REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Pre-Emption Presidency
Bush promises to solve problems that are optional as politics.
Rare is the American president who arrives at his second inauguration wearing coattails. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower won 57% of the popular vote, but lost two seats in the House and one in the Senate. Richard Nixon did better in 1972 and even picked up 12 seats in the House, but he lost two in the Senate. (Nixon called it his "lonely victory.") Much the same went for Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide and Bill Clinton's 1996 semi-landslide.
But when George W. Bush takes the oath today, he will be doing so both with a popular majority of his own and with enlarged majorities in both houses. That's the first reason why the forecasts now being made of a hollow second term strike us as so much wishful thinking by the President's critics. If second terms have historically tended to fail, it's not always because past Administrations ran out of ideas, talent or gas. It's because, frequently, they didn't have the votes. This time the Administration does, at least if it plays the politics right.
The second reason lies within Mr. Bush himself. The President, who seems to be a late bloomer politically as well as personally, came to office in 2001 without any really large ideas of what he wanted to accomplish other than a tax cut to draw down the then-surplus and to be the un-Clinton. But he began to discover his purpose after September 11, and the process of discovery hasn't stopped since. Now the man who articulated the doctrine of pre-emption for foreign policy--confronting "grave and gathering threats" before they explode in our faces, fighting "wars of choice" before we have to fight wars of no choice--wants to apply it to domestic policy.
That's certainly what Social Security reform is about. There will be no Social Security meltdown during the remainder of Mr. Bush's watch, nor for a decade after that. But as Treasury Secretary John Snow observed in a meeting with Journal editors last week, predicting a crisis doesn't take a Cassandra. It's a matter of arithmetic. We know life expectancy has risen to 78 years today from 62 years in 1935, when Social Security came into being. We know fertility rates have declined to two per woman from the baby-boom peak of 3.7. We know the worker/retiree ratio has fallen to 3 to 1 from 16 to 1 in 1950. We know the first baby boomer will retire in 2010. We know Social Security benefits will exceed payroll tax revenue in 2018.
None of this is to say partial privatization is the only solution to the crisis, although we see it as the best among politically realistic alternatives. It is to say that there's no use crying that "crisis" is such a harsh word, or that it isn't looming, or that it's best dealt with by some other Congress 20 years hence. And it is this willingness to take on challenges that are necessary as policy but optional as politics that chiefly distinguishes Mr. Bush's Presidency.
Something similar can also be said of Mr. Bush's immigration proposal. Again, the case can be made that there is no crisis--if the presence of 10 million undocumented workers, largely accounting for a $1 trillion black market, isn't quite a crisis. But at some point, one Administration or another is going to have to come to terms with the integration of the North American labor market, and neither ignoring the problem nor building a 2,000-mile Berlin Wall along our southern border achieves that. Mr. Bush's guest-worker program may only be a first step toward a more comprehensive solution. But at least the President is facing up to reality.
There's another reality Mr. Bush is facing up to and it's called the Hispanic vote. Paleocons and nativists may think the key GOP demographic is uneducated whites. But it's hard to imagine a majority Republican future without at least being competitive among Hispanics. In this sense, the guest-worker proposal isn't just an exercise in economic sanity but also in long-term party building on a par with FDR's capture of the black vote.
One danger to such an ambitious domestic agenda is that it might cause the Administration to lose sight of its foreign policy objectives. There will certainly be pressure to engage in a more conciliating style of diplomacy, particularly with Europe. There will also be a temptation to find the quickest possible exit from Iraq.
But America's objective in the war on terror isn't a Nixonian "peace with honor." It's a Churchillian "victory at all costs." That will mean staying put in Iraq until the insurgency has been defeated, and coming to grips with other emerging threats, a nuclear Iran above all. It would help if the Administration could do a better job of selling its case this time around; it would help too if Condi Rice could get the State Department to join the effort. But ultimately foreign policy is not an exercise in public relations, and unpopular choices may have to be made.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Mr. Bush described November's election as "an accountability moment," in which Americans were offered two competing visions and chose his. Now Mr. Bush must face another such moment--his accountability to history. If he can stick to his guns and principles, his second term will confound the skeptics as much as his first one did.
