The Battered Bush Principles

...The scene I would have given much to witness was the Saturday live but untelevised ceremony preparing for the dramatic Sunday abstinence pledge on television...

...Revolving Door...

...And long before the legendary Hundred Days had elapsed, all three lay battered...

...The debate went steadily downhill, amid anger and frustration, although no participant saw any advantage tobe gained from the struggle...

...The Tragic Ending This brings us to the Greek tragedy aspect of the Tower affair...

...I have to approach it dif ferently as President...

...Say, you want more for nutrition and child welfare...

...Any consumption of alcohol, past or present, that gives you the reputation among your peers of having a drinkingproblem...

...Passing back and forth between government and private enterprise (including the news media...

...No problem...

...Your peers, being part of the definition, become part of the problem...

...Seeking to get sworn in, he swore off...

...I want to have high ethical standards, but I don't want to have it so it goes so far, bends so far backward that a person that knows something about a subject matter is disqualified from serving, or a person that has some means is disqualified from serving...

...On his first working day, January 23, the President told his assembled staff, "It's a question of knowing right from wrong, avoiding conflicts of interest, bending over backward to see that there's not even a perception of conflict of interest...

...Tower summoned to his suite two bemused coresidents of the Jefferson Hotel, Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner and Admiral William Narva, a Navy physician who attends members of Congress, to have them witness his signature to the pledge, thus creating a pseudolegal document, a television artifact...

...Actually, they know it better when they feel it...

...Wishing to take the oath, he took the pledge...

...It left the executive and legislative branches of government ill-prepared to cooperate in dealing with the effects of the Eastern Airlines strike...

...Bush's long-time friend, legal counsel and ethics watchdog, C. Boyden Gray, found himself obliged to resign from the communications company where, incredibly, he had been chairman and had drawn considerable compensation since he had started working for Vice President Bush in 1981...

...Simple, says the President...

...How does the freeze work...

...For the convenience of those outside the Beltway who may have had difficulty following the Great Debate, I offer a glossary of frequently-used expressions: Drinkingproblem (one word...

...Archaic: A consensus on matters so consequential to the national interest as to be above partisan exploitation...

...Profiting from knowledge, experience and contacts accumulated in public service...

...Innuendo...

...Current usage: A way of appealing to opponents to break ranks while trying to insure that your supporters do not...

...a friend of the President, said on television that he considered Tower's $750,000 in consultancy fees from large military contractors after serving as a Reagan arms control negotiator in Geneva a greater problem than allegations about Tower's private conduct...

...It raised new obstacles to bridging the gulf on the budget, which, as crafted in the White House, did not go far toward fulfilling the promise of "a kinder and gentler nation" or the call to "a mission of goodness and greatness...

...If Congress wants something to go up, it must make something go down...

...In a married man almost synonymous with adultery, but with a further suggestion of brazenness and promiscuity...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR The Battered Bush Principles During his first three days in office President George Bush enunciated three themes: ethics in government, bipartisanship with Congress, compassion for the disadvantaged...

...The biggest applause line of the Bush Inaugural Address, repeated in his budget message to Congress, was "The people didn't send us here to bicker...

...I do not want to have the loudest charge, no matter how irresponsible, be that that sets the standards...

...If you say that this freeze represents a cut in actual services, you get an argument from Budget Director Richard G. Darman, who maintains that a freeze is not a cut even if it walks and quacks like acut...

...By the time President Bush came to talk about ethics again at a news conference on February 6, it was in less ringing terms, "We've got to be very careful about perceptions of impropriety when it comes to conflict of interest...

...The soap opera part had to do with the figure cut by Tower as he defended himself against allegations of excessive drinking and womanizing...

...More ambiguous when big bucks are paid nominally for sage advice, but possibly for confidential information or hope of favored treatment from a consultant who whirls back through the revolving door to high office...

...Tower may have been seeking to illustrate this point in a restaurant when he lunged for a woman friend under a luncheon table, saying, "I'm going to fondle you...

...To stay even, with inflation and population growth, the total would be about $10 billion more...

...Louis Sullivan, awaiting confirmation of Secretary ofHealthand Human Services, found himself having to renounce $300,000 in accrued sabbatical pay for 13 years ofserviceas president of Morehouse Medical College...

...Not that y ou have lower standards, but I just think that again, this whole question of perception— we'vegottolookatit very, very carefully...

...Bush wanted to freeze that 12 per cent portion of the total budget at this year's level of $136 billion...

...Not rumors or innuendoes of one sort or another...

...The ticking came from the so-called "black box," the repository of the "discretionary " programs not subject to increases mandated by law—everything from child nutrition to national parks...

...Easily identified when it violates the law (see Michael Deaver, lobbying the White House he had recently left...

...President Bush spoke opaquely in the knowledge that his Commission on Federal Ethics Law Reform, headed by former Judge Malcolm R. Wilkey and former Attorney General Griffin Bell (all of whose eight members had worked in government and six of whom are now in law firms with substantial government relations) seemed more inclined to relax than to tighten the rules for financial disclosure...

...Again, talking informally to reporters in the Oval Office on February 16, hesaid:"IhopeI haven't created something that just carries things too far...

...Any rumor or allegation deemed adverse to nominee...

...That was the reverse of what Gray had done and a manifest injustice to Dr...

...Gradually it dawned that the Bush budget was as regressive as the Reagan budget...

...Sullivan as sympathetic Senators noted during his confirmation hearing...

...In a single man there is a connotation of uncontrolled behavior, often with employees and even strangers...

...A Towering Comedy The Tower affair ranged from a Mack Sennett comedy to Greek tragedy, with a lot of soap opera in-between...

...See also "raw data," the "raw" here meaning merely unevaluated...

...It would take great cooperation between the White House and Congress to resolve differences over the budget under the best of circumstances...

...As the President went around the country telling of the nice things he wanted to do about schools and homelessness, Congressional leaders walked around the budget, poked at it and detected sounds of a ticking bomb that they soon found themselves believing could explode in their hands...

...In the fallout from that episode, Secretary of State James A. Baker III had to divest himself of bank stock that he had inherited from his grandfather...

...Adverse information arrives in various ways—some over your transom, some under your door, and some through innuendo...

...The Mack Sennett part had to do with the stumbling performance of an administration whose standard-bearer had campaigned on "experience" based on 14 years in government, yet seemed unable to anticipate, let alone manage its problems with the Senate...

...The Tower controversy represented a descent into profound bickering, and it dealt bipartisanship a severely bruising blow...

...But I want to be fair...

...Indeed, Senator Alan Simpson (R.-Wyo...

...Correspondent Cokie Roberts, challenged by Tower on ABC to define the term, said women know it when they see it...

...That flight of hyperbole soon turned out to be embarrassing...

...That call had been followed by a 193page budget document that came to be viewed on Capitol Hill first as a Churchillian riddle wrapped in a mystery, then as Darman's Dark Deed...

...Although he was supposed to know the ethics rules, he said he had not known that deferred compensation applies to the period when services are actually rendered...

...Bipartisanship...

...See Gary Hart...

...You cut, say, Amtrak subsidies and legal services for the poor...

...By that time, of course, ethics in the form of the "revolving door" had also become one of the issues in the controversy over the confirmation of John Tower as Secretary of Defense...

...After the Tower collision, circumstances were not of the best...

...Womanizing...

...The initial briefing of Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee about the status of the FBI investigation, ignoring the Democrats and Chairman Sam Nunn of Georgia, and the pressure for a committee vote while the President would be in Tokyo were only a few of the inept moves...