Bush’s America Is Working
And how. Forty percent of vacationers are in daily—yes, daily—contact
with their offices
msnbc.com
NEWSWEEK
Aug 6. issue — Washington’s conventional wisdom, which
often is the wishful thinking in its media culture, is that
George W. Bush’s presidency is floundering. But as he
passes the six-month mark, only one eighth of the way
through his term, his serenity seems grounded in some
favorable developments.
THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT votes Congress will cast this year
have gone as Bush wished and the media did not. One passed his
tax cut. The other killed campaign-finance reform—the plan for
government rationing of the political speech of everyone except the
media.
A Washington wit called the defeat of that reform in the House
of Representatives a victory for Laura Bush’s campaign to promote
reading. John McCain’s threat to disrupt the Senate unless it acted
on his bill, and Bush’s refusal to say he would veto it, forced House
members to actually read the legislation. Twice before they had
passed it, confident that the Senate would kill it. Suddenly their
vote was more serious than a genuflection toward the pro-reform
editorial writers in their hometown newspapers.
This year’s defeat should let the air out of a reform movement
that is almost all air. Public interest in the issue is negligible. It is
McCain’s hobbyhorse, which he rode to swift defeat in the
primaries. The failure of the almost entirely Washington-based and
media-driven campaign for reform has spared Bush the necessity of
either signing a bill with provisions he has hitherto described as
unconstitutional, or spending political capital on a veto of a
measure beloved by people who buy ink by the barrel—editorial
writers.
His most important defense and foreign-policy
initiative—missile defense—has benefited from the successful test
of an interceptor high over the Pacific Ocean. This instance of “a
bullet hitting a bullet,” each traveling at 4.5 miles per second, came
shortly after an array of leading Democrats reaffirmed as party
orthodoxy the guess that missile defense is technologically
impossible. Imagine what a fuss such people would have made
about the early misadventures of the technologies of steamships,
bridges, railroads, automobiles, airplanes, vaccines.
Democrats also reaffirmed the principle that U.S. security and
international stability are best served by the nation’s forever
remaining completely vulnerable to ballistic-missile attacks. This
may define the most pressing argument of the remainder of this
decade.
The less-than-pressing nature of the current domestic agenda
of Bush’s adversaries is writ large in the argument over the
patient’s bill of rights. If the most important question of health-care
policy is who can sue whom, where and for how much, then there is
no especially important question.
Bush should be thankful for the difficulties he is having
advancing his energy program, because of the primary reason for
those difficulties: there is no serious energy crisis. Not even as
Americans, with their low pain threshold, understand a serious
crisis—gasoline that, although abundant, is not as cheap as it was
20 years ago. Which gasoline now is, having declined in cost for
eight consecutive weeks. The price of natural gas is down two
thirds from earlier this year. So until—but only until—there is a
price spike at gasoline pumps, it will be safe for politicians to polish
their environmental credentials by opposing drilling in places like
the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Meanwhile, with the OPEC cartel curtailing production for the
third time this year in order to increase prices, energy policy should
partly be foreign policy. Irwin Stelzer, an expert in oil markets, notes
that Kuwait possesses about 10 percent of the world’s proven
reserves of oil but accounts for just 3 percent of output. We might,
Stelzer says, relate our support for Kuwait’s defense to the
country’s level of output. Saudi Arabia, like Kuwait, could produce
at current levels from proven reserves for 100 years and could
easily expand proven reserves. The Saudi regime, like Kuwait’s,
survives because of U.S. defense policies.
In this summer driving season, Americans are undeterred by
gasoline prices. In fact, many are driving to avoid the delays and
congestion increasingly associated with air travel. Not that demand
for energy is insensitive to price. Consider California, where energy
doomsday has turned out to be not all it was cracked up to be.
George’s at the Cove, a La Jolla restaurant, jauntily offers a
high-octane martini called a Rolling Blackout. But the real
things—rolling electricity blackouts—have subsided. In fact, the
state suddenly is awash in surplus electricity, which it is selling, at
a loss, in a glutted market.
The state’s mismanagement of energy policy means that
Californians, and even more so their government, will have less
disposable income than they would have had if they had had more
sensible energy deregulation. However, higher electricity prices
have produced quick and substantial conservation by consumers,
which is the essence of Bush’s energy policy in action. And
through it all, California, which also has been hit hard by carnage
among the dot-coms and other tech enterprises, had only 5.1
percent unemployment in June and still continues to dodge a
recession.
In the economy as a
whole, corporate profits have
been shrinking, but that is
partly because wages are
rising, which is one reason
that consumers—whose
spending constitutes two
thirds of America’s economic
activity and whose
confidence rose in
June—have continued to
spend, cushioning the effects
of a slowdown in investment.
Unemployment (4.5 percent)
remains low by historical
standards, and if, as some
analysts expect, by the end of the year it peaks at 5 percent, that
was, just a decade ago, defined as full employment.
About 40 percent of working Americans work even when they
are ostensibly at play: during their vacations they are in daily
contact with their offices, by e-mail from their cabins, by cell
phones from their canoes. This hum of activity may scare away the
trout, but what it means for the president is that America is working. |
