 |
THE OBSERVATORY A Whiff of Normalcy January 23, 2001 |
| It's Party Time again ... |
 |
 |
By informal consensus of the media, the period of
mourning for September 11 has ended, and politics is allowed to rear its ugly head once
more. To use the standard cliche, the political landscape has changed entirely since the attack. What exactly it has changed into, though, is still an open question. Obviously it depends on what happens, most of all on the terrorism front. The easy-victory days in Afghanistan are already over. The Taliban has been given a well-deserved boot from power, but we are already beginning to discover the murkiness of Afghanistan -- with some warlords capturing former Taliban honchos only to let them slip away, and disturbing reports that other warlords have manipulated US airstrikes to settle private scores. Still, let's assume the (still fairly probable) best: that bin Laden and "Mullah" Omar are captured or killed, al-Qaeda effectively fragmented, and further terrorist attacks precluded. If these things happen, attention will come back inevitably to matters at home -- where they are not all that great. As I write, Bush's approval ratings have softened very slightly, but are still in the mid-80s. Strikingly, though, an in an early-January poll for the Cook Political Report, only 53 percent said that they would "definitely" vote for Bush. (The rest were about evenly divided between "would consider someone else" and "would definitely vote for someone else.") This would be a surprisingly modest showing for Bush -- except that it isn't really surprising. During the four months since September 11, asking people of they approved of Bush was more or less like asking them if they approved of the American flag. Talk of how he "rallied the American people" is pretty much blather: He didn't have to. Osama bin Laden and the hijackers did that for him. When it comes to creating national unity, there is nothing like having fanatics kill 3000 Americans. This is not like the Kosovo war, fought on behalf of distant strangers and long-term world stability. In that war, Republicans in Congress turned into instant peaceniks, and had to be dragged kicking and screaming even to express "support for the troops." This time, support from pols of both parties was as spontaneous and near-universal as from everyone else. I do have to give Bush due credit for a couple of things. He warned from the outset that this wouldn't all be easy (which was good political sense). He also came down firmly and early against anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice, and the initial wave of hate crimes quickly subsided. He also has (so far) a negative accomplishment: resisting the impulse of Administration hawks to manufacture a war against Iraq. But the media convention of treating Bush as a great wartime leader is otherwise pretty hollow. He has pretty much left for others to explain what we are doing and what our objectives are. A price will be paid for this passivity: his public support is equally passive. Support for getting Osama does not and will not translate into support for another round of giveaways to corporations, or mugging the environment, or the rest of the pre-9/11 (and continuing) Bush agenda. Over every other domestic political issue looms the economy. The recession may be short, but it is not likely to give way to a bumptious recovery. Too much corporate money was tossed around too recklessly, and it will take time to get over "over-investment." For this reason, the Bushters' predictable call for more tax cuts for his well-heeled friends is even more irrelevant than usual. Only consumer spending -- by ordinary people of modest means, who never attended a GOP fundraiser -- will keep the economy going and in time justify new investments by business. Meanwhile -- on the subject of well-heeled friends -- there is the lurking matter of Enron. This will never become "Bush's Whitewater." The Enron crowd is not colorful enough, and too well-connected for a media crucifixion. But unlike Whitewater, which turned out to be very much ado about nothing, the Enron matter is likely to shed a great deal of light on how business is done in both Texas and Washington. So ... as the 2002 political season begins, the prospects for Democrats are actually pretty good. Bush, who has already imitated his father's "read my lips" antitax pledge (in the even more overdrawn form of "over my dead body"), shows every sign of also sharing his father's haplessness when it comes to the economy and domestic concerns in general. And that is what the 2002 election will be all about. Addendum - No sooner had I written the above (a couple of weeks ago, for our county Democratic newsletter) than Enron blowed up real good, all over the front pages. Enron is looking more and more like a truly colossal swindle, possibly the largest in history. Still, I'll hold to my position above, and join the chorus of commentators, such as Joshua Micah Marshall, who suggest that the corruption on the political (read Bush) side involves not bags of money but ideology. The Bush people were not idiots. Once they got phone calls indicating that Enron was tanking, they didn't rush in to save it. Instead they treated it as radioactive. Bush now acts as if he barely knew Ken Lay, previously a close friend not to mention one of the largest - if not the largest - of his big-time campaign contributors. (Bush also told one outright lie, claiming that Lay supported Ann Richards against him for governor of Texas.) The question, though, is about favors done before Enron tanked - and, more generally, a shared outlook. The Bush energy task force was pretty much run by and for Enron and other big Texas energy outfits. Sometimes Enron itself got outvoted, as on the Kyoto accord. (Enron favored it, looking forward to trading "emissions credits." Most of the Houston country club, though, opposed it, and the administration went with the club majority.) Whatever the question, the Bush administration's answer was pretty much in lock step with the opinions of Texas good-ole-boy big bidness. The old ole boys, after all, are the crowd Bush ran with; the ones who saw to it that he failed upward from one dry-hole venture to the next. Thanks to Enron, we are finally finding out how they play the game.
-- Rick Robinson
|
||
Return to Observatory
Back to Top
|
|