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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Backed into a corner on Social Security but still claiming a mandate, Bush seems ready for a barroom brawl.
May 5, 2005 | On the 99th day of his second term, one day short of the fabled 100 days used to mark a president's progress since Franklin D. Roosevelt's whirlwind beginning of the New Deal, President Bush held a press conference to explain how far he had gotten in undoing the New Deal.
Bush had allotted 60 days for a nationwide tour to sell his plan for privatizing Social Security. Insisting that the system was in imminent danger of collapse, he had proposed a vague scheme for carving out private accounts. He did not acknowledge that the deficit, ballooned by his regressive tax cuts for the wealthy, might have anything to do with solvency. Of course, he did not advocate rescinding his top-rate giveaway; nor did he suggest raising the levy on the rich or the limit on income subject to Social Security taxation (currently $90,000), the solutions favored by large majorities of the public. Nor did he propose any detailed plan, though he tried to goad the Democrats into doing so, on his terms. But the more Bush campaigned on his proposal, the less support it received. By the end of his tour, 58 percent disapproved of it and only 35 percent approved, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll.
Rather than admit defeat, Bush upped the ante. He unveiled a new idea at his press conference, "progressive indexing," that would slash benefits for the middle class and affluent, but purportedly not those for the poor. The poll numbers rolled in instantly -- 54 percent disapproved, 38 percent approved. Even Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, lately deposed as majority leader, dismissed Bush's plan as little more than "a welfare system." Indeed, that is its intent.
The day after the 2004 election, Bush claimed that he had achieved a mandate. "When you win there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that's what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as president." Even last week, as Bush was replacing one unpopular Social Security panacea with another, Karl Rove, his chief political advisor, was taking another victory lap, this time in Ohio, to declare before a gathering of Republican faithful that Bush was making a lasting political "realignment."
An autodidact and amateur history buff, the University of Utah dropout has beguiled younger members of the Washington press corps with billowing visions of realignment since 2000. Rove regularly compares Bush's campaign with William McKinley's in 1896, which ushered in a long period of Republican dominance. "A successful party," he told his reportorial transcribers, "had to take its fundamental principles and style them in such a way that they seemed to have relevance to the new economy, the new nature of the country, and the new electorate." The analogy also contains a self-serving implication, with Rove casting himself as the modern version of Mark Hanna, the Republican kingmaker behind McKinley. (Rove's assertions about realignment have always been little more than a press strategy. They may reflect his wishful thinking, but the only actual constituencies he has in mind for this talk are reporters and pundits.)
In the 2004 election, Bush received a legitimacy he did not have from the 2000 election, when he lost the popular vote and was handed the presidency by the Supreme Court -- in a decision notable for Justice Antonin Scalia's claim that counting the votes in Florida would call into question Bush's "legitimacy." But the shift from illegitimacy to legitimacy is not a mandate for realignment. In 2004, the country made a decision by a narrow margin to stick with Bush as a defender against terrorism. Bush won no mandate to dismantle the legacy of the New Deal, and during the campaign he went out of his way to deny he would ever do that. Now a majority of evangelical Protestants who voted for Bush, his strongest constituency, are awakening to his position on Social Security, and they disapprove, according to a Democracy Corps poll. The more Bush openly pushes his agenda, the more his base disintegrates.
In 2004, Rove field-marshaled a campaign of tactical targeting -- focused on anxious working-class women ("security moms"), "faithful" Catholics, evangelicals and white married men. With the launching of the Social Security tour, Rove hoped to duplicate his tactical success, peeling off enough marginal constituencies to frighten a few marginal Democrats into backing the Bush plan, and thereby shatter Democratic unity, force the proposal through, and herald realignment. But the process Rove set in motion during the campaign is now operating in reverse, as distress among evangelicals over a change in Social Security suggests.
Rove's claim to be the advance man of realignment bears superficial plausibility mainly because he was a key operative when realignment in Texas accelerated in the 1990s. But the cards were already dealt there. While his smarmy dirty tricks helped undermine a number of prominent Democrats, and he latched on to the rising star of George W. Bush, Texas was far along in its drift into Republicanism, following the classic Southern pattern on a slightly delayed schedule.
In the first 100 days of Bush's second term, Rove's magisterial vision of realignment, undergirded by the movement of tectonic social forces, is being obviously eclipsed by Tom DeLay's undisguised brutal leadership. The defining sensibility of the Bush administration -- 50 percent plus one equals 100 percent -- is represented by the mindset of the Republican House. Following Majority Leader DeLay's edict, Speaker Dennis Hastert enshrined the operating principle that the "majority of the majority" governs the entire body. The minority has no rights, no consultative role, no say whatsoever.
