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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: yard_man who wrote (209455)	12/13/2002 12:23:14 PM
From: MythMan	Respond to of 436258

roger!

To: yard_man who wrote (209455)	12/13/2002 12:36:12 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 436258

Bush forced to pay attention to economy By HELEN THOMAS Columnist HEARST NEWSPAPERS Friday, December 13, 2002 seattlepi.nwsource.com WASHINGTON -- The surest sign that the White House was using Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill as a scapegoat for its failed economic policies was the timing of his firing by President Bush. After White House aides had assured O'Neill his job was safe, he was abruptly sacked by Bush and informed of the deed by Vice President Dick Cheney late last week. The announcement of his heave-ho came the same day the Labor Department reported that unemployment had jumped to 6 percent in November, matching the eight-year high reached in April and serving as glaring proof of a troubled economy. O'Neill became the fall guy for the administration's poor economic performance, especially now that the 2004 presidential campaign is in full swing at the White House. A former CEO of the aluminum giant ALCOA, O'Neill had thought he was cozy with his old pal Bush, but he learned the hard way how rough the game of politics is played when presidential stakes are involved. He was the first Bush Cabinet official to be forced out. Bush also bounced Lawrence Lindsey, his national economic adviser, on the ground that he, like O'Neill, was not a good salesman for the president's tax-cut policies. Of course, dumping these advisers does not mean that Bush will abandon his beloved tax-cut panacea for most domestic ills. It will still dominate his economic policy, and the change will come mainly in the cast of characters. One of Bush's long-held rules is that he is not going to make the same mistakes that his father, George H.W. Bush, did. That embedded conviction turned out to be bad news for O'Neill, who, it was said, had an aluminum ear for politics. The first President Bush lost his re-election bid in 1992 because the economy was in a slump and he seemed not to care. The upstart governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, fueled his own campaign with the slogan: "It's the economy, stupid!" During that year Clinton stuck to the bread-and-butter issues while the elder Bush, riding high after the Persian Gulf War, ignored them. The effectiveness of the Clinton insurgency was all the more dramatic because Bush seemed invincible. His approval rating in March 1991 after the U.S.-led victory over Iraq in the Persian Gulf War hovered around an astonishing 90 percent. Yet his lofty poll numbers plummeted fast when Americans began focusing on their pocketbooks. So the lesson learned by the current President Bush was: Ignore the economy at your political peril. Although W is still consumed with the possibility of war against Iraq, he is being forced to pay some attention to the crummy economy mainly because of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who is aggressively seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Kerry has criticized Bush's tax cuts for the upper crust, calling them "unfair, unaffordable and unquestionably ineffective in growing our economy." The senator has proposed that Congress cancel those portions of the tax plan that would most benefit wealthy taxpayers and oppose Bush's pleas that his 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax package be extended permanently. Kerry has also uttered publicly what many people say privately, namely that the Bush administration ratcheted up the war threat against Iraq in order to distract attention from U.S. economic problems. Meanwhile, to demonstrate that he is taking the shaky economy seriously, Bush has named John Snow, chairman of the CSX Corp., a railroad holding company, as O'Neill's replacement. He is a veteran of the Gerald Ford administration, a one-time economics professor and a former chairman of the powerful Business Roundtable, a lobbying organization for large corporations, who knows his way around Washington. Snow, who used to abhor big deficits, is expected to get on board and sell the Bush tax package along with the president's plan to privatize Social Security. Bush has honed his claim that the recession had already started when he took office. He has conveniently forgotten that he also had a balanced federal budget and a surplus that has now evaporated. It's not O'Neill's fault that the budget went from a $127 billion surplus for fiscal 2001 to a deficit of $159 billion for fiscal 2002, which ended Sept. 30. That dramatic shift in a single year was caused by the tax cuts as well as the added spending in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and the new war on terrorism. The fiscal dilemma led Congress to adjourn for the year without passing new budgets for most government agencies and without extending unemployment benefits for 2.1 million ousted workers to March 31. The result will be a bleak Christmas for hundreds of thousands of families. A simple phone call from Bush to the congressional leaders could have changed the outcome. And one thing is clear: O'Neill was fired not because he was the architect of a faulty economic policy. He wasn't. He was only a spear-carrier for it -- and certainly not an effective one. He was axed because the president needed a scapegoat to reassure nervous Americans that he feels their pain and that he is making a midterm correction -- just as he gears up for re-election. He doesn't want to repeat his father's mistake. Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com. Copyright 2002 Hearst Newspapers.