More than Saddam Hussein, Americans fear economic hard times
BY RON DZWONKOWSKI
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
October 13, 2002
To hear the war drums beating along the Potomac River, one would think Iraq is all that matters in this country. That's a distortion fueled by a Washington-obsessed media and what seems to be a Saddam Hussein-obsessed George W. Bush.
Certainly the American people care whether we go to war, and they care very deeply about the American lives that would be laid on the line. But they don't get the urgency. Not when the economy is still faltering, retirement investments are being wiped out, and the health care system seems to be getting more and more screwed up as it gets more and more expensive. Meantime, 41 million Americans are going "bare" -- no insurance -- and hoping they don't get sick. But when they do, we all pay.
It was interesting Monday that in their debate at the Economic Club of Detroit, neither incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Carl Levin nor his Republican challenger in the Nov. 5 election, state Rep. Andrew (Rocky) Raczkowski, identified war with Iraq as the most important issue facing the country, although that's all the Senate has been talking about. Levin said the major issue was restoring the economy. Raczkowski said it was fixing the health care system.
In its most recent statewide survey, Lansing's EPIC-MRA polling firm said Michigan voters listed health care as their No. 1 issue, with the economy and jobs in second place.
In a CBS/New York Times poll released Monday, nearly seven in 10 Americans said Bush "should be paying more" attention to the economy, and that included 51 percent of his fellow Republicans surveyed.
The numbers are pretty grim: 2 million fewer people working today than in January 2001, economic growth at about a rate of 1 percent a year since Bush took office, compared to 3.6 percent in the Clinton years, 3.4 percent when Ronald Reagan was president and 2 percent under the first Bush presidency. The value of stock market holdings, $16.4 trillion in January 2001, has dropped to $11.9 trillion.
A federal budget that 18 months ago was projected to show a $5.6-trillion surplus is now expected to post a $4-billion deficit. The national debt, which was supposed to be reduced to a relatively manageable $36 billion by 2008, is now forecast to balloon to $3.8 trillion -- and that's not figuring in the cost of a war in Iraq and keeping the peace there post-Hussein.
Cynics are suggesting that the beat of the war drums has gotten louder since early September to deflect attention from the economy, which would otherwise be the major issue in the Nov. 5 elections. That doesn't take a great deal of cynicism based on the evidence to date about the imminence of danger from Iraq. White House strategist Andrew Card even compared the war-on-Iraq push to a new product launch. Plainly, Bush would rather talk about a war he can win with a few bold strokes than an economy that isn't going to bounce back with an enforced "regime change."
For Bush, the election stakes are high. If Republicans can hold on to the House and pick up a Senate seat, the president will have a GOP-controlled Congress that may actually enable him to accomplish some things in the two years before he's up for re-election. If the Democrats take the House -- they need six seats -- or hold on to their one-vote Senate majority, Bush will find himself in a two-year stalemate on just about any major issue except war -- when everyone falls in line behind the commander in chief. In 2004, if the economy is still stalled and Hussein is still in Baghdad, that ranch in Crawford, Texas, may be looking pretty good to the president.
Hard to fault the political strategy. But the American people don't seem to be buying it. Rather, they are wondering why Bush and Congress aren't doing more about the economy -- and they seem to have given up on health care reform, or even a prescription drug program for the elderly.
There is a huge disconnect that Levin, Raczkowski and other candidates are sensing between Washington and places such as Michigan, where people are worried about their retirement savings and their kids' college plans, where they are avoiding the health care system as much as possible, where they are wondering whether the government could do more to protect their jobs from foreign competition.
Mind you, everyone believes that Hussein is a bad guy and would like to see him run out of Baghdad. In hindsight, most of us can probably agree that George I should have finished him off as the coup de graceof Operation Desert Storm.
But he is not today what is scaring America.
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RON DZWONKOWSKI is editor of the Free Press editorial page. You can call him at 313-222-6635, or write him in care of the Free Press editorial page, or via e-mail at dzwonk@freepress.com.
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