George W Bush: far from Mount Rushmore

Also by Godfrey Hodgson in openDemocracy:

• “Can America go modest?” (October 2001)
• “From frontiersman to neo–con” (April 2003 )
• “A comedy of errors: Tony Blair and America” (April 2004 )
• “Ronald Reagan: the feelgood president” (June 2004 )
• “America’s choice: inequality or democracy?” (July 2004)
• “Bush vs Kerry: what sort of people do we want to be?” (October 2004)
• "Anthony Sampson remembered" (January 2005)

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To many in Britain, George W Bush is the evil-looking creature of Steve Bell’s cartoons in the Guardian: a man with an animal snout and eyes too close together. To many in the United States, he is a Moses who has led his people out of Egyptian bondage to liberals and the licentious, and will save them from Islamic terrorism, gay marriage and stem-cell research.

Even many who fear his policies accept him as a political master, who has harnessed the power of deep currents in American politics and rides a wave of conservative values in majesty.

Bush is neither moron nor master. He won re-election in November 2004 not because of his political genius, nor because the country as a whole has been converted to radical rightwing ideology, but because he was the political beneficiary of 9/11 and the “war on terror”.

Now he faces intractable problems, at home as well as abroad. Not all are of his own making, but he is making them worse for himself. Already, three months into his second term, he faces confusion in Congress, division in his party and deep fissures in the conservative movement.

Rather than seeing him, as conservative Republicans do, as a candidate to join the immortals (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt) carved into the South Dakota rock high on Mount Rushmore, I think he is in a hole, and hasn’t yet had the wit to stop digging.

True, the Democrats are divided and timid. They are afraid that to say what they really believe will doom them to disaster. That was John Kerry’s problem in the 2004 presidential campaign, and it is still the problem for Democrats in Congress. But this conceals the fact that the Republicans, too, are now divided and uncertain. Their economic policy is a mess. Iraq has turned out to be a disaster, for all their optimism about a wave of democracy in the middle east.

And now their domestic agenda is falling apart. Take three examples: social security, the death of Terri Schiavo and judicial appointments.

A triple whammy

Like any president, George W Bush believed that his re-election endowed him with renewed political capital, and he went out to spend it. His first project was the reform of social security. That means the federal retirement pension scheme, introduced by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1935 – hitherto regarded as “the third rail of American politics”, a cherished idol it is death to touch.

Bush announced that the system was in crisis and  set off on a series of campaign-style trips around the country selling the need for reform and his preferred solution.

The crisis, so Bush says, is that the current system will run out of money by no later than the mid-21st century. The answer is to leave older workers’ pension rights untouched, but allow younger people to divert one third of their pension rights into private retirement accounts, to be invested in equities (corporate shares).

Private equity accounts will do nothing of themselves to solve the system’s long-term difficulties, which arise fundamentally from the fact that – in the United States as in other developed countries – people are living longer. As the proportion of the population of working age declines, people who work must support a far larger number of pensioners than in the past. The only solution is lower (or delayed) benefits, higher taxation, or some combination of the two.

President Bush likes the idea of privatised accounts, not because they solve an actuarial “crisis”, but because they are private. By demolishing the last bastion where the majority of Americans are dependent on, and grateful to, the state, he would exorcise the ghost of FDR. Bush’s policy is ideological not practical, and it has the useful bonus of offering Wall Street the prospect of managing tens of millions of new accounts.

The Bush plan soon ran into serious trouble. Some noted that Bush’s proposal – in contrast to earlier Democratic proposals that combined equity investments with the guaranteed state pension – would reduce benefits substantially. Moreover, privatised accounts would improve on the existing pension only if the stock market performed beyond realistic expectations. As reality sunk in, even Republican members of Congress began to withdraw support for the plan.

Then along came the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a permanent vegetative state for sixteen years after a heart attack. The president, his (Catholic convert) brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, and conservative Republicans in Congress demanded that the judiciary keep Schiavo alive after her estranged husband decided to allow her to die. In their rhetorical use of the word “life”, Schiavo’s death was assimilated to abortion. Many on both sides of the ideological divide were troubled by their tone. But Bush and his allies also transgressed one of the most sacred boundaries for American conservatives: that dividing federal government from state rights. They also seemed to be behaving as conservatives believe liberals do, by invoking the power of the government to interfere with citizen rights.

Many religious conservatives were authentically shocked by the way the president reacted. And the country, on this, was with them. No fewer than 82% were against what the president had done. As the columnist EJ Dionne, a liberal but also a Catholic, asked: what else do 82% of Americans agree on?

Schiavo has set the scene for the next bloody battle in Washington, over judicial nominations. The immediate problem for Bush is that the chief justice, the safely conservative William Rehnquist, has leukaemia, and must retire, probably in mid-2005. Even if the president makes a moderate nomination, which is far from certain, he will not avoid frustration and perhaps humiliation.

The president has the right to nominate federal judges, subject to the “advise and consent” of the Senate. Historically, consent has been, if not automatic, generally uncontroversial. In the 1970s, however, President Nixon, as part of his “southern strategy”, nominated two very conservatives justices to the Supreme Court, and a Democrat-controlled Senate refused to confirm them.

In 1987, President Reagan nominated Robert Bork. He was a brilliant, if reactionary, legal scholar, but unacceptable to Democrats. (His general philosophical position is adequately indicated by the title of one of his books: Slouching towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.) He did not disguise his hostility to the court’s legalising of abortion in the case of Roe v Wade. He was suspected of disliking the Brown decision, which struck down the legality of racial segregation. And he had not been forgiven for his role in defending Nixon in the Watergate scandal, where as acting attorney-general he agreed to dismiss the respected special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, in the “Saturday Night Massacre”.

So Democrats in the Senate blocked Bork’s nomination. Their aggressive tactics infuriated Republicans, who called it “Borking”. They determined to retaliate. By President Clinton’s time, the Republicans systematically held up his nominations. When Clinton left office, some forty-three of his nominations to the federal bench had not been confirmed; the Senate judiciary committee had not even heard most of them.

Now the Republicans have a majority in the Senate. But to override a filibuster (delaying tactics) by the Democrats, the Republicans need the support of 60 of the Senate’s 100 members, and they only have 55.

Outraged by their inability to get conservative judges appointed, the Republicans threaten to use what is being called “the nuclear option”. They would appeal to the arch-conservative vice-president, Dick Cheney, in his capacity as presiding officer of the Senate, to give a ruling that a simple majority of 51 would suffice to end debate.

The Democrats are infuriated in turn. The Democratic minority leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, has threatened to “screw things up” if Senator Bill Frist, the Republican majority leader, chooses the nuclear option.

Many Republicans have worked themselves into an almost hysterical rage at what they see as the excesses of liberal judges. Some are outraged that the federal courts refused to intervene to save Terri Schiavo. Many focus their wrath on Justice Anthony Kennedy, previously regarded as a moderate conservative, who was appointed by President Reagan. They object to Kennedy’s opinion forbidding the execution of juveniles, to his striking down laws banning sodomy, and to his citation of foreign judgments and international treaties in his opinions. Some Republicans appear to be threatening to impeach him.

The conservative schism and Iraq

The simmering passion over allegedly liberal judges and judicial appointments is kept on the boil by the deep polarisation of American society on two issues in particular: abortion, and anything to do with race. Senator Barbara Boxer has openly accused the Republicans of trying to overturn Roe v Wade and so outlaw abortion.

Apart from the merits of specific issues, however, the apparent deadlock over judicial appointments threatens to paralyse Congress at a time when the president’s economic policies are creating a ballooning budget and international deficits, with consequent downward pressure on the dollar’s exchange rate and upward pressure on interest rates.

Meanwhile, Bush presses on with highly divisive tax policies. So far, Republicans have been successful in dismissing any attacks on policies that blatantly favour the rich by denouncing them as “class warfare”. The latest example is the Republican campaign for repeal of estate tax.

As a result of Republican legislation, estate tax (which only catches the top 2.1% of estates) will be abolished altogether in 2011. A few years ago, a small group of very wealthy families hired public relations consultants, who said that estate duty was the “death tax” which was driving family farmers off their land.

Opponents of repeal have countered by calling repeal the “Paris Hilton Benefit Act”, after the free-spending hotel heiress. This hasn’t worked. Pollsters find that 80% of Americans call any taxation of inheritances “extreme”. Many Americans continue to believe, in spite of all evidence, that they will be millionaires one day, and worry that their wealth will be sequestered by the state.

That is the root of the popular sentiment that allows George W Bush to pursue tax policies that unashamedly favour the rich and increase economic inequality. But it may not be enough to save him from the divisions and contradictions that are now evident even in conservative circles. Since the late 1970s, a conservative ascendancy has been maintained in American politics by the alliance between economic and pro-business libertarians, on the one hand, and “social” and religious conservatives, on the other.

George W Bush, a pro-business, tax-cutting conservative who is also a convert to southern-style, born-again Christianity, has been successful so far in keeping that alliance together. But its strains are now showing.

Shrill conservative attacks on the judges breach the fundamental American constitutional tradition of the three-way separation of powers between executive, judicial and legislative branches of government; so do presidential and legislative attacks on the judiciary over the Schiavo case. The revelations of arrogant and unethical behaviour by the very powerful Republican congressman from Texas, Tom DeLay, challenge the conservatives’ image in the public mind as the guardians of morality.

President Bush is still firmly in the saddle. But his standing in the polls has been declining, with 56% disapproving of his overall performance in mid-April 2005. Support on specific domestic issues is even lower: 42% for economic policy, 38% on education and health care, 36% on social security. Historically, those are not high ratings for a newly re-elected president.

And then there is Iraq. The elections there gave the Bush administration a boost. Republicans were able to claim that the electoral turnout in the 30 January elections, together with demonstrations against the Syrian presence in Lebanon, and very limited gains for “democracy” in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, added up to the wave of democratic change across the middle east the president’s champions have predicted.

If democracy in the middle east turns out to be as elusive as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, then foreign policy and the “war on terror” will no longer cancel out the failures of President Bush’s domestic policies. That is not yet certain. But what is already plain, so soon after his re-election, is that George W Bush is not yet on his way to Mount Rushmore.