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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (71073)	11/12/2000 8:41:12 AM
From: John Carragher	Respond to of 769667

No Appomattox By David Warsh, Globe Columnist, 11/12/2000 he heat of the moment is no excuse for the Democrats to bluster about their incredibly narrow defeat. A court fight is simply unacceptable. Count the remaining votes, and if the standings remain the same, hope that Al Gore finds the strength of character to concede when the waiting period for absentee ballots ends next Friday. What kind of president will George Bush be? A clue is to be found in the speed with which he became the nominee. Having been among the first newspaper columnists to tout a Bush candidacy, I claim further license to speculate. In March 1998, I wrote a cheerful column headlined ''One Way to End an Uncivil War.'' Kenneth Starr had brought forward Monica Lewinsky six weeks before. The outlines of the trap in which President Clinton had been caught were clear. ''It is hard to imagine how the poisonous atmosphere that today afflicts Washington will change. But perhaps it is a little like driving in the mountains. Just when you think there is no way to get out of the valley, a pass appears.'' The way out I had in mind was the candidacy of George W. Bush. He was a centrist, I wrote, at home (if not at ease) with the Republican Right from having successfully governed Texas. If he could gain the nomination, it was just possible that he could carry the South in the next election, and enough of the West and East to win. ''Because he is the son of the man who was `wronged' by the 1992 election,'' the column continued, ''a victorious Bush could behave toward Bill Clinton with the gallantry of Grant at Appomattox. [Appomattox is the Virginia town where U.S. Grant accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender at the end of the Civil War with a memorable declaration: ''Your men may keep their horses. They'll need them for the spring plowing.''] ''Because he is antagonistic towards the GOP splinter group [pursuing impeachment] only along a fairly narrow length of the spectrum (Bush is a free-trading internationalist who favors immigration and national education benchmarks), a Bush presidency could put his own party back on the road to consensus.'' Not entirely! Two important things have changed since that upbeat assessment. The first is that impeachment trial deepened the bitterness to a previously unthinkable degree. The first business of the country became the repudiation of the impeachment managers and, to his credit, Bush tackled the task, banishing them from the Republican convention. Ironically, that necessary diversion made it easier for Gore to compete. A second, more far-reaching wrinkle has developed. In his haste to offer a full suite of policies for the campaign, Bush bought into a number of positions that had been devised for the GOP in the wake of Republican victories in the Congress in the mid-1990s. Much of his economic platform is essentially Gingrich warmed over. Two examples stand out: Bush's tax cut and his promise to privatize Social Security. That the tax cut is a dead letter goes practically without saying. Democrats picked up seats in both the House and the Senate. They'll probably take back both in 2002, if only because of redistricting already in the works. The Social Security proposal is not in any better shape. It was in 1996 that the Social Security Advisory Commission split three ways, shattering the consensus that had protected the program since World War II. The center of debate appeared to be shifting rapidly to the right in those days. Mainstream economists such as Martin Feldstein of Harvard and Edward M. Gramlich of the University of Michigan argued it was time to partially privatize the system. Suddenly a federal income security program that for 30 years had been regarded as the ''third rail'' of American politics (touch it and you're dead) was declared by Republicans ready to be replaced by an individualistic ''personal security system.'' Bush economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey devised a plan that put such a partial privatization at the platform's center. It turned out in the campaign that the appetite for dismantling Social Security was not very widespread at all. Paul Krugman, the economics columnist of The New York Times, complained repeatedly that numbers in the Bush Social Security proposals did not add up. Now we'll see. But can there be any doubt that Bush would have won the election handily if he'd simply pledged to do what Alan Greenspan did for Ronald Reagan in 1982 - organize a commission to restore balance by reducing benefits slightly and making up the rest from revenue? Thus the first thing Bush should do is quietly appoint a ''Team B'' to make a parallax assessment of the outlook for economic policy. Stanford's John Taylor, a plausible candidate to succeed Greenspan at the Federal Reserve Board, would make a good leader. With a little luck, a compromise could be devised that might extract some meaningful concessions from congressional Democrats in exchange for preserving Social Security in its present form. In 1998, George W. Bush seized opportunity with remarkable aplomb. Here's hoping he can do it again in an even more complicated situation. David Warsh's e-mail address is warsh @ globe.com.