[Mb-civic] EDITORIAL The President Reloads

[Michael Butler]

latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-union3feb03.story
EDITORIAL
The President Reloads

February 3, 2005

President Bush wasn't even on camera for his best moment in Wednesday
night's State of the Union address. The emotional high point was provided by
a heartfelt embrace in the balcony, between the mother of an American
soldier killed in action in Iraq and the daughter of one of Saddam Hussein's
victims, who proudly voted in last Sunday's election.

It was a triumphant moment for Bush, but also a reminder that the rationale
for the war has changed. If the Iraqi people's freedom was once seen as
merely a bonus from an unavoidable war, that freedom has moved to center
stage as the war's primary justification. That's because contrary to what
Bush said in a previous State of the Union speech, we now know the threat
posed by Hussein was not imminent.

Given that history, Bush was wise in Wednesday's address to restrain himself
in discussing Iran and North Korea, nations he memorably described as part
of a three-country "axis of evil" three years ago.

This time he stressed diplomacy, nodding to efforts by France, Germany and
Britain to persuade Tehran to forgo nuclear weapons, and saying the United
States is "working closely" with other governments to get Pyongyang to
abandon them. That's also a bow to realism; U.S. forces are stretched
woefully thin in Iraq. Washington needs help in dealing with Iran and North
Korea.

The president also deserves credit for gently prodding the regimes of Saudi
Arabia and Egypt, challenging them to loosen up politically and implicitly
comparing them to Morocco, Jordan and Bahrain, more liberal Arab countries.
The criticism of two major allies in the Middle East suggested that his
inauguration speech's high-flown rhetoric about spreading freedom might not
have been written on the wind. Bush's proposal of a $350-million grant to
the Palestinian Authority to implement political, economic and security
reforms augurs well for the chances of advancing the goal of a Palestinian
state in the aftermath of Yasser Arafat's death.

Social Security Quagmire

On the domestic front, Bush shows signs of making the same blunder he made
in Iraq ‹ getting so enamored of an admittedly gutsy choice that he comes to
believe it's an unavoidable one.

The contentious and unnecessary project of Bush's second term is partial
privatization of Social Security ‹ although the words "privatize" and even
"private" did not appear once in his speech. Don't get us wrong: There is a
real imbalance coming in Social Security, as the president explained quite
well. But as he also said, the earliest moment when this imbalance can be
labeled an actual crisis is more than four decades away. (Note: 2018 is just
when the fund starts paying out more than it takes in. It is not a crisis.)

In his address, Bush strongly hinted that he deserves credit for taking up
this issue so far in advance. But in taking up Social Security with such
zeal, he is looking past plenty of vexing issues that aren't on a
four-decade fuse. No credit for that. On the other hand, he deserves a lot
of credit for saying almost explicitly that his solution will involve
reducing benefits for future retirees. He did this through the clever device
of listing various benefit-reducing proposals that others have suggested and
that he would be willing to consider. But the message was clear, and
courageous.

The truth is that any of these ideas (such as raising the retirement age),
or a combination of them, would solve the Social Security problem for the
rest of this century. Yet Bush insists on presenting them as preliminary
steps in his plan to "save" Social Security by partially privatizing it.

Bush fleshed out his plan a bit Wednesday night, and it is starting to look
like Hillarycare, the healthcare overhaul disaster of President Clinton's
first term. Every objection to the idea is addressed through another layer
of complexity. Bush added several layers in his address, but no amount of
complexity can hide the idea's flaws ‹ such as the virtual mathematical
certainty that it can't work. (See http://www.latimes.com/proof for details
of that claim.)

More Pressing Issues

There are plenty of truly urgent problems Bush could focus on if he weren't
so distracted by Social Security. He mentioned two of them in his speech,
deficit reduction and immigration.

On the subject of the federal budget, Bush made the familiar Republican
complaints about wasteful government programs and the usual promises about
cutting or eliminating them. He promised to cut the deficit by half by the
end of his presidency. This is a remarkably modest ambition, though one he
has seemed unwilling to act upon.

Keep in mind that Bush has Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.
Republicans can have any level of spending and taxes they want. It also
means that they are responsible for whatever combination of spending and
taxes that comes out of Washington. If Bush wanted a balanced budget, he
could have one tomorrow.

Instead, he continues to illustrate what he meant by the famous phrase,
"compassionate conservative": a conservative who doesn't mind the government
spending a lot of money as long as there is no talk of raising taxes to pay
for it. The State of the Union address was peppered with new proposals for
spending programs and tax credits, all of which will make even Bush's modest
budget goal harder to reach.

On immigration, he said all the right things. The status quo is not
acceptable, and Washington needs to come up with a way to address the
nation's need for imported labor without continuing to condone a black
market of millions of undocumented workers. This isn't a system that will be
broken in several decades. It is broken now and the administration needs to
be more forceful in pressing Congress for a solution.

There were plenty of crowd-pleasing items sprinkled throughout the speech.
Bush sounded positively Clintonian in saying he wants a community health
center in every poor county, and he sounded even less like himself when he
called for funding training for defense attorneys in death penalty cases. If
only he'd been so concerned about poor lawyering when he was overseeing all
those executions as governor of Texas.

The president's crowd-pleasing instinct isn't always harmless. In calling
for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Bush once again sought
to capitalize on a certain crowd's worst instincts, hatred and intolerance.

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