge from a meeting with top economic advisors Treasury Secretary John F. Snow and Joshua B. Bolten, the new White House budget director, and announce, “We believe it is more likely in the upcoming year that people are going to be able to find a job, and that’s exactly what — where we focused our policy.”
Yes, the focusing of unspecified policy, developed at the What-Where School of Psycho-Economic Medicine, on the afflicted regions of the body politic is ongoing even as we speak. No, wait a minute; the speaking is pretty much it. But haven’t you ever caught an old rerun of “Marcus Welby, M.D.” in the middle of the night and thought, “Hey, thanks to all that pseudo-diagnostic dialogue, and the vague references to candy-coated placebos I feel like going back to sleep now”? Exactly.
That’s the beauty of Taxium, my friend. So what if the only significant job growth is a Snow job, complete with company bus and a tri-state sales territory for peddling shoddy excuses? With Taxium in your system, that nasty condition will feel as if something positive is happening. And if you squint your eyes and look at the economy upside down, it will appear every bit as beautiful as a $2,000-a-plate fund-raiser juxtaposed with a cancelled voucher for the school lunch program.
But wait, there’s more. Thanks to Taxium, I prevented my own convulsive episode this very morning when George Bush finally checked in on us here in Oregon — the state that leads the nation in unemployment and hunger — as part of a caring economic plan to ask us for money. Money to be used, not for job creation, education or healthcare, but as a down payment on four more years of his proven commitment to nurturing a massive deficit. Good thing I always carry an emergency kit of Extra-Strength Taxium, a fifth of Thunderbird, and a sledgehammer for my carotid artery. Ah, that feels better.
Of course, Taxium is not for everyone. Do not take Taxium if you are pregnant or exist as the result of a pregnancy. In the event of a heart condition, up the dosage until it ceases to be a factor. For maximum benefit, supplement Taxium with diet, exercise, and a place on the Fortune 500.
Side effects from Taxium may include loss of function, housing, motor skills and motor vehicle, military fatigue, blackouts, and hypersensitivity to the continuing employability of Stephen Glass, Anna Nicole and the guy in the Verizon Wireless commercial. Some Taxium users may experience difficulty swallowing a pretzel, making it all the more unlikely that they will be able to digest economic realities or read the handwriting on the wall.
Isn’t it time you tried Taxium? Your free trial is already on its way and operatives are standing by to shut down whatever resources might still remain. With Taxium, you’ll learn how to double your productivity and still end up unemployed. How to operate a household on 60 percent less. How to exert overtime while keeping your salary level at recommended minimums. And if you’ve already lost your job, with Taxium you can still pay proportionately more taxes than major corporations. Best of all, you’ll develop the unshakable belief that things are actually getting better.
So take Taxium today. Start kidding yourself tomorrow.
(“Brad,” on the phone at the Office of Management and Budget)
Hi, It’s me. Yeah, I’m at the office, doing the numbers thing. It’s been quite a day. Do you remember that $127 billion surplus we were all wondering how to use? Yeah, only two years ago. And how OMB had estimated the surplus would be $334 billion by now?
Well, it’s the darnedest thing. We just released new figures showing a deficit. Yeah, that’s right, a deficit. Oh, about $455 billion. Hello? Are you there?
Listen, it’s not really that bad. Well, yes, if you want to get all technical about it, it is “the biggest budget deficit in history.” But it’s not like the deficit is stuck. Next year, it’ll hit $475 billion, and at this rate, we project the national debt will be more than $5 trillion in only five years. Hey, five in five. Kind of has a ring to it.
It’s sort of a weird coincidence, though, because back in 2000 — you know, during the mock election — everybody was looking forward to a decade of surpluses totaling — you guessed it — $5 trillion … Yes, I suppose it is a bit of a turnaround, but we came up with a solution. From now on any time someone asks us to cite specific figures, we’re supposed to say, “Give or take $5 trillion.”
Still, it could have been worse. See, what we did was, we used the current surplus in Social Security to hold the debt figures down to only … oh right, $455 billion. But, if you look at it another way, that represents only 4.2 percent of the whole economy.
Of course, if we hadn’t counted Social Security, people would have seen right away that the deficit is actually closer to 6 percent of the economy. That would probably bum them out a little bit, since even during the Great Depression the deficit averaged only 3.5 percent of the economy.
Another thing we did, we looked at the $8 billion a year that normally gets set aside for federal disaster relief, and we said, “You know what, guys? Screw it. Why should we spend all that money for things like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters? Who needs them?” So we knocked that off the total and, this brought it down to … uh — right, right, $455 billion. Do you have to keep saying that? You make it sound so negative.
Anyway, we’re having this meeting, coming up with all these ways to tweak the numbers, and then one of our creatives says, “Hey, I know. What if the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan were all wrapped up by, say, two months from now? That could happen, right?” So that gave us another $5 billion a month we could leave out of the report.
Wait, it gets better. We knew we couldn’t make defense spending go away completely — and why would we want to? — so we decide to pretend that after defense spending inexplicably falls, it will then start to rise, but only by a little bit at a time. How? I get out my calculator, click in a few billion here, add a few billion there, times 52, plus my lucky lottery number, carry the billion, zero zero zero, zero zero zero, zero zero zero, and — yada yada yada — defense spending will increase by only $3 billion throughout all of 2005.
Yeah, I don’t really know how I did it either, but everybody loved it.
Sure, sure, I know that in “the real world,” as you put it, defense spending rose by $43 billion in 2002 and then by $76 billion in 2003. What’s your point?
Anyway, I’m not done yet. OK, we had the numbers, and the numbers were looking really sweet. But we needed something more. Something persuasive. So we asked ourselves: What can we say to make a bad deficit sound better? Call it “manageable.” Then we asked: If that doesn’t work, how can we make the deficit sound like it’s somebody else’s fault? Have Republicans call it “spending driven.”
Well, sure, the Republicans hold the majority in the House, but I still don’t see what … And in the Senate too. Fine, fine … As a matter of fact, I can tell you just how spending-driven it is. According to OMB, spending in 2003 will equal 20.6 percent of the economy … What’s that? You say that spending from 1962 through 2001 also averaged 20.6 percent. I did not know that. Huh. Now, may I finish?
This is my favorite part — we announced that all the tax cuts had nothing to do with the worsening of the budget outlook. Even though [rapid, incoherent mumbling and sudden drop in volume].
Oh, sorry, what I said was: Even though [mumble, mumble] …
I SAID … [sigh] … Even though the tax cuts will mean a slight revenue loss. Alriiiiiight, $3.7 trillion. Are you happy now? Geeze, you’re such a stickler.
Anyway, you’re missing the big picture here. If you squint both eyes and then peer through rose-colored glasses as you review the report, it creates the illusion that the stalled economy will suddenly shift into overdrive at an annual growth rate of 4 percent.
Meanwhile, the deficit will seem to level off beginning sometime around, oh, the next election year, but it won’t last … Well, because after 2008, the baby-boomers start retiring, and we’ll be feeling the effects of further tax cuts and the repeal of the estate tax. As retirement rates speed up, we’re going to need a mint-load of revenue to pay for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But by then the deficit will be growing again. And that’ll cause higher debt, which will hike up government interest payments on the debt, which will drive up interest rates on everything else.
Yeah, it’s going to get ugly after 2009. So you know what we did? We stopped the budget projections in 2008. Thanks, I like it too.
Hey, I gotta go. Josh Bolten, the new budget director, just e-mailed me a memo. Something about exercising “serious spending discipline.” Nah, I wouldn’t sweat it. I think he’s mostly talking about cutting back on extras, like the infrastructure, education, law enforcement, access to healthcare, stuff like that. I wouldn’t worry. Josh says all we need to do is stick with our “pro-growth economic policies” … Well, just because they haven’t worked, doesn’t mean that they won’t work. Hey, speaking of work …
Well, I’m telling you, just keep pounding the pavement and sending out those résumés because any day now there will be jobs all over the place … Oh, c’mon, who really expects unemployment to stay at 6.3 to 6.5 percent through next year? … Well, besides the Federal Reserve …
Yes, I know you’re desperate to find a job, sweetie, and believe me, Daddy wants you to find one real soon, maybe two jobs … Yes, and your little brother too. And the twins. That’s right … You’ll all find jobs and then you’ll grow up and all your kids will find jobs, and all their kids will find jobs, and if you’re real, real frugal, pretty soon we won’t need to have any more talks about the Big, Bad Deficit. All better now?
Philip Gold, a former Georgetown University professor who worked on Steve Forbes’ presidential run, says that when he talks to conservatives about the direction of America under President George W. Bush, he senses a clammy, middle-of-the-night kind of fear. “I am getting more and more a sense across the board of enormous apprehension,” he says. “There’s this whole 3 a.m. sense of, ‘What are we doing?’
“Between this recession that ended statistically but not in real life, and all the little lies or fabrications and falsehoods in Iraq and elsewhere that are starting to add up to one big problem, there’s so much diffuse anxiety right now,” he says.
Bush is still beloved by the Republican rank and file, the people who participate in voter drives and turn out on Election Day. Increasingly, though, there’s unease among some of the party’s elders, including veterans of the Reagan and Bush I administration. It’s not principally about Bush’s poll numbers, though they’re going down, or about the 2004 election, though it’s shaping up to be more competitive than most predicted a few months ago. It’s about something more fundamental. Though they don’t like to say it, when they look at the economy and Iraq, they can’t help worrying about where Bush is taking the country.
Bush, with his tax-cutting fervor, Manichean foreign policy rhetoric and disdain for church-state separation, appears to liberals as the apotheosis of Republican conservatism. Yet plenty of Republicans don’t recognize their ideology in Bush’s lavish deficit spending and the grandiose, world-transforming neoconservative foreign policy he’s adopted.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about a new group called the Committee for the Republic, formed to spark a discussion in the establishment about America’s lurch toward empire. Its sponsors include Republican Party loyalist C. Boyden Gray, a lawyer in the first Bush administration. The Journal quoted a manifesto the group is circulating, saying, “Domestic liberty is the first casualty of adventurist foreign policy … To justify the high cost of maintaining rule over foreign territories and peoples, leaders are left with no choice but to deceive the people.”
Republicans, after all, are traditionally averse both to nation building and to the whole idea of humanitarian intervention. Until now, the rise of neoconservatism, a movement dominated by ex-liberals who dream of remaking the world through American military might, has eclipsed such old-school realism (or isolationism), but with American soldiers dying almost every day and the Iraq war costing $1 billion a week, some Republicans are challenging their party’s direction. As George Will wrote in a July 24 Washington Post column titled “A Questionable Kind of Conservatism”: “The administration … intimates that ending a tyranny was a sufficient justification for war. Foreign policy conservatism has become colored by triumphalism and crusading zeal. That may be one reason why consideration is being given to a quite optional intervention — regime change, actually — in Liberia.”
“The neoconservative foreign policy is not the traditional foreign policy of the Republican establishment,” says Lawrence Korb, director of security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. “Bush’s father was kind of the last of the Republican multilateralists.” Under Bush I, he says, “We went in, threw Saddam out of Kuwait, then we went home. The neocons said, ‘No, you should go after and get rid of Saddam.’ Bush 41 was saying, ‘Do we want to get tied down there forever?’”
Establishment Republicans, says Korb, are “very alarmed. What they see, basically, is us spending more than we have and not putting the money away to deal with the coming burst of baby boomers who will be retiring.”
It’s not just so-called moderate Eisenhower Republicans like Korb who worry about Bush. Some conservatives are also fearful. In addition to the Iraq war and the economy, they were already troubled by the USA PATRIOT Act’s erosion of privacy rights, and they’re angry at Bush’s new Medicare prescription drug entitlement, which they see as an intolerable expansion of the federal government.
“At the grass-roots level there is not a great deal of anxiety yet, but a lot of conservative leaders are quite apprehensive,” says Don Devine, vice chairman of the American Conservative Union and former director of the Office of Personnel Management in the Reagan administration. “All of this disturbance [in Iraq] was predictable and predicted. As long as the administration doesn’t believe its own rhetoric on trying to create a Western democracy there and gets out before they get too involved in nation building, it probably can be handled. If the strategy is to stay there until we turn it into a Western democracy, it would be a disaster.”
Devine emphasizes that he’s speaking for himself, not the American Conservative Union, the country’s oldest conservative lobbying group. But he says he’s far from alone as a conservative leader who’s lost faith in Bush’s fiscal and foreign policies. “Many of them were very concerned about getting into Iraq in the first place,” Devine says. “Once it was clear that Bush was going to do it, the conservatives didn’t want to do anything that could jeopardize a military operation, but there was concern the whole time, though it was pretty much muted.”
As for the economy, he says, “Anyone with an economic conservative view of the world has to be quite concerned” about Bush’s spending. “Sure, tax cuts are a good thing, but they’re not everything.
“I think you’re going to see more criticism as time goes by,” Devine continues. “The Medicare drug bill, the largest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society, is very much under criticism. I think it has kind of woken up conservatives to the need to do something about restraining government spending.”
Still, don’t expect an intra-party battle anytime soon. Even those Republicans who are deeply worried about the Bush presidency have little incentive to speak out. “For those who make their livings based on politics and what happens here in Washington, who else are you going to support if you consider yourself either a conservative or a Republican?” asks Charles Peña, director of defense policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “If you go against [Bush], that’s, if not treasonous in a political sense, almost implying you’d prefer to have Bill Clinton back in office or Al Gore running the show.”
Conservative leaders know criticizing Bush jeopardizes their role in the movement. “You have to make a big distinction between the grass roots and the leadership,” says Devine. “The grass roots love him, and that’s another reason why conservatives aren’t very vociferous, because they know their troops aren’t with them.”
Besides, says Gold, the right dreads sounding like the left. He points to the Vietnam era, saying, “By 1966 and 1967, supporting the war was a way of opposing the people who opposed the war. We’re seeing something very similar here with a kind of quiet, ‘give him the benefit of the doubt’ attitude, coupled with a real aversion to sounding like the left.” Republicans, says Gold, think, “We’re against the people who are against Bush.”
Even so, the doubts about Bush that are bubbling up among Republicans show that the aura of omnipotence that surrounded the president just a few months ago is dissipating. Radiant with victory right after the fall of Baghdad, Bush and the neoconservatives who dominate his administration had seemed invincible. Yet as the death toll in Iraq and the deficit in America both shoot upward, neoconservativism has been discredited in the eyes of many. And Bush, says Peña, is now irrevocably tied to neoconservatism. “There’s no going back for him,” he says.
Before the war, Republicans who doubted Bush’s course were aggressively marginalized. “The Bush administration was so sure of itself, so sure that it could handle Iraq, that it was unwilling to listen to those who disagreed with its policy on Iraq,” says John Mearsheimer, an acclaimed foreign policy realist at the University of Chicago. “It dismissed them out of hand as appeasers or fools.” Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Bush I veterans James Baker and Brent Scowcroft all warned against Bush’s course, and all were “tarred and feathered by the neocons,” he says.
Other Republicans were simply caught up in the administration’s confidence. “Before the Iraq war, the feeling was that the United States would go in, get rid of Saddam, lop off a few of the top Baathists, and you would still have a functioning [Iraqi] military and police force,” says Korb. “We could get in and out quickly.
“It was ‘The Best and the Brightest’ No. 2,” he says, referring to David Halberstam’s classic about the intellectual elite who were the architects of the Vietnam War. “All these people with tremendous accomplishment, they let their beliefs in American power and American values carry them away.”
Indeed, says Mearsheimer, Iraq was always about much more than Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons. “Their scheme involved not only Iraq,” he says. “They were talking about democratizing the entire Middle East. Iraq was just the first step, and it was going to have a democratizing domino effect. We were going to transform the Middle East at the end of a rifle barrel. The result would be the disappearance of terrorism and we’d solve the nuclear proliferation problem.”
Instead, says Mearsheimer, Iran has redoubled its nuclear efforts, while North Korea has been unbowed. As Korb points out, former Clinton Defense Secretary William Perry gave an interview to the Washington Post last week warning, “I think we are losing control … It was manageable six months ago if we did the right things. But we haven’t done the right things … I have held off public criticism to this point because I had hoped that the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous.”
Such a threat, coupled with instability in Iraq, “will sober up people who believe in American omnipotence,” Korb says.
“What the Iraq thing has shown is the cost of empire,” he says. “Who’s going to pay for it? Are you going to need a bigger military? Are the American people going to get tired of running this empire and then not fund what they really need to for national security? That’s what happened in Vietnam. We extended ourselves trying to fight Soviet Communist expansionism, and we went into an area where it was really hard to make that connection. We got 579,000 people tied up there, and it turned the American people against defense, so that in the ’70s they wouldn’t even spend what was necessary.”
He sees the current situation imperiling American security at home. “What do we spend on homeland security, roughly $40 billion, and the police and firemen are saying they don’t have enough — the police in New York don’t even have [adequate] communication equipment or protective clothing,” he says. “How much are you spending on Iraq a year? Fifty billion. And at the same time you have these escalating budget deficits.”
None of this means the party is going to rupture or turn on its leader. “The president is hugely popular within the party for tax cuts,” says Peña. “He is in fact a bigger spender than Clinton was, but conservatives love his rhetoric and they seem to be much more forgiving of the implementation of it. Besides, if you’re a well-to-do businessman and you get your tax cuts, you look at your own wallet, and if you are affected positively by this presidency, you may not be 100 percent happy, but you’re going to keep your complaining to a relative minimum.”
Still, there are already small signs that Bush’s power is weakening. On Wednesday, the House voted overwhelmingly to block a new FCC rule that would allow a single company to own television stations reaching 45 percent of American homes, up from the 35 percent cap that exists now, despite Bush’s threat of a veto. The new FCC rule was backed by big media companies, but opposed by a coalition of liberal, religious and conservative political groups.
Meanwhile, Peña suggests that some Republican critics of Bush’s foreign policy want to distance themselves from a political faction that might be compromised. “For people who make their livings in the world of politics, who you get associated with matters,” he says. “If there are people who feel this is going to end up being an albatross around Bush’s neck, and it very well could be, they aren’t going to want to be tainted by that because they have aspirations beyond this administration.
“If we look back a year from now, or six months from now, this July may be a watershed month for this administration and the neocons,” says Peña. “We may be able to point back to July and say this is when it all started to unravel.”
And if Bush does go down, Devine says many conservatives will refuse to be pulled along behind him. “His danger is if he gets in trouble,” says Devine. “When you get in trouble you need the leaders to speak up for you, and the leaders are much less enthusiastic.”
Still, he says, “As long as Bush stays in relatively good political shape, it probably doesn’t make any difference.”
At least, not right now. In the long term, though, Peña says it could lead the party to return to its roots. He compares the Committee for the Republic to the neoconservatives’ Project for a New American Century, which formulated much of the Bush doctrine well before Bush took office.
“A lot of the people who are associated with the neocons got their start by doing the same thing” as the Committee for the Republic, Peña says. “They formed the Project for the New American Century and published their manifesto, ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses.’ You never know when something like that becomes something more than a group of guys meeting to kibbitz over policy.”
If the party turns sharply away from nation building, that bodes ill not just for the reconstruction effort in Iraq, but perhaps for Republican political hopes in ’04. “That rhetoric, as far as the democracy part, I don’t know if even [Bush] believes that,” says Devine. The problem is that the U.S. failure so far to find WMD means that the Bush administration has been forced to emphasize its idealistic, humanitarian motivations for the war. As a result, if Bush pulls U.S. troops out before Iraq is stabilized and the situation there spirals out of control, or anti-American fundamentalists take power, the entire adventure could end up looking pointless — which would be a poison pill for Bush and his party. That’s enough to wake any Republican up in the middle of the night.
