One of the weekend’s more important stories was Jim VandeHei’s article on Bush’s embrace of “crisis” politics.
President Bush had great success in his first term by defining crises that demanded decisive responses. Now, as he begins a second term, Bush is returning to the same tactic to accomplish three longtime conservative goals.
Warning of the need for urgent action on his Social Security plan, Bush says the “crisis is now” for a system even the most pessimistic observers say will take in more in taxes than it pays out in benefits well into the next decade.
He calls the proliferation of medical liability lawsuits a “crisis in America” that can be fixed only by limiting a patient’s right to sue for large damages. And Bush has repeatedly accused Senate Democrats of creating a “vacancy crisis” on the federal bench by refusing to confirm a small percentage of his judicial nominees.
This strategy helped Bush win support for the war in Iraq, tax cuts and education policies, as well as reclaim the White House.
There are two facets to this that hurt Bush considerably. First, his use — I mean, abuse — of these crisis scare tactics is poised to backfire. The m.o. has become painfully transparent to the point that no one should take these shrieks seriously anymore.
Bush came to office with a series of goals he wanted to accomplish, regardless of merit or circumstance, so he labeled every area of public policy that interested him a “crisis.” Soon after, everyone learned no crisis existed. What will change in Bush’s second term? Nothing.
Just since the election, we’ve heard there’s a crisis on the federal bench because Dems blocked 10 judges in his first term, a crisis in Social Security where none exists, and a crisis in health care costs because of trial lawyers, despite the fact that malpractice expenses amount to less than 2% of overall national health care expenditures.
The poor man can only cry “wolf” so many times before the cries are ignored. In other words, if he’s going to try and pull the same stunts again, he’ll need a new shtick.
Second, there’s some irony in Bush’s choice of tactics. The president who sees crises everywhere, oddly enough, is creating crises in need of solutions. Or, as Marshall Whitman so eloquently put it, “Bushies increasingly act like serial arsonists who sound the alarm about a rash of forest fires they themselves set.”
The Moose would argue that the Bushies are the masters of creating crises – social security, for instance. By raiding the social security lockbox and giving the contents disproportionately to his rich buddies through tax cuts, the President himself exacerbated the problem in the system.
By turning surpluses into deficits, they created a budget crisis. Of course, this may not be a crisis, but rather a part and parcel of the Bush “ownership society” – future generations will “own” trillions of dollars in national debt.
By failing to prepare for the post-war period, the Bushies created a crisis in Iraq. By developing a new program in Medicare that helps the drug industry and lying about the cost, they worsened yet another crisis. And by pathologically being adverse to the truth, the Administration gave birth to a credibility crisis.
The list, alas, goes on and on. Bush’s misguided agenda leads to real crises that go ignored, while pursuing policy goals that make things worse under the guise of “crisis management.”
At the rate Bush is going, the word will lose all meaning.
“One of the key problems of this form of rhetorical leadership” is discerning the difference “between a genuine and manufactured crisis,” said Jeffrey K. Tulis, author “The Rhetorical Presidency” and a government professor at the University of Texas. “People do respond to crisis — if you think there is one, you tend to support the leader. The danger there is if it appears there is not one, you can have a credibility problem.”
Too late; he already has a credibility problem.