One of the things I always liked about John Kerry was the fact that he seemed so willing and prepared to become president in 2005 — despite the historic mess Bush has made of the world, the nation, the budget, and our economy. It’s hard not appreciate a man who sees the results of the worst president in generations and volunteers to help correct them. Smaller men would take one look at Bush’s disastrous tenure and run the other way.
Of course, a slim majority of America didn’t want someone to fix Bush’s mistakes. Most of them appear not to even be aware of the mistakes themselves. It’s leading to a surprisingly large number of people to conclude, “Fine, let Bush wallow in his own crises of his own making.” Or, as John Quiggin said at Crooked Timber, this election “was a good one to lose.”
“While I’ve tried to be open to more optimistic possibilities, it’s far more likely that the second Bush Administration will be more of the same, and worse. The problem for the winners is that the consequences of the Administration’s policies, still debatable in 2004, will be grimly evident by 2008, and there will be no one but Republicans to take the blame. In purely partisan terms, as I argued several times before the election, this was a good one to lose.”
I find this terribly compelling. I desperately wanted Kerry to win, and believe he would have been an excellent president. But had he been elected, Kerry would have inherited catastrophic failures from Bush. Instead, Bush will have to deal with his own crises. For the nation’s sake, I want the president to succeed, but even in just the few days since the election, Bush has indicated he’s prepared to make things worse, not better.
On the budget, for example, Bush’s policies have been a disaster, producing the largest deficits in human history. Now, the president is planning to spend more, cut taxes more, and add trillions to the debt, making a horrible situation considerably worse.
President Bush signaled yesterday that he would add personal investment accounts to the Social Security system, simplify the tax code without raising taxes and cut the budget deficit in half, all before he leaves office in 2009. Ambitious as those promises are, they may be mathematically impossible, budget and policy analysts say.
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Bush pledged early this year to halve the deficit in five years, a promise he renewed yesterday. “I would suggest [deficit hawks] look at our budget that we’ve submitted to Congress, which does, in fact, get the deficit down, cut in half in five years,” Bush said.
But in an independent analysis of that budget, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded it would not fulfill that promise.
Even in Bush’s fantastical reality, more tax cuts, a $2 trillion privatization of Social Security, and two wars make any kind of hopes about deficit reduction utterly ridiculous. No serious person anywhere could possibly believe Bush’s nonsense, but that doesn’t stop the president from shoveling it anyway.
Slate’s Daniel Gross joined the chorus yesterday, saying Dems should be “thankful” because “they don’t have to clean up the Bush fiscal catastrophe.”
On Nov. 3, as the bleary-eyed nation returned to work, the Treasury Department announced an impending crisis. If the lame-duck Congress doesn’t raise the statutory $7.384 trillion debt limit, which was intentionally breached in October, by Nov. 18, the world’s greatest power will run out of cash.
Congress, with the White House’s blessing, left town before the election without dealing with the debt limits — but not before passing an appalling, special-interest-written, corporate tax bill that will deprive the government of more than $100 billion in future revenues. That double irresponsibility — the lousy tax bill and the ignored debt limit — was a fitting end to the past four years of essentially one-party rule.
The only solace for sullen Democrats is that now Republicans might have to clean up their own fiscal mess. The fiscal record of the past four years has been one of unmitigated — and seemingly intentional — irresponsibility.
And speaking of unmitigated irresponsibility, we also have Iraq, which is a crisis Bush not only isn’t prepared for, but refuses to understand.
I realize the pre-election thinking. Bush felt it necessary to deny the reality in Iraq because to do otherwise would be to risk a political backlash that would remove him from office. As long as he told his tragically uninformed supporters that Iraq is a “remarkable success story” and “freedom is on the march,” he’d keep his base together just long enough to win.
He no longer has to deny the facts. Will he anyway? Fred Kaplan is as pessimistic as I am.
[F]rom start to (alas, not quite) finish, [Bush’s team of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith] have been wrong, at times perniciously so, on nearly every major aspect of this war. Nor do their recent statements or activities reveal any sign that they’re aware of past mistakes or that they detect a need for changes in strategy or tactics.
So what is the second-term Bush going to do with this troika? If he gets rid of them (i.e., if they resign for reasons of health, business opportunities, or the sudden desire to spend more time with their families), it may be a sign the president really does know that things aren’t going well, that his top aides have given him terrible advice, and that he wants to set a different course or at least — to put it in terms that a Harvard Business School grad, like Bush, should understand — hire a more competent executive board.
If the president doesn’t show them the door, then we can only conclude that he believes what he’s been saying, that his pronouncements on staying the course are not mere campaign slogans, that he truly has shuffled off the coil of a reality-based world.
We’ll know soon enough.