Measured against the numbers or his own promises, Bush’s economic policies look like a failure. Overall economic growth has averaged .7 percent a year during Bush’s first term in office, the worst since the 1930s. Personal income, after allowing for taxes and inflation, has grown by only 1.2 percent, another post-Depression low. Three million more Americans are out of work than in 1989. Little wonder that 80 percent of the public consistently says the nation is on the wrong track, a finding that reflects deep anxieties over America’s economic health.
With the election less than 90 days away, such poll results spell trouble for the Bush campaign. But it is arguable that Bush is one more victim of the economic excesses of the 1980s, and that no president could have averted the nation’s current problems. Indeed, a series of speculative bubbles began to burst just as Bush took office in 1989. Real estate, home building, retailing, banking and insurance were all vastly overextended, and the economy was staggering under a mountain of business and consumer debt. In retrospect, it is hard to conceive of a mix of fiscal stimulants that would have prevented the 1991 recession. But the federal deficit, rising steadily through the Reagan years, meant Washington had no stimulus to offer. The deficit was a major part of the nation’s economic problems in 1989 and still is: new tax cuts were never an option.
In fact, purely on his policies, George Bush merits a C-plus or B-minus for economic management. Despite the uproar over his flip-flop on taxes, the 1991 budget deal he approved has significantly reduced the long-term federal deficit. The deficit is still very high-but this year’s total, $325 billion, would have been much worse if the deal had failed. Bush has staunchly supported free trade and resisted demands for federal support of new-tech losers like high-definition television. He has also pushed the unpopular necessity of the S&L bailout. That bailout, according to new congressional estimates, will ultimately cost the taxpayers about $130 billion, far less than the doomsayers’ predictions of up to $250 billion. And Bush has supported tough monetary policies by the Federal Reserve. The result, in 1991, was an inflation rate of only 3.1 percent that has helped cut interest rates to their lowest level in years and should lead to strong future growth.
No one can say with certainty how soon that brighter future will arrive or how much more pain the average American must endure to pay off the excesses of the 1980s. But Bush has taken many of the steps that are necessary to get the nation’s economic affairs back in order. His principal failure has been political: a failure to rally the country to the need for austerity-and to apportion that burden with some measure of fairness. And there is a certain rough justice in the political troubles that the nation’s economic hangover is now causing him-for it was the spending spree of the Reagan years that elected Bush in the first place.
Bush’s environmental record is mixed-which may be a liability at a time when environmental action is once again on the minds of many voters. He got high marks for appointing William Reilly to head the Environmental Protection Agency and for pushing the 1990 reauthorization of the Clean Air Act. But his performance at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June was widely judged to be a diplomatic disaster, and critics say the administration is undermining the Clean Air Act by obstructing regulations that spell out the intent of the law.
The candidate who said he wanted to be “the education president” has fumbled the opportunity-and it was a very large opportunity indeed. When Bush took office in 1989, many observers saw the makings of a powerful consensus among leading businessmen, politicians and educators for reforming the nation’s schools. In September 1989, Bush and the National Governors’ Association announced a package of lofty reform goals, including a promise to make American students second to none in science and math by the year 2000. Virtually no one thinks that goal is attainable now.
What happened? For starters, it was clear that the White House was desperately afraid congressional Democrats would use school reform as an excuse to bust the budget. Second, Bush’s education secretary, Lauro Cavazos, proved to be a lackluster choice, and it was not until 1991 that Bush found an abler man in former governor Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. And finally, Bush and his political handlers seem to have seen school reform as a motherhood issue that was mostly useful for producing good photo ops.
But school politics ain’t beanbag, as a legion of frustrated reformers could have told them. The administration now has two basic strategies for school reform, and both are intensely controversial with the myriad interest groups within the education system. The first, embodied in the “America 2000” goals from 1989, is to promulgate new national standards for student achievement–so much reading, so much math, so much history and science, all measured by some form of national testing. This approach implies comprehensive curriculum and teaching reform, and it will take at least a decade to achieve results. The second approach is educational choice. Under this plan, parents could use government vouchers to pay the tuition at any school, public or private.
Both approaches are now stalled in Congress, and neither has any chance of passage until after the election-if then. Bush has rightly criticized Congress for its inaction, but he shares the blame for the lack of results. In truth, pushing ahead toward real progress on school reform will take determined presidential leadership-and so far, the education president has never been willing to put his credibility on the line for a battle that America must win. Give Bush a “D.”
It’s fair to say that George Bush was training to be Leader of the Free World through most of his adult life–and it is a matter of surpassing irony that he was elected president at the exact historical moment when cold-war leadership was becoming obsolete. Bush, to his lasting credit, ably orchestrated the West’s response to the collapse of the evil empire. And if his critics suggest that he was at times too cautious–that he was slow to grasp the significance of Boris Yeltsin’s rise and largely unprepared for the Soviet coup-he can argue that prudence paid big dividends. The former Soviet Union and its client states have split up and democratized themselves without setting off a war. Germany is reunited, NATO is intact and the superpower arms race is winding down on terms largely favorable to the West.
These are historic accomplishments-even if, as some would have it, Bush’s part in the transformation of Eastern Europe was essentially reactive. And Bush has proven himself to be an adroit crisis manager whose core foreign-policy team-James Baker at State, Dick Cheney at Defense and Brent Scowcroft as national-security adviser-is arguably the best of any recent administration’s. Their collective handling of the Persian Gulf crisis is the obvious case in point. Although Bush and his men were caught flat-footed by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Operation Desert Storm was a triumph of deft diplomacy and the determined use of military force. The anti-Saddam coalition they created was remarkable for its diversity and its reliance on the authority of the United Nations–a precedent that future presidents may welcome.
But its downsides are no less obvious, and they are telling reminders of the Bush team’s shortcomings. The emerging evidence of the administration’s prewar “tilt” toward Iraq demonstrates that Bush and his top advisers, preoccupied with events in Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R., were wrong to ignore the warning signs of Saddam Hussein’s aggressive designs. And Bush, who relies heavily on personal diplomacy with other heads of state, depended far too much on the advice of Middle Eastern leaders who said Saddam could be appeased. The dictator’s continued defiance and the threat he poses to regional stability are painful reminders of a policy that fell just short of victory–and so are the devastating consequences for Iraq’s Kurdish and Shiite minorities.
The fact that Bush never delivered a memorable speech on foreign policy is one more sign of his difficulty with “the vision thing.” It also suggests his inability to form a coherent foreign policy for the post-cold-war era. He and his advisers are gifted who have nevertheless stumbled over issues like the Tiananmen Square massacre and U.S. aid to Russia. The notion of a new world order is fading rhetoric–a lofty phrase, but one that provides no clear guideline for managing civil conflicts like the bloodbath in Bosnia. Jim Baker’s departure from the State Department, meanwhile, has given rise to fears that Washington may yet squander the most positive side effect of the gulf war, the possibility of a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush will surely go down in history as one of the best cold-war presidents-but it is anyone’s guess if he will also be remembered as the architect of the new world era.
