Bush Breaks Out to Fast Start

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 21, 2001 | by Jennifer G. Hickey

The American people now seem receptive to President Bush's understand approach and down-home personality. Democrats hope their more aggressive tactics will end this honeymoon.

With pundits producing profiles of potential Democratic presidential candidates and pollsters already hitting the hustings to gauge name recognition, it almost seemed unseemly to focus on history's standard presidential benchmark -- the first 100 days in office. Nonetheless, Washington responded with the requisite polls and articles examining the state of the presidency of George W. Bush.

If public-opinion polls are an accurate reflection of a nation's sentiments, Bush is casting a positive image. For the man who almost didn't became president, the 63 percent job-approval rating in an April 18-19 Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll was cause for delight. The positive job-approval ratings were reinforced in polls conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News (63 percent approval), NBC News and the Wall Street Journal (56 percent approval), as well as a survey conducted by pollster John Zogby for Reuters (63 percent favorable). Bush's job disapproval ratings ranged from 22 percent to 32 percent.

But positive 100-day polls a presidency does not make. Take Bill Clinton. After the (attempted) attorney-general nominations of Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood, the botched siege of Waco, the early defeat of his stimulus package in a Democrat-controlled Senate and with his approval ratings on the decline, including two polls showing support under 50 percent, Clinton looked like anything but a two-term president.

Fed on the activism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Society, the Clinton administration was marked by the subtlety of a brick upside the head. On the other hand, the Bush approach has been understated -- even, on occasion, too much so. Recognizing the hazard in permitting perception to become reality, administration officials finally launched a Sunday talk-show offensive to right what environmentalists and media-greens have portrayed as ecological wrongs.

To the delight of weary Republicans on Capitol Hill, Bush moved personally to become more involved in, not to mention more conciliatory on, lobbying for his tax cut. Meeting with a handful of fiscally conservative Democrats, the president said he would be willing to settle for a compromise tax cut of $1.34 trillion during nine years with a $60 billion stimulus to take effect this year.

The shape the tax cut takes likely will be decided in the ongoing House-Senate conference meetings, which were marked by partisan tensions and distempers. With Democratic leadership insisting the tax cut still is too high, the role played by Sen. John Breaux, D-La., will be important. As then-Democrat Rep. Phil Gramm of Texas took the lead in ushering Ronald Reagan's 1981 tax bill through the House, Breaux will have to do the same with on-the-fence Senate colleagues. A resolution and subsequent votes are expected in May.

The issues of tax cuts and spending always have managed to inspire spirited philosophical debate. Now the scrap within government about a spiritual role in public policy is as contentious. But there was no contention inside the Library of Congress on April 25 as several hundred community leaders convened for the Faith-Based Leadership Summit.

Spearheaded by House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma and Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Penn., the gathering was intended "to facilitate a national dialogue between lawmakers, the faith-based community and the public" concerning a variety of faith-based initiatives -- known as charitable-choice programs -- in place nationwide. Santorum, who in March introduced the Savings Opportunity and Charitable Giving Act, said there was "much enthusiasm" for permitting religious organizations to qualify for federal funding of antidrug and poverty-fighting programs. Nonetheless, he said, passage of Bush's faith-based initiative legislation "is going to be tough."

A March 5-18 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found 75 percent of those polled supported federal funding for secular social programs of religious groups. But respondents were less supportive depending upon which faith was to be assisted. Only 38 percent supported funding programs of Muslim mosques, and 51 percent approved giving such funds to efforts run by the Mormon Church. But the converts whom Santorum and Watts need to hit the sawdust trail are their Democratic colleagues on Capitol Hill.

Although the summit was a predominantly Republican event, Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., delivered a keynote address and Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., a cosponsor of Santorum's bill, was invited to join in the homiletics, but a scheduling conflict prevented his appearance. Lieberman nonetheless "remains committed," to the issue, a spokesman tells Insight.

Those committed to opposing expansion of the charitable-choice programs approved in the 1996 welfare-reform bill gathered for several press conferences during the summit to drive out the demons. The Coalition Against Religious Discrimination sent Bush a petition signed by 850 religious leaders to "express our serious reservations" that charitable-choice provisions "would inject government dollars and bureaucratic oversight directly into houses of worship and other pervasively religious organizations" Speaking at a Capitol Hill press conference a day before the summit began, the reverend Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said he aims to roll back the charitable-choice provisions, as well as stopping pending legislation. He asserted the programs will lead to "coercion" and would be in violation of the constitutional "separation of church and state" a Jeffersonian notion that does not appear in the Constitution -- Jefferson having been away in France at the time the Constitution was drafted.