Small earthquake in beltway

National Review, July 8, 1991

PRESIDENT BUSH made a full-dress defense of his approach to domestic affairs in a speech on the White House lawn earlier this month and the earth hardly moved.

The President addressed crime and transportation, accusing Congress of dragging feet on his agenda. But the problems of the criminal-justice system are largely procedural tangles generated by judges. The Administration's crime bill does propose one reform-lifting restrictions on evidence now deemed to be illegally obtained, so long as the police acted in good faith-but real change, for good or for ill (mainly ill), will have to come from the courts, not the White House or Congress. On transportation there is even less to get excited about. The Administration and the Senate each have a bill. The price tags are the same-$105 billion-but the Senate would spend less of that sum on highways.

The point of the speech for Mr. Bush was not these concerns, but a necessarily modest effort to define himself philosophically. He acknowledged that the preceding decade had created twenty million new jobs. Yet millions still trudge the path of poverty. The marketplace alone can't solve all our problems." The country would have to follow "a better way," combining government "properly defined" and the market "properly understood."

Thus, even as the Vatican abandons its century-long snipe hunt for a political and economic third way," George Bush embarks on one. But perhaps that is putting his speech in too long a historical perspective. The President's concerns are immediate, and positional-he wants to put himself at a proper distance from Ronald Reagan on the one hand, and from the Democrats on the other: kinder than the former; more prudent than the latter.

Like all politicians who define themselves positionally, however, he leaves the agenda in his enemies' hands-which for now means, in the hands of the Democrats. His approach is to wait till the Democrats move-then propose to reach their destination by a slower route.

That means a lot of huffing and puffing about transportation bills from now till 1996-without really getting anywhere.