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CIAO DATE: 8/01
The First Hundred Days
On The Issues
May 2001
Newt Gingrich and John O'Sullivan argue that President Bush is an effective manager but that his goals for America require more than sound management principles; he must create a shared commitment with the public to implement his bold proposals.
Presidents Who Aim High
By Newt Gingrich
As analysts dissect President Bush's first hundred days, the most important thing to remember is that he and his administration are different from what Washington has become used to. Because Bush works in a disciplined way to implement a broad strategy, he has been able to set the stage calmly and methodically for a potentially far-reaching performance.
Not insignificantly, the biggest changes in Washington have been cultural rather than political: The atmosphere is more businesslike, and dialogue across party lines is calmer. President Bush has already been able to change the tone dramatically, even after the thirty-five-day, often toxic fight over the election. He has been friendly, flexible, open, and very conservative—though no reporter seems to be capable of typing those four adjectives in one sentence. Bush is willing to delegate important initiatives and decisions and give credit to others.
The president remains focused on the themes he campaigned on: cutting taxes, reforming education, expanding access to health care while reforming Medicare, creating personal Social Security accounts, and strengthening our military and intelligence capabilities. The only new theme to emerge in the first hundred days is the concept of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Labor unions and the Democrats in Congress will create the opportunity and the political necessity for President Bush to engage the Hispanic community to help build real commitment to the free trade area. The debate is likely to combine diplomatic, economic, and political factors and will enable the Bush administration to demonstrate its commitment to free trade while emphasizing the benefits to citizens in all of the Americas.
Engaging the Public
President Bush has assembled an exceptionally competent, mature, and experienced team, but while the strength of his cabinet and advisers is their ability to remain focused on large goals, they face the challenge of creating a shared commitment with the American people. Undoubtedly, the Bush team can manage the daily government and meet international challenges. The question is whether it can reach out to the country and arouse the level of support his bold proposals will require.
The Bush team is still wrestling with the objective reality that this is not a Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan era of obvious change. F. D. R. had the Great Depression and the Second World War as backdrops. Ronald Reagan inherited economic decay and the most intense Soviet effort to win the cold war. These were great administrations, but they were in times of response to great events.
Bush has been effectively barnstorming the country for his program, and this tactic is clearly working for him personally, but it may or may not be working for his programs. People see his steady activity and are impressed that he is a serious person with a real plan. Still, they are not yet convinced that they have something real at stake or that his solutions to public policy problems could dramatically change their lives for the better. Consequently, the public hasn't become engaged and hasn't put pressure to bear on Congress to get the Bush program passed.
Dwight Eisenhower was very effective in managing the system, but in the end he transformed neither his party nor the country in domestic policy. It was Barry Goldwater and Reagan, in the cold war years, who transformed the Republican Party and ultimately the country.
The last Republican president to transform the country and his party in prosperous and peaceful times was Theodore Roosevelt. He did so by knowing the difference between managerial politics and transformational politics. He knew that managing Washington was a minimalist approach. He focused on rallying the country to impose on Washington changes that reactionaries in both parties vehemently opposed.
A transformational presidency has to convince the American people that it is in their best interest to implement its plans. Unless the Bush administration can do this, it will be very hard to get Congress to make transformational changes. The morning the president convinces his party and the country that his goals are decisive in their lives and that they have to join him in insisting that Washington implement them, he will have begun to transform the system.
The environment has been the most obvious public relations failure of the administration so far, and it is also a good issue on which to note the difference between managerial and transformational styles. The Bush administration dislikes the regulatory, adversarial, litigious, government-dominated model of environmentalism that is the hallmark of liberal groups. That wing of the environmental movement is an adversary of business, free markets, private property, and full-time rural residents. It favors bureaucrats, trial lawyers, government control of daily life (what kind of car you drive, what kind of gas you buy, where you are allowed to drive, what you can do with your own farm or ranch), and it favors the affluent transient rural residents who earn a living in places like Hollywood but tell Idahoans and Montanans how to live.
President Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney represent a Western distrust of Washington-controlled, bureaucratic policies. The Bush cabinet includes veterans of state government and business who know full well that the Washington-based environmental bureaucracies are politicized, antibusiness, anti–local rights, and often extreme in the policies they implement. Yet the political climate is such that the Bush team cannot simply ignore the arguments of the most vocal activists in the environmental movement.
This will force a real choice on the Bush administration. A managerial, Eisenhower-style approach would create the most conservative regulatory policies that the current political system could tolerate. It would then grudgingly give the Left those environmental victories it could not block. A transformational, Theodore Roosevelt-style approach would develop a vision of a healthy environment with maximum biodiversity that would attract the support of the vast majority of Americans and would use a high-technology, scientifically based, locally implemented, and cooperative approach to problem solving.
A Moment of Opportunity
The shift from a public presumption of the Left's moral superiority has already occurred in education, health, and Social Security. President Bush can make policy proposals in those areas that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago, like personal Social Security accounts and school choice. Today there is an opportunity for similar transformation on environmental issues.
The key to the first term will be this distinction between a managerial and a transformational approach. President Bush is a good manager, and he has assembled a good team of managers. However, his goals are far beyond the reach of normal management. Achieving his agenda will require the kind of national outpouring of support that is normally aroused by transformational strategies. It will be interesting to see how the two blend together in the second hundred days.
Aims and Eloquence
By John O'Sullivan
Do conservative critics of President Bush—such as I was throughout his campaign for the presidency—not owe him some sort of apology for underestimating him? Has he not been both more commanding and more conservative than we forecast? And is not his "compassionate conservatism" the potential philosophical foundation of a new political majority?
The Bush administration has certainly begun more impressively than most observers on all sides expected. In part this is because Bush is the kind of relaxed personality who is not afraid to surround himself with such highly experienced and competent politicians as Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Powell. The administration accordingly handled a crisis—the Hainan plane standoff—with forethought, deftness, and a disciplined self-restraint; its subsequent decision not to give Taiwan the Aegis system now but to deliver it if Beijing increases the number of missiles aimed at Taipei very neatly forces the Chinese to choose between avoiding escalation and taking the blame for an eventual Aegis sale. If this administration makes mistakes, they are less likely to be minor errors than serious and sustained misjudgments.
It is also a genuinely conservative administration. Of course, it is not as extravagantly conservative as the media regularly suggest. And the frequent suggestions by reporters that Bush is a calculating deceiver who disguised his cold conservatism during the campaign by being amiable to everyone merely reveal that they have a bias toward Gothic fiction as well as liberal politics. Even so, the administration has fought for a substantial tax cut (if an ill-judged one spread over too long a period), it has refused to sign the Kyoto treaty, and it has placed conservatives in senior positions throughout the administration. At the very least, Bush and his house Machiavelli, Karl Rove, appreciate that conservatives are an essential element in the Republican coalition and have to be kept reasonably content.
Three Defining Issues
As the current standing of Ronald Reagan demonstrates, however, the reputation of any presidency is likely to rest on the outcome of two or three major issues. In Reagan's case, these were the West's victory in the cold war, the revival of the American economy, and the associated restoration of America's self-confidence in world affairs. Let me suggest that three issues, none of them at present in the headlines, will retrospectively determine how we judge the Bush presidency.
The first is how successfully he brings the growth of the regulatory state back under democratic control. At home and abroad, the state extends its regulatory powers in all directions. It determines our use of the environment; it lays down minute rules for workplace behavior; it seeks to regulate our lifestyles to improve our health; it affects recruitment, promotion, and remuneration in all but the smallest companies; increasingly it regulates free speech. Yet this regulatory state increasingly exempts itself from democratic control by transferring decision-making power from elected bodies to the courts, federal agencies, and international organizations. International lawyers argue that U.S. courts are bound to interpret the law in the light of even those treaties the United States has refused to ratify. And recent treaties like Kyoto and the Law of the Sea seek to establish bodies to regulate international economic activity. If these trends continue unchecked, then democracy, market freedom, and U.S. sovereignty will all suffer. But opposing them would be highly controversial since they are deeply entrenched in international (and especially European) politics. To do so, Bush must not only curb judicial power and resist the spread of international regulation, but also vigorously preach the virtues of the low-tax, low-regulation model of a free economy and demonstrate its superiority over the EU's regulated "Rhineland" model. Making his case will be an economic version of the long cold war.
The second issue is whether Bush will be able to halt the drift toward an America Balkanized into ethnic, cultural, and linguistic tribes. Perhaps it is wrong to call this a drift; it is in fact a government-enforced stampede. From the imposition of race and gender preferences in college admissions to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's campaign to inflict "language rights" in the workplace, the state is fostering a divided and difference-conscious society. The binding concept of an inclusive American identity founded on a common language and culture—though it still has the support of the great majority of Americans, including minority Americans'is regarded as oppressive by political, cultural, and governmental elites. Ethnic and racial resentments are on the rise; the economy is suffering, as merit becomes less important; cynicism and a culture of lies are taking hold, as the concept of equal opportunity becomes increasingly debased.
Unfortunately, Bush may be on the wrong side of this issue. He has equivocated on racial preferences and supported bilingualism. Although his motives are doubtless honorable, the effect of his policies is the opposite of inclusionary; the longer they persist, the more they promote division in U.S. society and weaken its solidarity in the face of external challenges. And, incidentally, because difference-conscious policies intensify ethnic grievances, they help the Democratic Party politically.
The third issue is whether Bush will entrench America's position as the leading world power or preside over the development of a multipolar world in which the United States is, at best, first among equals—and some hostile equals at that. Here a little history may be in order: America's current preoccupation with the rise of China is often compared with Britain's dilemma on how to deal with the rise of the kaiser's Germany. In fact, the dilemma was Germany's, not Britain's. London would have been happy to maintain friendship with a Germany that confined its ambitions to the European continent; it had no choice but to resist a Germany that was plainly outbuilding the Royal Navy and seeking ";a place in the sun." What the British saw clearly was that the rise of Germany compelled them to establish a firm friendship with the United States. From the 1890s onward, they did just that, and as a result Britain and the United States were allies in the twentieth century's two hot wars and one long cold war. On all three occasions, moreover, the British were on the winning side.
Bush should ponder this lesson. The United States can do little about China except to be prepared to wage peace or war as the Chinese decide. Nor can America turn for help to an exact equivalent of the United States to which Britain turned: The North American Free Trade Agreement, even expanded into a hemispheric American Community, would add very little to America's clout. What the United States must do is ensure that it remains the unquestioned leader of a Western alliance that can outpunch any other potential alliance of great powers. That in turn means that America must discourage and, if necessary, prevent the emergence of a single European superpower with a military capacity that matches its economic power. Among the many policies to achieve this—bringing Britain and Eastern Europe into NAFTA, establishing a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area, offering the Europeans greater influence over the development of grand strategy—the most obvious one currently is to delay and obstruct the proposed European Rapid Reaction Force. Again, however, this is an issue on which the Bush administration's trumpet gives forth a decidedly uncertain sound; perhaps too many people are wrestling for control of the instrument.
All three of these major battles will need to be fought philosophically before they can be won politically. They are not occasions for Disraeli's advice that "a majority is always the best repartee." Without strong arguments to generate popular support behind them, the majorities they need will fade away. Thus far, the administration has acted more boldly than it has spoken. On such questions as the Kyoto treaty, it risks falling into the trap, identified by Princeton's Robert George, of being "all action, no talk." It must now roll up its sleeves and speechify.
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, is a senior fellow at AEI. A version of his article appeared in the New York Times on April 29, 2001. John O'Sullivan is the editor-in-chief of United Press International and an editor-at-large of National Review. He is the founder of AEI's New Atlantic Initiative. A version of his article appeared in the May 14, 2001 issue of National Review, and material is reprinted here with the permission of that magazine.
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