President W - humorous look back after Year 2005 if George W. Bush becomes president - Brief Article

National Review, July 12, 1999 by John O'Sullivan

A review of Richard Darman's Second Term, a 2005 memoir.

It was said by the British politician Enoch Powell that all political careers end in failure, except those cut off in their prime. Mr. Darman's second volume of memoirs raises, however, the sad possibility that some careers end in failure even when cut off in their prime- notably, of course, that of Mr. Darman's boss, President George W. Bush.

It is hard to recall now the scenes of Republican rejoicing that attended the coronation of "George the Second" (as a bitter Al Gore took to calling him in the last stages of Campaign 2000.) Here at last was that sturdy oxymoron-a Republican winner. He arrived in Washington having succeeded not only in uniting the American people in a landslide victory but also in the far more difficult task of uniting the GOP. Supply-siders, defense intellectuals, pro-lifers, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Christian Right-all had fallen beneath his easygoing spell, all were convinced that (secretly of course) he agreed with them, and all thrilled to his inaugural proclamation of a "new future."

"Let us not focus on the past," he had memorably intoned. "Let us focus on the future. The future comes before the past." And they had all felt he was speaking directly to them.

The Christian Right were the first to discover their mistake. Apparently Mr. Bush felt that nominating an Episcopalian woman bishop to the Supreme Court to replace Chief Justice Rehnquist would cleverly satisfy both Christians and feminists. In fact, not only did the Christian Right denounce him as "a gnostic or, worse, a Unitarian," the ACLU sued to prevent the appointment as violating the separation of church and state. The nomination died in the Senate when the bishop's earlier career as a lesbian lap-dancer hit the tabloids.

Cultural conservatives were also upset when, after six months in office, the president vetoed a bill to transfer federal funding from bilingual-education programs to English-immersion ones on the grounds that it would offend the vital Hispanic vote. His veto caused such an outcry on the right, however, that he moved to make amends with a bill that would reduce bilingual spending as a percentage of education spending by hiking the education budget in total.

"You wanted to know what we meant by 'compassionate conservatism'? Well, that's what we mean by it," a senior White House aide told the Washington Post. Other measures to please the vital Hispanic vote- notably, the IRS audit of Ward Connerly-were instituted as that vote became progressively more vital with the administration's fall in support among all other groups.

"The GOP has a choice," said the president's pollster after the loss of both Houses in the midterm elections. "It can either change its policy on immigration-or its policies on everything else. We've decided on everything else."

For the first 18 months of office, there were few international crises, and foreign policy was on autopilot. Mr. Bush then unveiled a bold new initiative, modeled on his father's foreign policy of ten years before, to build up Germany as the leader of a new independent Europe that would take up America's role in North Africa and the Middle East. In ten years, however, the Germans had changed and the former Green leader Joschka Fischer was now chancellor of a Left-Green coalition. Still, the legendary Bush charm worked again, with the result that the U.S. backed Germany's ecological intervention in Algeria in 2003.

"We Germans must get used to controlling all climates from the Arctic to the Sahara," Chancellor Fischer later remarked at the Casablanca conference that ratified Kyoto III, giving NATO the power to enforce U.N. environmental standards on violators worldwide. He added with a chuckle that Texas had better watch out, to which the president laughingly assented; but of course the Guadalajara Treaty between the European Union and Mexico had not then been broached, let alone signed.

Throughout these political ups and downs, the president's personal popularity had remained high largely because the economy performed well, and the Dow hit 25,000 at the outset of his third year. Then "Black Week" struck, and in due course became "Black Month," and finally "Black Year." Distress returned to America. Former Silicon Valley executives could be found selling hand-held computerized multiple-use communication devices in the street.

These events hit the president hard. As he complained, mystified, to his Treasury secretary: "Have revenues ever gone down before?" He lost all confidence in the economic advisors he had brought in largely to dispel conservative suspicions that he would hire Dick Darman, dismissed his entire team-and hired Dick Darman. As Mr. Darman describes the scene in his new book, he arrived to find a White House in disarray. But he quickly restored its (and the president's) morale because he knew exactly what had to be done. He raised taxes across the board and set the U.S. economy on the road to recovery.