Posted on 02/05/2002 7:55:49 AM PST by tberry
In Oval Office, ideology subject to change
By David M. Shribman, Globe Staff, 2/5/2002
ASHINGTON - George H. W. Bush accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 1988 with an unshakable antitax vow, only to agree two years later to raise taxes to fight the deficit. Bill Clinton criticized the Republicans' policies on China only to continue them once he was in the White House. The American presidency has many qualities, but predictability is not one of them.
So, in truth, no one should be surprised by two recent surprises from President George W. Bush - his warm embrace of a volunteerism program once assailed by conservatives and growing indications from the White House that a Republican president might well sign a campaign overhaul bill reviled by the Republican congressional leadership.
Even so, these two developments show Bush, while firm in his resolve to battle terrorism around the globe and steady in his dedication to new cuts in federal taxes, nevertheless is a work-in-progress. His presidency is far from finished, and his ideology is far from fixed.
The result is one of those moments - Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan had almost none of them, but Richard M. Nixon, the first President Bush, and Clinton produced them with regularity - when the president's usual rivals are bewitched and his usual allies are bothered and bewildered.
Last week the president unveiled a $560 million volunteerism program, complete with boosts to the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and Senior Corps. The war and changing cultural values conspired to place him, surely for the first time, in a presidential tradition begun by John F. Kennedy and continued by Clinton, and behind a philosophy of government-sponsored volunteerism dreamed up by midcentury liberals like Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota and Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, the very models of the Midwestern progressivism of the time.
For years Republican conservatives bridled at AmeriCorps, seeing it as a symbol of big spending and big government and as a subsidy for left-leaning social and environmental causes. It was a particular target of former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan.
Now, however, government-sponsored volunteerism is one of the elements of the new struggle against terrorism and its ally, complacency. ''At home you can fight evil with acts of goodness,'' Bush said last week in Winston-Salem, N.C. ''You overcome the evil in society by doing something to help somebody.'' Hoekstra, who once wanted to eliminate AmeriCorps, now promises a bipartisan effort to support volunteerism. ''We need to have volunteerism because it is one of the things about America and the American spirit that makes us different,'' he said in an interview. ''We need it especially now.''
With the Enron financial scandal thrusting an administration headed by two former energy executives on the defensive, Bush may feel that way about an overhaul of the campaign finance system. For years Republican leaders have opposed efforts to change it; former Senate majority leader Bob Dole of Kansas, for example, was a particularly virulent opponent of legislation that didn't even include the restrictions on unregulated ''soft money'' at the heart of today's bills.
Capitol Hill Republicans, fearful that change is coming, now are showing unusual creativity in sending soft money across the country. They're shipping bundles across state lines while soft money is still legal in the expectation that it might soon be eliminated. This winter former Red Cross president Elizabeth H. Dole, a Republican candidate for the Senate in North Carolina, is facing uncomfortable questions about contributions she received from Enron executives. (She has since donated about a quarter of her take from an Enron luncheon to a fund for displaced Enron employees.)
But Bush, who in 2000 showed his fund-raising prowess, has been far more open to banning corporate and labor money than the GOP establishment has been. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer has said the president ''can't be counted on to veto'' a campaign finance bill, which is the White House's way of telling Republican lawmakers that they shouldn't expect to be saved by the stroke of the president's pen. When Representative Richard E. Neal, a Democrat from Springfield, last month became the 218th lawmaker to sign a petition forcing a House vote on the legislation, it became clear that the White House's viewpoint was more than theoretical.
Bush knows that he's probably running for office only one more time. He knows that his own reelection campaign in 2004 can survive and thrive under any financing system, even one with no soft money. He knows, moreover, that campaign finance overhaul is the most important cause in the life of Senator John S. McCain of Arizona - who until Sept. 11 was still harboring presidential ambitions, and may have regained them. All of that is why the groups who want to eliminate soft money have a surprising ally in their pocket: the president.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 2/5/2002.
"Wishy Washy"
"Look at what I do not what I say"
"Situational Ethics"
"Read my lips, 'I'm a conservative'"
Expected from a Republicrat that is nothing more than a made over 1960s Democrat
So what? I doubt President Bush gives a flying fig what Sen. McCain wants. This article's analysis is nonsense.
Yes, Pro-Freedom Thought is OK, However, if you attempt to turn it into speech, and that speech doesn't include platitudes about Dubya walking on water, healing the sick, raising the Dead, or making the blind see, then it is not allowed. :)
We now return to the Flaming, in Progress...
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