“The comparison is fundamentally flawed,” Bartlett told NEWSWEEK last week. “Even at 41’s highest approval ratings after the gulf war, he never broke 40 percent on handling the economy.” By contrast, Bartlett added, the son’s approval ratings are at least 15 points higher.
But, hey, who’s counting? As it happens, almost everybody–at least inside the Bush White House. While the president’s overall job-approval number is still a robust 65 percent in the latest NEWSWEEK Poll (down from a high of 88 percent last fall), Bartlett, Karl Rove & Co. are intently examining the stats they know matter most, especially to a Bush: job performance on the economy. Here the numbers aren’t horrible yet, but there’s reason to worry: Democrats in Congress are now enjoying a 42 percent to 36 percent edge over Bush on who is most trusted to handle the corporate-greed scandal. “Crime in the suites” is finally stripping some of the Teflon off this president.
Bush himself has long claimed to be uninterested in polls, but he is hardly indifferent to the legacy of his father, who went from a 90 percent-plus job-approval rating after the gulf war in 1991 to losing the presidency the following year to Bill Clinton. While he reveres his dad and consults him almost daily, George W has organized much of his political career around avoiding his fate. Now, with his own wartime approval ratings pulled down to earth by economic worries, the comparisons that have shaped his life are inevitable once more.
We’re talking about Poppy and Dubya here, not Abraham and Isaac, but it’s an ancient dilemma for a faithful son, shadowed by the vagaries of love, obligation and independence: How to follow in your father’s footsteps while walking your own road? How to avoid repeating family history, when that history is in your bones? Among American presidents, only John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams (the Adams clan refrained from wearing caps emblazoned with “2” and “6”) have faced a similar quandary. John Quincy came to office in a disputed election in 1824 and lost his re-election bid four years later, just as his father had in 1800. Family patterns can be hard to break.
Of course odds are still strong that George W is not another John Q. For starters, Al Gore is no Andrew Jackson, whose passionate supporters worked hard from day one to throw out “the pretender” in the next election. And by all accounts Bush is a better politician than his dad, more clearly at ease with ordinary voters. He’s determined “to avoid the mistakes of the father–the way he campaigned, the way he governs, in his personality,” says one key White House aide, requesting anonymity for obvious reasons. (The Bushes dislike all but the most flattering generational themes.) “He [41] didn’t understand what was going on. This guy [43] gets it. I doubt 41 [during his presidency] sat glued the way we do to cable TV. This president always asks, ‘How’s it playing?’ "
Not well just now. Most investors blame themselves, corporate crooks and that guy on CNBC before pointing fingers at the president. But the crisis of confidence is on his relentlessly pro-business watch. If it continues, he’ll pay the price, fairly or not, just as his father did. So far, the picture is not as gloomy as it was in 1990-91, but the risks of an abortive recovery (page 30) are real. The political knives are already gleaming. “You have to hand it to the Bush family,” says Bob Shrum, a Democratic strategist. “In nearly six years of two Bush presidencies, there hasn’t been any real job growth at all.”
Even so, the timing of the grizzly-bear market–last week, the Dow closed at its lowest point since 1998–could turn out to be fortuitous for Bush. The same short-term thinking that gave rise to the corporate abuses in the first place may eventually help him, as attention wavers. Another large-scale terrorist act would obviously change the equation. And if the normal business cycle holds, the president will soldier through the storm more than two years before the 2004 election. (The recession that sank the elder Bush climaxed just as Bill Clinton was mounting his challenge.) Even this November’s midterm congressional elections, while looking dicey for Republicans, are too far away to predict with any accuracy.
Still, the ground is shifting ominously beneath Bush’s feet. From last fall until this spring, he enjoyed a remarkable run of public respect, as even many Democrats applauded the way he responded to the terrorist attacks. For a time, Vice President Dick Cheney actually got away with saying it was unpatriotic to criticize the president. Debates over prescription-drug benefits and Social Security looked like “prewar” irrelevancies. Today those issues are back–big time–while a soaring federal budget deficit limits Bush’s options and further spooks investors. Efforts to change the subject to homeland security or terrorist warnings sound tinny.
On Capitol Hill, once despairing Democrats are suddenly energized; once exultant Republicans–long the proud party of business–are sprinting for cover, as they desert the White House to back corporate reform they scoffed at only a few weeks ago. “We’re awaiting an amendment calling for the summary execution of all CEOs,” jokes John Feehery, press secretary to House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Feehery didn’t mention that both the president and the vice president are themselves former CEOs. A double-dip recession could make them political exhibits A and B of how late-20th-century “crony capitalism” enriched insiders at the expense of everyone else.
So it’s hardly surprising that Bush has lost some of his mojo. According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, 46 percent now approve of how he’s handling the corporate scandals, down five points in a week, while 39 percent disapprove, up seven points. While poll respondents place much more blame on corporate executives than on politicians, a solid majority believe Bush’s proposed reforms do not go far enough.
Part of the problem is presentational. Reading the well-crafted rallying cries of speechwriter Michael Gerson isn’t cutting it anymore, especially when contrasted with Bush’s often-hesitant and uninformative spontaneous remarks. Modern-day presidents must be good explainers of a complex world; Bush isn’t. And while his foreign-policy team has proved extremely effective at communicating with the public, this administration has no Donald Rumsfeld to articulate economic policy. The vice president is compromised by his history of running Halliburton Inc., where his tenure is now under SEC investigation; the Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, is a gaffe-prone former corporate executive best known for touring Africa with a rock star; lesser officials have no juice on Wall Street. Like his father, Bush lacks an oracular Robert Rubin figure with the clout to calm markets.
Of course, in the crunch, leadership can’t be subcontracted. It’s the president who must project both confidence and concern. “Things were never as bad as they were portrayed in 41’s time,” says one of the former president’s closest aides. “He wasn’t that out of touch. He made the right economic calculation. But the political calculation was sheer disaster. He didn’t seem to be doing anything, which left the impression that he didn’t care.” Historians agree that the caricature of an uncaring Bush I was unfair. But looking back, the former president himself saw the problem, conceding after his loss: “I’m convinced the American people didn’t know my heartbeat, and I can’t blame anybody but myself for that.”
So what will his son do to show his heartbeat? Not clear yet, though White House aides say they have no plans for “hug-a-shareholder” events. In fact, the president will go ahead and campaign this summer for California gubernatorial candidate William Simon, though Simon is under fire for alleged accounting irregularities. Bush worries, with some reason, that the rush to action on Capitol Hill might inadvertently hurt the economy. But he’ll nonetheless sign a bill–any bill–that addresses corporate governance. Beyond that, his strategy boils down to: avoid Dad’s mistakes, even as he risks repeating them.
That’s an ironic posture for a man who spent most of his life trying (and usually failing) to live up to his father’s example. George H.W. Bush was a star athlete and academic standout at Andover and Yale, a war hero in the Pacific, a successful Texas oilman and congressional candidate, a knowledgeable public servant. By contrast, George W. Bush was a mediocre athlete and student at Andover and Yale, a frequently absent Air National Guard pilot in Texas during the Vietnam War, a failed oilman and congressional candidate who by his own admission tended to drink too eagerly until the age of 40 and lacked the depth of knowledge about public affairs his father brought to the Oval Office.
But somewhere in the 1990s the father-son parallels took an unusual turn. After getting elected governor of Texas in 1994 (his father failed in bids for statewide office), young Bush began to prove that he has more political horse sense and a better common touch than the old man ever had. He can make people forget the blue blood and see him as an average guy who wouldn’t be caught dead in Top-Siders. This was particularly clear after September 11, when the president related with ease to the heroic rescue workers at Ground Zero and the families of victims. Where his father could be tone-deaf (“Message: I care,” he told struggling New Hampshire voters during the 1992 campaign), this Bush seemed for a time to be pitch-perfect.
This was partly natural (43 did grow up in west Texas) and partly the result of a conscious effort to outdistance his father in mastering the politics of the presidency. To put it in terms they understand up in Kennebunkport, the son has “gone to school” on 41’s errant putt. Over time, Bush the Younger (with his lifelong political adviser, Rove) drew up a kind of reverse blueprint from Dad:
(1) Get right with the Right both economically and culturally, on a level deeper than his father’s support for capital-gains tax cuts and taste for country music and pork rinds.
(2) Stick to a short, disciplined agenda, which nowadays means protecting his tax cuts and fighting terrorism, with a splash of “compassionate conservatism” mixed in. (His father’s presidency tried to do too much.)
(3) Avoid any photo op that looks patrician, elitist or out of touch. Unsteady in such matters, Bush the Elder had to have his press secretary carry around a notecard reminding him of the current prices for a dozen eggs and a quart of milk.
The problem for today’s President Bush is that some of the lessons of his father’s failure are in conflict with each other. If he stays too faithful to free-market conservative economic ideas (lesson No. 1), Bush risks seeming too out of touch with the public’s pain (lesson No. 3). Take private accounts for Social Security, which Bush favors. If he backs away from them, he looks weak to the Right. But Democrats will campaign hard this fall against anyone who dares subject Social Security to the not-so-tender mercies of the stock market.
Next year the real crunch will come on taxes. It’s an article of faith among Republicans that George Bush sealed his fate when he went back on his 1988 “Read My Lips” pledge as part of a 1990 budget deal that raised taxes slightly and cut spending to shrink the deficit. But what’s forgotten is that the deal worked. Even many Democrats now give 41 some credit for the boom of the 1990s; his deal helped restore confidence in the capital markets.
So might Washington revisit last year’s huge tax cut, which is scheduled to go overwhelmingly to the same rich crowd that is suddenly in bad odor? Rubin, Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, says an “adjustment” is essential. He tells NEWSWEEK that the 10-year, $1.5 trillion tax cut is a much bigger threat to the economy than the corporate scandals. Rubin suggests a kind of domestic “loya jirga” (a big Afghan council) on the economy. “Get everyone together and put everything on the table,” he says. “We don’t have to ‘raise’ taxes, we just have to postpone or cancel what would otherwise happen in the later years. The fact is, deficits are once again the biggest threat to the economy. We’ve gone in less than two years from $5 trillion worth of surplus to new and growing deficits as far as the eye can see. That’s having its own effect on the markets.”
Republicans will fight that all the way; they want the tax cuts extended. But if Democrats take control of the House this fall, the stage could be set for a return to the grinding budget politics of 41’s presidency. This Bush certainly won’t tinker with the tax cut, his biggest legislative accomplishment so far. Besides, to go along with Rubin’s idea would violate perhaps the cardinal lesson he learned from his father’s defeat–never, ever alienate the GOP base on taxes. But obeying the “tax lesson” will likely leave Bush with a Hobson’s choice–slash defense and Social Security, or watch the deficit balloon to dangerous proportions.
Then there’s the lesson of Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction pose a genuine threat, and the reasons for taking him out are much larger than family vengeance. But perceptions can be reality, and much of the world views this as a family feud. In that sense, his father’s gulf-war history may limit Bush’s flexibility in the region. On the other hand, at least we know this Bush won’t stop short of Baghdad.
Not all of President Bush’s lessons stem from where 41 went wrong. Some–like the skill Bush showed in assembling a coalition against the Taliban–come from where he went right. The president’s success in handling U.S.-Russian relations no doubt owes a debt to his father’s example.
But other inherited traits could prove more problematic. Take loyalty, first among all virtues in the Bush family canon. Any other president (except perhaps 41) would have long since jettisoned Army Secretary Thomas White, who made more than 70 calls to his former employer, Enron, when he should have been working on government business. But the president invariably rewards loyalty, even at the expense of accountability. Bush said last week that Cheney will be cleared by the SEC. Imagine being the investigator assigned to that case. Your boss’s boss’s boss–the president of the United States–is basically telling you to back off.
Secrecy is another old family trait (both were Skull and Bones at Yale) in vogue again in Washington. Recall Cheney’s secret energy task force, the secret detentions of suspected terrorists and a decision by Bush–terribly harmful to professional historians–to keep the documents of his father and other presidents secret.
This essentially undemocratic impulse may come back to bite the president. For instance, Bush said recently that if reporters wanted to pursue his history as a boardroom insider at Harken Oil in the 1980s, they should simply consult the board minutes. Harken Oil, not surprisingly, refused to provide them (they’re leaking out anyway, thanks to document-digging by the Center for Public Integrity); Press Secretary Ari Fleischer insists the press “has all it needs” on that story.
Of course this is a recipe for exactly the kind of drip-drip reporting that can hurt, as the Clintons learned. The minutes are unlikely to tarnish Bush, but failing to provide requested documents always makes the White House look as if it has something to hide–even when it doesn’t.
In other words, a penchant for secrecy can sometimes keep the public from seeing the truth, even when the truth helps. On the day after he lost the presidency, George Bush told his diary: “Be strong, be kind, be generous of spirit, be understanding and let people know how grateful you are.” This was the fine side of the former president that the voters didn’t get to see enough of that year. His son saw it, of course. As his fortunes dip, we’ll find out just how much he has learned from it.
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In our July 29 chart “The Nitty-Gritty: Handicapping Corporate Reform,” we stated that the Securities and Exchange Commission supports requiring corporate executives of only the largest companies to publicly certify their financial statements. On June 28, the SEC published a list of 945 companies whose CEOs needed to personally certify that their most recent reports were accurate. However, the SEC does support certification of all companies, and proposed a rule on June 17 to that effect.
