Is there any organizing principle to the Bush administration?
Some years ago I read a piece by James Fallows comparing the Carter and Reagan presidencies. I‛ve looked for the piece online to no avail, mainly because I can‛t remember its name.

Fallows served on Carter‛s White House staff as a principal speechwriter. I am recalling from my memory what he said defined the main difference in presidential styles between the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Carter, said Fallows, was an enormously intelligent man with great intellectual curiosity. He was a man of Great Ideas. The problem was that Carter had twenty Great Ideas every day before lunch and his staff, from the chief of staff on down, spent their time zinging off on new tangents all the time. Yesterday they were charging off to solve homelessness and improve America‛s energy self sufficiency. Today they are redirecting to improve America‛s technical competitiveness and forge security links with east Asian countries. Tomorrow - who knows?

There was, Fallows observed, no real organizing principle to Carter‛s administration, just one Great Idea after another, unconnected with one another.

Reagan, OTOH, was not a man of Great Ideas. He was a man of Big Ideas, of which there were precisely three: decrease taxes, "get government off the backs of the people," and build up the military. That was Reagan‛s 1980 campaign platform in a nutshell, and Reagan ruthlessly stomped on campaigners or, later, his administration‛s officials, who tried to divert him or his administration from doing those three things.

Fallows wrote that under Carter, the administration‛s leaders many days literally did not know what they were supposed to be doing in their office to move the administration's goals forward. The reason was that there were so many goals, and they changed all the time.

Under Reagan, however, every department head, every administrator arose every morning and knew s/he was supposed to do one or more of three things, and s/he'd better get to it.

Whatever one‛s opinion of Reagan personally or his politics, there seems little reason to dispute that he and his administration were well focused on those three things. ‛Tis true that there was intra-staff backbiting and the Irangate controversy harmed Reagan's presidency (in the second term). But overall, even though Ronald Reagan‛s list of accomplishments is very short, each item is truly major and we still live with the effects today.

What about President Bush? Great Ideas, a la Carter, or Big Ideas, al la Reagan? His 2000 campaign platform revolved around "compassionate conservatism" (which we have now learned means Big Government Activism and growth thereof.) But its basic tenets seemed simple enough:

Reduce taxes.

Reform public education at the local level.

Reform Social Security, give prescription-drug coverage to seniors and reform Medicare.

Reform federal land-management procedures and environmental policies, including energy policy.

"Shift power from Washington back to the states" and reform the structure of the way the federal government does business.

Reconstitute the military, provide for ballistic-missile defense, and energize America's trade relationships abroad.

I am wondering whether George W. Bush is more "Carteresque" in style than Reaganesque. Leave aside whether Bush is really a liberal or conservative. Just focus on what Bush is doing, not whether what he is doing is for good or ill.

My question: Is there an organizing principle to this president's administration in the way there was for Reagan's? I'm not seeing one. While Bush started off cleaving to the main points of the platform, ISTM more and more that he has jumped on the presidential horse and rode off in all directions.

I don't mean the dramatic refocus of his energies in fighting the terror war. My skepticism stems from, for example, the immigration policies announced this year and Bush's imminent announcement of a breathtakingly expensive space-exploration program. Where did they come from? Bush never campaigned on either, never brought them up.

The party's 2000 platform addresses mild immigration reform, but makes no mention of anything resembling what Bush proposed a few days ago. Instead, it emphasized minor tweaking of the present system in the short run, and economic development of Mexico and countries of Latin America and the Caribbean in the long term.

Regarding space, the platform's entire space policy said that the Bush administration would,

... remain committed to America’s leadership in space research and exploration. We will ensure that this Nation can expand our knowledge of the universe, and with the support of the American people, continue the exploration of Mars and the rest of the solar system. We consider space travel and space science a national priority with virtually unlimited benefits, in areas ranging from medicine to micro-machinery, for those on earth. Development of space will give us a growing economic resource and a source of new scientific discoveries. The potential benefits of new science and technology to the American people, indeed to all humanity, are incalculable and can only be hastened by the international free market in ideas that the Information Revolution has created.

That's it, except for a throwaway line about "imposing sound management and strong oversight on NASA."

My fear is that Bush is morphing from a candidate with a few Big Ideas to a president with a lot of Great Ideas. Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Update: The day after I wrote this, the Washington Post's editorial observed,

Does he [Bush] lack the seriousness to decide priorities? ...

Mr. Bush spends money freely in all directions ... .

I don't understand this president's central intentions anymore. Is he still keeping the main thing, the main thing? I'm not sure.

by Donald Sensing, 1/9/2004 04:50:38 PM. Permalink |