Posted on 12/04/2001 3:33:07 PM PST by Jeff Smith
WASHINGTON — As analysts dissect President Bush's first hundred days, the most important thing to remember is that he and his administration are different from what Washington has become used to. Because Mr. Bush works in a disciplined way to implement a broad strategy, he has been able to set the stage calmly and methodically for a potentially far-reaching performance.
Not insignificantly, the biggest changes in Washington have been cultural rather than political: the atmosphere is more businesslike, and dialogue across party lines is calmer. President Bush has already been able to change the tone dramatically, even after the 35-day, often toxic fight over the election. He has been friendly, flexible, open and very conservative — though no reporter seems to be capable of typing those four adjectives in one sentence. Mr. Bush is willing to delegate important initiatives and decisions and give credit to others.
The president remains focused on the themes he campaigned on: cutting taxes, reforming education, expanding access to health care while reforming Medicare, creating personal Social Security accounts, and strengthening our military and intelligence capabilities. The only new theme to emerge in the first 100 days is the concept of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Labor unions and the Democrats in Congress will create the opportunity and the political necessity for President Bush to engage the Hispanic community to help build real commitment to the free trade area. The debate is likely to combine diplomatic, economic and political factors enabling the Bush administration to demonstrate its commitment to free trade while emphasizing the benefits to citizens in all of the Americas.
President Bush has assembled an exceptionally competent, mature and experienced team, but while the strength of his cabinet and advisers is their ability to remain focused on large goals, they face the challenge of creating a shared commitment with the American people. Undoubtedly, the Bush team can manage the daily government and meet international challenges. The question is whether it can reach out to the country and arouse the level of support his bold proposals will require.
The Bush team is still wrestling with the objective reality that this is not a Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan era of obvious change. F. D. R. had the Great Depression and the Second World War as backdrops. Ronald Reagan inherited economic decay and the most intense Soviet effort to win the cold war. These were great administrations, but they were in times of response to great events.
Mr. Bush has been effectively barnstorming the country for his program, and this tactic is clearly working for him personally, but it may or may not be working for his programs. People see his steady activity and are impressed that he is a serious person with a real plan. Still, they are not yet convinced that they have something real at stake or that his solutions to public policy problems could dramatically change their lives for the better. Consequently, the public hasn't become engaged and hasn't put pressure to bear on Congress to get the Bush program passed.
Dwight Eisenhower was very effective in managing the system, but in the end he transformed neither his party nor the country in domestic policy. It was Barry Goldwater and Mr. Reagan, in the cold war years, who transformed the Republican Party and ultimately the country.
The last Republican president to transform the country and his party in prosperous and peaceful times was Theodore Roosevelt. He did so by knowing the difference between managerial politics and transformational politics. He knew that managing Washington was a minimalist approach. He focused on rallying the country to impose on Washington changes that reactionaries in both parties vehemently opposed.
A transformational presidency has to convince the American people that it is in their best interest to implement its plans. Unless the Bush administration can do this, it will be very hard to get Congress to make transformational changes. The morning the president convinces his party and the country that his goals are decisive in their lives and that they have to join him in insisting that Washington implement them, he will have begun to transform the system.
The environment has been the most obvious public relations failure of the administration so far, and it is also a good issue on which to note the difference between managerial and transformational styles. The Bush administration dislikes the regulatory, adversarial, litigious, government-dominated model of environmentalism that is the hallmark of liberal groups. That wing of the environmental movement is an adversary of business, free markets, private property and full-time rural residents. It favors bureaucrats, trial lawyers, government control of daily life (what kind of car you drive, what kind of gas you buy, where you are allowed to drive, what you can do with your own farm or ranch), and it favors the affluent transient rural residents who earn a living in places like Hollywood but tell Idahoans and Montanans how to live.
President Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney represent a Western distrust of Washington-controlled, bureaucratic policies. The Bush cabinet includes veterans of state government and business who know full well that the Washington-based environmental bureaucracies are politicized, anti-business, anti-local rights, and often extreme in the policies they implement. Yet the political climate is such that the Bush team cannot simply ignore the arguments of the most vocal activists in the environmental movement.
This will force a real choice on the Bush administration. A managerial, Eisenhower-style approach would create the most conservative regulatory policies that the current political system could tolerate. It would then grudgingly give the left those environmental victories it could not block. A transformational, Theodore Roosevelt-style approach would develop a vision of a healthy environment with maximum biodiversity that would attract the support of the vast majority of Americans and would use a high-technology, scientifically based, locally implemented and cooperative approach to problem solving.
The shift from a public presumption of the left's moral superiority has already occurred in education, health and social security. President Bush can make policy proposals in those areas that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, like personal social security accounts and school choice. Today there is an opportunity for similar transformation on environmental issues.
The key to the first term will be this distinction between a managerial and a transformational approach. President Bush is a good manager, and he has assembled a good team of managers. However, his goals are far beyond the reach of normal management. Achieving his agenda will require the kind of national outpouring of support that is normally aroused by transformational strategies. It will be interesting to see how the two blend together in the second hundred days.
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