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Jewish World Review May 2, 2001 / 9 Iyar, 5761
Chris Matthews
He embraced Christian conservatives by picking
John Ashcroft, a hero to the Bible Belt, as attorney
general.
He played to ardent abortion foes by banning
federal family planning aid to countries or
organizations that provide abortion services or
counseling.
He pushed a $1.6 trillion tax cut beloved by
conservatives.
He rejected the Kyoto accords on global warming,
displaying his rugged independence from
environmentalists.
He has yet to travel overseas, focusing on domestic
and hemispheric issues.
In each instance, George W. Bush has distanced his
presidency from his father's. In the late 1980s,
President George Herbert Walker Bush pegged
himself as a Republican moderate. His policies
would be "kinder, gentler" than those of his
predecessor, Ronald Reagan. He would avoid the
nasty budget cuts, the red-meat ideology, the
hostility of blacks and the poor.
George Walker Bush hasn't played that game. He
campaigned as a compassionate conservative, but
from the get-go of his administration, he made clear
that he's an unafraid conservative. On abortion, on
taxes, on the environment, he drew a line in the
sand.
The Ashcroft selection was especially emblematic.
The new president knew that naming the former
Missouri senator would trigger an all-out fight with
the liberal opposition, that the People for the
American Way, Hollywood, the Civil Liberties
Union and the NAACP would all join the cotillion
of rejection.
Young Bush did it anyway. He knew naming a hero
of the Christian right to the attorney general's office
was precisely what his father would never have
done.
This father-son dynamic can be seen on other
playing fields:
Dad broke a promise with a painful tax hike. Son
has bet the ranch on a big tax cut.
Dad trumpeted "a New World Order" after forging
a global alliance against Iraq. So far, son is the most
stay-at-home president in recent history. Except for
quickie trips to Mexico and Quebec, he displays no
more urge for foreign travel than Jesse Helms.
George the son is not rebelling against George the
father out of some Oedipal rage. He is rebelling
against a father's ways because those ways didn't
work. To put it bluntly, the 43rd president is intent
on avoiding the mistakes that cost the 41st his job.
When the senior Bush broke that "read my lips"
promise -- "No new taxes" -- he got badly burned.
Having won 54 percent of the popular vote in 1988,
he won just 38 percent in 1992. That kind of lesson
is hard to forget.
George the father's focus on foreign policy also set
a bad example. Father and son watched Dad's
dazzling 91 percent approval rating after the Gulf
War evaporate two Novembers later. They learned
that even an impressive military triumph does not
guard a commander-in-chief against an electoral
trashing at home.
The two also gleaned a cultural message from the
wreckage of the senior Bush's loss in 1992: Don't
forget the Republican base, especially in the
conservative South. That Dixie base lies far from the
family's ancestral home in New England.
Connecticut is now Gore-Lieberman country. So
are California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and
New Jersey -- states that the father carried in 1988
but the son lost badly last fall. To hold the
presidency in 2004, W. needs to hold the South,
the border states along the Mason-Dixon line and
the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. To
hedge possible losses there,
he needs to target Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and
other vote-heavy states.
To grow his culturally conservative base, young
Bush offers himself as a true son of Texas, an oil
wildcatter who may have gone to Yale but didn't
leave his heart there. This explains why, at the
university's 300-year anniversary last weekend in
New Haven, Conn., the world's most powerful
Yalie was conspicuously absent.
The grandest canyon between George and George
W. lies in their approaches to foreign policy. Dad
built his resume fighting in the South Pacific, serving
as envoy to the United Nations and to China,
running the CIA. Son made his name running the
Texas Rangers.
Consider how the old man would have handled the
stand-off over the American spy plane's emergency
landing on China's Hainan Island. He would have
conferred with fellow world leaders in London,
Paris, Moscow and Tokyo. We'd have gotten
leaked accounts of late-night meetings, of the
continuous vigil in the White House situation room.
It would have been the stuff of grand diplomacy,
with the president as the nation's Chief Diplomat.
Of course, George W. played it just the opposite.
He let others -- Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Don
Rumsfeld -- share the spotlight. Foreign policy is,
after all, their job. He knows, because he learned it
from his father, that the key to winning re-election is
to focus on matters at home. Like cutting taxes.
When that big tax cut bill gets passed and signed in
the Rose Garden in August, don't expect to see any
Cabinet members or staff folk sharing in the
applause.
George W. Bush may be a Harvard MBA, but he
learned politics in the college of his father's hard
knocks. Before the big tax cut signing ceremony,
the White House ballyhoo boys will be working
overtime.
The hazard President Bush faces three years down
the road is that the voters may not buy his act, even
if it is 180 degrees from his father's. An ABC
News-Washington Post poll gives Bush his highest
approval rate for "international affairs." But the poll
also shows trouble for the president on the tax cut
issue. Only 13 percent of those surveyed said
Bush's .6 trillion plan benefits middle-income
taxpayers. Fifty-three percent said it mainly benefits
"upper income" folks. The poll also gives the new
president a far humbler rating of 47 percent on the
pollster's perennial question: Does he understand
the problems of people like you?
Perhaps Bush will skirt these electoral dangers with
savvy strategy. Bush senior acted as if winning the
war to liberate Kuwait in 1991 liberated him from
any worries about winning re-election in 1992. That
turned out to be a tragic delusion.
It's the rare commander-in-chief who can survive
when he outruns his homefront supply line. W. is
trying to avoid making the same mistake. Reports
are thatmembers of his White House staff is busy
planning for 2004. Rather than rest on their laurels,
they are focused on the hard re-election battle
ahead.
The closeness and controversy of this president's
election may prove his greatest edge. The father
beat his 1988 rival, Michael Dukakis, in the popular
vote 54 to 46 percent. The son lost the 2000
popular vote to Al Gore. Young Bush will not rely
too dangerously on a past electoral mandate
because he never got one.
The shadow he may have to escape is not his
father's, but his
own.
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