It's Good to Be the King
What does the Fourth mean to you, Mr. President?" was the hardball question thrown at George W. Bush this week, as he visited the Jefferson Memorial in search of ordinary citizens and a photo op. The answer: "Well, it's an unimaginable honor to be the president during the Fourth of July of this country." Or, as Mel Brooks might put it (and has): "It's good to be the king."
Mr. Bush's response was a perfect summation of the man we've seen in office so far: The Second Boomer President, a narcissist who can't see past himself.
On the same day as his drop-by at the Jefferson Memorial, Mr. Bush opened another window into his limited, arrogant worldview when he applauded the medical treatment of his vice president. Dick Cheney, the president said, "sets a good example for Americans who may share the same condition he has" about the need "to take precautionary measures." It never occurred to Mr. Bush that 43 million Americans have no health insurance to pay for a device with a price tag of $30,000 (exclusive of installation), or that most other Americans would have to battle their managed-care providers at length and perhaps fruitlessly to win approval for so costly a "precautionary measure." These Americans are not even on his radar screen, which is why he made the blunder of threatening to veto any patients' bill of rights that vexes the H.M.O.'s, which are among his biggest campaign contributors.
The president's polls are down, and Washington, of course, is shocked, shocked. Washington had given Mr. Bush high marks for his amazing feats to date: the largest tax cut in 20 years, mandating school testing, standing up to the Chinese, hobnobbing with the Europeans, wearing a jacket and tie in the Oval Office. What's gone wrong?
One alleged culprit was the supposed liberal slant of the first poll to mark the extent of Mr. Bush's political anemia, the New York Times/ CBS News survey finding the president's job approval rating at 53 percent and the country disagreeing with him on nearly every issue, including the use of the budget surplus for a tax cut. "When I look at The Times's polls, they are generally tilted toward the Democrats," said John Zogby, a rival pollster championed by conservatives, who then added that the Times/CBS poll was "an inaccurate reading [that] doesn't tell me anything." Days later, the Zogby/Reuters poll showed Mr. Bush's job approval number at 51 — two points lower than Times/CBS.
What we have here, big time, is another case of disconnect between the Beltway and the country. In the Clinton years, Washington kept saying that Americans would soon give the president the boot, only to be rebuffed by the president's high job ratings, which were then confirmed by the Democrats' romp in the 1998 election, at the height of the impeachment frenzy. In the Bush years the disconnect has inverted itself: Washington keeps saying that the country is warming to its decent new president, only to be confounded by polls showing what CNN has described as "a slow, steady slide spread out over several months" that is capsizing the G.O.P.'s ratings at an even steeper pace.
Liberals tend to attribute Mr. Bush's decline to what they call his right-wing policies. But it's a measure of how malleable this president is that he has backed away from so many conservative principles with little fight. In just over five months, he has abandoned school vouchers and his opposition to price controls for California energy; he has knuckled under to protests led by Al Sharpton in Vieques; he has embraced the "honest, straightforward" Vladimir Putin as a soulmate, which looks even more foolish now than it did three weeks ago, given Mr. Putin's subsequent betrayal of a U.S.-backed U.N. resolution to retool sanctions against Saddam Hussein.
The real ideology that drives Mr. Bush remains less that of the hard right than that of his soft character, which is a product of a biography full of easy landings. A man who has never faced adversity — who has finessed Andover, Yale, Vietnam and brief careers in business and politics with well-placed connections and sweetheart deals — is not conversant with reality as most Americans have experienced it. The problem isn't that he's wealthy — so were F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, whose hard knocks in life gave them an empathy for their fellow citizens — but that he's out of touch. He doesn't know how much he doesn't know and is in no rush to find out.
What's been farcical about the Bush presidency so far is how quickly his smug policy assertions, and not just about Mr. Putin, are upended almost instantaneously by events or facts (some of them supplied by his own administration). "America in the year 2001 faces the most serious energy shortage since the oil embargoes of the 1970's," read the opening of the Bush energy report, which also warned that skyrocketing energy prices were disrupting family finances. But, as David Sanger and Joseph Kahn pointed out in The Times, a chart in the same administration report showed that Americans spend less than 5 percent of their disposable income on energy costs now, a sizable drop from the 8 percent of the early Reagan years. Nor was the shortage itself real: Gas prices have fallen like Mr. Bush's polls, with everyone from Alan Greenspan to Sir John Browne, the head of BP oil, dismissing talk of a crisis.
A similar comeuppance followed Mr. Bush's insistence that the verdict of science wasn't in on global warming — a stance immediately demolished by a report that the administration itself solicited from the National Academy of Sciences. Last week the president's blind faith in abstinence-only sex education was undermined by the Surgeon General's report, which politely pointed out that only sex education that includes birth control information has any track record of delaying teenage sexual activity.
The administration is studiously ignoring that finding, and presumably it will do the same with the internal Defense Department report uncovered last week by Defense Week. The report reveals that the tests given to Mr. Bush's favorite toy, a national missile defense system, have been overly "rehearsed," rendering them meaningless as indicators as to whether a missile shield could actually accomplish anything beyond busting the budget.
Will Mr. Bush also ignore the National Institutes of Health report on the dazzling medical value of embryonic stem cell research? Our "pro- life" president's position is that adult stem cells can substitute for embryonic stem cells in cures for diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Once again the science contradicts him. Why is Mr. Bush disregarding it?
On this life-or-death decision, political science takes precedence over biological science. Karl Rove, this president's answer to Dick Morris, is worried about losing Catholic votes and offending the pope on the eve of Mr. Bush's visit to the Vatican. But the political science is wrong too. Polls show that most Catholics, just like most other Americans, support embryonic stem cell research. (And if Mr. Bush is so solicitous of the pope, why isn't he reversing his position on the death penalty as well?) It's hard to imagine that any leader in touch with his constituents would waffle as long as Mr. Bush has on a no-brainer decision like this, putting a months-long hold on research that could save countless lives.
As the fine print of the president's poll numbers reveals, the public isn't blind to any of his actions (or non- actions). Only a quarter of the country answers yes when asked if Mr. Bush "has concentrated on problems that matter most to you." Nearly two-thirds think he lied about an energy crisis to reward big oil. As with the last administration, Americans have sized up the strengths and weaknesses of this one well ahead of the press. They salute Mr. Bush for having higher "moral values" than Bill Clinton, but they don't make the Washington mistake of confusing his personal life with his policies.
The White House, meanwhile, continues to hope that we can be suckered by pictures. Never mind that Mr. Bush's recent, sudden tour of national parks failed to convince a single American that he was an environmentalist. By Independence Day, his handlers had him back posing with inner-city black kids again, as they always instruct him to do when polls plummet. We'll know panic has really set in if those kids turn up to blow out his birthday candles this weekend in Kennebunkport.
nytimes.com |
