CasdraBlog

The history of the Bush administration’s domestic efforts is a direct result of the low value placed on policy making. The past four years have been chock full of proposals announced with great fanfare that then went nowhere; initiatives that were framed as approaches to real problems but that only really benefited Bush’s business cronies; and programs whose appropriated funds so failed to live up to the authorizing legislation’s promises that they became, functionally, entirely different laws.

In early 2004, for example, the president proposed a $12 billion, five-year program to build a base on the moon that would be a stepping stone to Mars. The proposal was largely political, and the White House didn't spend a lot of time fighting for it: When the budget was drawn up, Congress sliced the program's first-year funding in half, citing budget deficits. Similarly, in his 2004 State of the Union address, Bush promised to institute fundamental immigration reform and a guest-worker program for Mexican immigrants; the proposal, designed by Rove and his allied domestic advisers, died on the vine after meeting widespread opposition in conservative circles. The president's $15 billion AIDS initiative and the standards-raising No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law have been funded at levels far below those he promised, partly because Bush deferred funding for AIDS and, in the case of NCLB, failed to fight for funds that the initiative required.

Bush’s simultaneous commitment to Rove's political agenda (and the programs and pork that agenda demanded) and to the supply-siders’ tax cuts have encoded a conflict into the heart of his presidency and every program it proposes. The aims of America's government are now on a fiscal collision course. Rove, while infuriating to liberals, has been a bane to conservative ideologues because his political calculations have prevented the administration from doing the "principled" supply-side thing by cutting government. Real conservatives were aghast at the Medicare bill, which was a Rove-driven fulfillment of a very nonconservative campaign promise to seniors, as well as a payoff to corporations and insurers. It was also, as Califano notes with some combination of pride and bemusement, the largest expansion of an entitlement program since the Johnson era.

Today, the president publicly promises to cut the deficit in half within the next five years while simultaneously letting it be known to conservatives that he intends to baby-step the nation into a flat-tax schema. The combination is a fiscal impossibility. Will Bush have the courage of his convictions and do the program cutting to go with his tax plan? The evidence suggests not. Bush's focus on politics above policy has meant he's been unable to say no to pork-barrel spending. Like Johnson, Bush faces re-election as the principal architect of an increasingly unpopular foreign intervention. But where the increasing chaos in Vietnam led Johnson to focus ever harder on forging a domestic legacy, Bush has let the domestic chips fall where they may, at the hands of whoever pushed hardest for federal dollars.

If Bush has a second term, it's possible that, because he won’t be facing the prospect of re-election, Rove’s influence could wane and the supply-siders' could wax. One thing, though, is clear: In a second term, Bush would either have to begin the deconstruction of government as we know it or renege on his deficit-reduction plans. Either way, it won't be pretty.