Get ready for a blizzard of meaningless propaganda.
President Bush will hold a two-day economic conference [in Washington] Dec. 15-16 with his advisers and a few hundred business leaders, as he contemplates an ambitious second-term agenda of overhauling taxes and Social Security while cutting a ballooning deficit in half.
Administration officials have already announced that this “summit” will be just like the last one, which was held in Waco in August 2002. It’s not exactly something to look forward to — the last gathering was one of the more nauseating examples of political theater in recent memory.
While the “Ask the President” events of the campaign were bad — limiting audience participation to loyal sycophants makes for a boring gathering — there were at least a few unscripted moments and off-the-wall questions.
The last economic summit, on the other hand, was an exercise in fraud. What was billed as an exchange between the White House and “regular people” was actually a gathering of CEOs who told Bush (and the cameras) that the nation desperately needed everything on the White House’s wish list.
Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill led the two televised discussion groups. They opened with standard Bush administration talking points: Some people are suffering, but the economy is sound; Bush’s tax cuts helped cure the recession; and what we need now is more tax cuts and less regulation. Then they threw it open to the participants, who suggested that Bush should rethink … nothing.
Everyone wanted more tax cuts. Everyone demanded the permanent repeal of the “death tax.” Some called for tort reform or local control of education. They argued that Bush’s policies would cure even seemingly unrelated problems. Corporate malfeasance? Faith-based initiatives would help turn that around, said a business school dean. They repeated familiar Bush sound bites (“What we’re suffering today, I believe, is an economic hangover,” said one CEO) and implicitly traced the recession and weak business ethics to the Clinton years.
Of course, it’s been a couple of years, so now they’re going to do it all over again.
Participants will be carefully screened, no one will disagree with the White House on anything, and the concerns of “regular people” will be the last thing on the group’s mind (though the first thing from the group’s mouth). Jonathan Chait described the intellectual to-and-fro at the last such gathering as “roughly on par with that of a Communist Party Congress in Moscow circa 1935.” William Saletan wondered why Bush said the event was about “listening” to real concerns of real people.
[I]f all these people agreed with Bush beforehand, then the event wasn’t about listening. It was about selling Bush’s policies. And if the public had already agreed with Bush, the sales job would have been unnecessary. It would have made no sense for Bush to appeal to “those who are watching on C-SPAN” or for O’Neill to apologize to participants “who didn’t have an opportunity to say something for the television cameras.” In short, the operational premise of the event was that its stated premise was false: The “real people” onstage held beliefs that the real people watching it didn’t share. That ruse may have been economical. But it wasn’t very presidential, and it certainly wasn’t a forum.
On the other hand, the charade wasn’t a total loss — the president delivered some classic Bushisms that day:
* “There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we’re going to do it again.”
* “I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn’t here.”
* “I can assure you that, even though I won’t be sitting through every single moment of the seminars, nor will the vice president, we will look at the summaries.”
I guess that’s one thing to look forward to.