Bush agenda to be ‘an insult to incrementalism’

December 12, 2005

Looking back at the 2005 State of the Union address, the speech was a little thin in the “new ideas” category. A lot about the war, a lot about Social Security, a few words about tax cuts, and that’s about it. The 2004 SOTU was even worse — it included the infamous “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities” line, Ahmad Chalabi by the First Lday, and the only new idea was Bush’s heartfelt opposition to steroids in baseball.

Since then, Bush’s standing has fallen considerably and his agenda has stalled. What can we expect from the vaunted Bush political machine for the coming year? What will the party that allegedly won the “war of ideas” present to the nation? Not much.

The plan is to make January a critical month in what the President’s aides hope will be a turning-point year. The White House expects a quick victory on Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and the State of the Union speech will nod to big goals. But when it comes to fresh and concrete ideas, the list of what Bush will actually try to accomplish in 2006 is so modest that one bewildered Republican adviser calls it “an insult to incrementalism.”

White House advisers tell Time that the agenda for 2006 is in flux and that senior aide Karl Rove is still cooking up ideas. But the initiatives they have settled on sound more like Clinton’s brand of small-bore governance: computerizing medical records; making it easier for workers to take their health benefits with them when they leave a job and — an idea that captured Bush’s imagination in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — giving a boost to Catholic and other private schools as an alternative for inner-city children. While Bush still hopes to sign an immigration bill by summer and plans to talk a lot about the subject next year, his program to offer temporary legal status to illegal immigrant workers remains a tough sell with the conservatives in Congress.

Social Security privatization is out because everyone hates it. Bush likes his sweeping “tax reform” ideas and changes to federal immigration policy, but he faces intense skepticism in Congress on both ideas — from both parties.

So, what is the White House left with in terms of a policy agenda? A medical-records policy championed by Hillary Clinton, a take-your-health-care-with-you policy that Bill Clinton worked on in the ’90s, and a school voucher plan that Bush had to abandon in 2001 — when he actually had some political capital to invest.

Did Rove & Co. run out of ideas? Or do they feel too politically weak to push a more aggressive agenda?

Let’s hope they’ve run out of ideas. We
might survive until 2008. Of course, that
will simply be the point at which Bush
hands the baton off to another right
winger, who will have ideas.

  • Perhaps they’re all too busy meeting with their attorneys and trying to fend off grand jury indictments.

    Come to think of it, a preoccupied Bush administration isn’t such a bad thing. Is it?

  • They never had any real ideas, only neocon fantasies and a lust for power. Now that their pre-conceived notions about how the world works are crashing down around their ears, can anyone be surprised that they have nothing left in the tank except feeble non-issues and mindless attacks against their enemies, real and imagined?

    Save us, President Obama! Save us!!! 🙂

  • If you go to the bottom of that article, it leaves you with a very different sense of where Rove and W are going. Isn’t it a bad idea for the dems (and dem-bloggers) to start underestimating the WH or the GOP? Shouldn’t we at least wait until we actually win election to start that?

    Shouldn’t this paragraph be the take away from that Time article?

    “However improbable the odds at this point or modest his short-term goals, aides say, Bush still subscribes to Rove’s long-held dream that his will be the transformational presidency that lays the groundwork for a Republican majority that can endure, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition did, for a half-century or more. Once he gets past the midterm elections, Bush plans to introduce a concept that, if anything, is even more ambitious than his failed Social Security plan: a grand overhaul that would include not only that program but Medicare and Medicaid as well.”

  • Well, there really isn’t a whole lot left to plunder over here (and overseas plundering isn’t working out so hot either), so I’m not surprised there aren’t any new ideas for this year.

    So let me help our president out. As Atrios would say, “Mars, Bitches!”

  • Here’s an idea, from Bush himself: “The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.” (It seems to me that since he said that Bush has surpassed all presidential records for vacation days, and still has three and a half years to go.)

  • Regarding nick’s quote of time magazine paragraph: The White House is hoping that the 2006 mid-term election will restore political capital so that they can renew their class warfare. It reminds me of some kind of dormant virus that wants to persist and kill its host. strong>I’ve become convinced that all politics is class warfare. The question is which groups win and which groups lose. When FDR instituted the New Deal, the majority of Americans won and the minority (read “wealthy”) lost a big battle in the class war–power and wealth. America’s top ten percent want the New Deal undone–and sure as hell don’t want Americans to have universal health care!

    Wake up America, most wealthy Americans refuse to share the nation’s bounty and blessings. Scrooge lives!

    One more point: We need to be open & direct and tell our fellow Americans that the Republican politics–class warfare– of skewed tax cuts is making most of us poorer!

    (Why is it every time a Republican accuses the Democrats of class warfare, the Democrats cower? Stop cowering and fight back!)

  • The rich didn’t “lose” because of FDR. The rich made a compromise that saved their asses. Against their will, certainly, but nonetheless it was a compromise whose intent was to save them, not destroy them.

    You have to understand the political climate of the 1930’s. Communism and Socialism were running strong. There was tremendous poverty and unemployment and misery here in the USA, and all over the world in fact. Unions were militant and many were a part of an International Brotherhood that viewed both the ruling class and the state itself as enemies. The Left was very well organised, violent, and revolutionary. Stalin was running loose across Asia. Equally-insane right-wing counter-revolutionaries like Hitler and Mussolini were ramping up.

    FDR was, in the context of the times, a triangulator, a Clinton-like moderate. He was himself a very rich man from an elite family. He renounced none of that. FDR’s program was not to initiate a revolutionary socialist utopia. Come on people, get real!
    FDR’s goal was to save the wealthy ruling class from the worker’s revolution– or fascist counter-revolution– that was a very, very, very real threat at the time. His job was to steer the country through a difficult “middle way” between Communism and Fascism. One by one, the countries of Europe were succumbing to either one or the other extreme. FDR set out to save the middle way, the middle class, and he did.

    FDR and his agenda was neither extremist, nor revolutionary, nor Socialist. His goal was to preserve the American way of life and the American middle class. He did so with spectactular success.

  • Here we go again. ShrubCo is going to get us into 2006 with no plan to get us out.

    40 miles a day on the mountain bike for Jesus would be a respectable plan. A mile for every day that Noah was adrift on his ark. Symbolic of the drowned city we have in our midst and the seasick feeling America labors under.

  • goatchowder, I agree with you take on FDR and the New Deal. But the conservative stalwarts of the Republican Party resent FDR and the social compact of the New Deal to this very day! The ideological opposition to raising the minimum wage or universal health care is promoted by the wealthy Americans (some) who do not possess “enlighten self-interest”; they don’t understand that taking money out of their pocket (in the short term) will make America stronger and more prosperous. That’s the “scrooge mentality” and one of class warfare.

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