: Bush will need to become a moderate on domestic issues
" Nor can the terror crisis fairly be invoked to an excuse for every hobby-horse that members of Congress have been riding for years. The members citing Osama bin Laden as an excuse for irrelevantly tearing into the national parks in a search for oil or for another tax cut mainly for the rich invite public revulsion at their odious opportunism."
Tom Teepen
Cox News Service
Published Sep 28 2001
ATLANTA -- The terrorist attacks obviously test President Bush's
foreign-policy acumen and skill, but the attacks pose an equal, if less
immediately noticeable challenge to his domestic political abilities, too.
Right now the nation is going through a lovefest of bipartisanship. Republican
House Speaker Denis Hastert and Democratic House Minority Leader
Richard Gephardt are beginning to look like they're joined at the hip.
This won't last, nor should it.
In the large matter of national survival, we must be united, but differences
between the parties, and for that matter within them, will develop over goals,
means and manners. Fine. Debate is our strength, not our weakness. The knife
owes its sharpness to the whetstone.
The president's current approval ratings -- so close to unanimous the dissent
seems a statistical error -- can't stay this far aloft. His father logged approval
ratings in the 90th percentiles after the Gulf War and was voted out of the
presidency a year later. This successor administration knows that patriotic
exuberance can slump, indeed is bound to.
To preserve a majority
Still, the president will need to preserve a reliable working majority to meet the
challenges that have been forced upon the country and, though preoccupied
now with crafting a response to the terrorist assault, the administration soon
will have to return to the scut work of domestic policy as well.
It will be time, then, for Bush to become the moderate that as a candidate he
suggested to voters he was.
Bush, who lost the popular vote, came to office thanks to the unprecedented
intervention of a conservative Supreme Court -- and that by just one vote.
Though naked of any mandate, the administration pushed a firmly conservative
and often divisive agenda -- setting out to breach church-state separation,
pooh-poohing environmental basics, enacting ideology-dictated tax cuts that
favored the richest and skipped the neediest, angling to privatize Social
Security.
For the duration, neither side of the partisan aisle can afford to press its most
vivid desires.
We will have to pick our way though our at-home political issues for the next
several months, if not for the next few years, as carefully was we pick our way
though international issues.
The instinct to excite every difference and exploit every opening, developed in
the recent years of eager culture and partisan war, will have to yield to a new
instinct to cluster around problem-solving opportunities.
Nor can the terror crisis fairly be invoked to an excuse for every hobby-horse
that members of Congress have been riding for years. The members citing
Osama bin Laden as an excuse for irrelevantly tearing into the national parks in
a search for oil or for another tax cut mainly for the rich invite public revulsion
at their odious opportunism.
President Bush enjoys, in the circumstances, the population's overwhelming
good graces and fervent best wishes. That is an asset more powerful than any
weapon in the Pentagon's arsenal.
To keep it, Bush must become the president, not of conservative think tanks
and party angle-shooters but, just as the cliche goes, of all the people.
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