Wednesday, January 2, 2002
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Wednesday, January 2, 2002 |
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Bush's first year not that easy to rate By DAVE HAMRICK As 2001 draws to a close, what could be more natural than to look back and assess the first year of the George Bush presidency? Yes, I know, it hasn't been a full year yet because of all the problems, but give me a break. It's New Year's week. But it's a little bit different task, in the light of Sept. 11. Bush is riding a tsunami of popularity because he set about smoking them out of their holes, and the effort to do so seems to be going reasonably well. And he has managed to set pretty much the right tone in public appearances reassuring, firm and determined to continue the fight. In crisis management he gets high marks so far. The true test of his leadership will be whether he is continuing that fight two years from now, and whether he is continuing it with the same level of support from the American people, the Congress and the international community. At that point, Osama bin Laden will have been imprisoned, will be dead or will have disappeared. We'll have undoubtedly killed several thousand of his brainwashed volunteers, along with numerous innocent Afghani people. In the aftermath of the war there well may have been a My-Lai style incident or two to explain and deal with. There have been some suspicious goings on with prisoners, after all. And there will have been all the difficult and expensive business of putting the country back on its feet again. We can walk away from that, of course. We can take the attitude that we went there to do a job, we did it, and what happens next is somebody else's responsibility. In other words, we can take the same attitude we did after we helped the locals kick the Soviets out ... and we all know how well THAT went. But if Bush does the wise thing and insists on an active U.S. and U.N. role in restoring Afghanistan, and if he does the morally right thing and insists that we take an active role in humanitarian relief, then he'll have to deal with the whiners back home who don't like the amount of money it's costing. At the same time, what will be the state of our long-term war on terrorism? Will we be fighting in Iraq? Libya? Palestine? Any of a dozen other countries I can't spell or pronounce? Will the nations of the First World still be with us? Will the nations of the Third World be united against us? All of the answers to those and many more questions will have to be tallied up to put the grades on Bush's report card. And that's just in one arena. Which brings us back to year one. There are many in the Republican Party who are upset that Bush is not taking more advantage of his popularity wave. There is some wisdom in that point of view. It's only temporary, after all. If the economy doesn't turn around pretty soon, those 90 percent approval ratings are going to be dropping like a cookie cutter bomb, with the same results, politically speaking. If the situation were reversed, I can tell you what Clinton would be doing right now. He would be using his current exalted position to be Republicans to a bloody pulp. Every time they raised the slightest objection to any of his programs, he would be in front of the cameras shedding crocodile tears and blaming his detractors for everything from teen pregnancy to anthrax. Bush is striking a slightly more statesmanlike, less partisan pose, which you may recall was his promise to us during the campaign. Instead of castigating Democrats for blocking "his" economic recovery program, he simply castigates Congress as a whole for taking so long to pass "a" program. If Bush took a little more Clintonesque approach to the debate over drilling Alaska's oil, he could probably punch that one through as well. He could point draw a direct parallel between oil and security and accuse Democrats of giving comfort to terrorists by continuing our dependence of the Middle East. He doesn't seem inclined to take the extreme. He seems to be setting the tone for a pretty middle of the road term in office. To people like yours truly who believe we need some radical reforms and not just minor course adjustments, that's not good news. We're looking at four years eight if the economy improves of pretty good. When you consider the alternative that faced us a year ago, that's a little easier to take. All we can do is hope that a new wave of reform-minded people will take over Congress and, with a "pretty good" moderate president, can truly get some things done. And let's hope that Bush and the American people have what it takes to prosecute the war on terrorism all the way to the end.
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