The End of the Honeymoon
BARNES, FRED
The End of the Honeymoon With Bush's budget, politics gets real. BY FRED BARNES THE WHITE HOUSE doesn't quite know what to call President Bush's speech to Congress on February 27. It's not a...
...And two Senate Republicans expressed qualms about the Bush tax plan...
...Swallowing actual cuts is another...
...The press poses every bit as serious a threat...
...They will have actual budget numbers for specific programs to deal with, making it easier to point out the victims of Bush's budget...
...Chances are, they're ready to change their tune, and the budget will give them an opportunity...
...Among other things, Daniels told the Associated Press he wants to kill "a healthy fraction" of the 6,118 "earmarks" for local projects that members of Congress stuck in the 2001 budget at a cost of $15 billion...
...Anyone who remembers the shock and horror with which the media treated President Reagan's modest spending cuts in 1981 knows well how reporters can project an image of presidential coldhearted-ness...
...Neither Bush nor his aides have flinched on the budget...
...And the 4 percent increase will seem especially small compared with the 2001 budget, which grew 12 percent...
...We know they'll be coming [at Bush]," he says...
...Reporters have been remarkably kind to Bush in his first weeks as president...
...some Bush aides refer to it as "the budget priority speech," since the president will present highlights of his first federal budget...
...It's not a topic of conversation," she adds...
...But the president was able to lay the political and economic groundwork for the plan's passage, aided by Federal Reserve boss Alan Greenspan and surging surplus numbers...
...In his first month as president, Bush fared extraordinarily well in Washington, wooing if not wowing nearly everyone and defying expectations that his honeymoon would be shorter than Darva Conger's...
...Now comes the hard part, the 2002 budget, which Bush hasn't even begun to sell...
...Yes, he took some potshots from congressional Democrats over his $1.6 trillion tax cut...
...House Republicans, in a series of private "listening sessions," accepted all this calmly...
...For this, they've been harshly criticized in both media and left-wing political circles...
...Mitch Daniels, the budget director, has gone about his work of holding down spending without interference...
...Also, Bush's claim to be a compassionate conservative will be sneered at...
...At least that's the working title used by the Bush speechwriting staff...
...This stems, I suspect, from a combination of steadfastness and innocence...
...Yet the White House seems oblivious to the possibility of an abrupt end to the honeymoon...
...But going along with reprogramming in theory is one thing, notes representative Roy Blunt, the deputy GoP whip...
...But the budget had to take a backseat to two higher priorities: education and the tax cut...
...He will propose a 4 percent (or less) hike in spending, which may sound like a lot outside the Beltway, but in Washington it's Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Democrats and the media are...
...And of course all the spending constituencies who benefit from budget growth will weigh in...
...For Democrats, that's a rhetorical question...
...You don't want to open that prematurely...
...There's a time for [promoting the budget]," according to Rove...
...Democratic attacks are utterly predictable...
...He sent some spending proposals back to agencies because they didn't follow his instructions to justify any new expenditures (even ones based on inflation) beyond last year's budget...
...There's another problem: repro-gramming...
...Democrats will say Bush had to trim critically needed spending to accommodate a tax cut that's too large and favors the rich...
...Nor should it be, says Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist...
...So Bush won't begin selling his budget until his address to Congress next week, followed by a couple of days of events outside Washington...
...Mary Matalin, the refugee from Crossfire who is now Vice President Cheney's political adviser, says she doesn't know anyone at the White House who frets about the end of the honeymoon...
...bound to be viewed as Draconian...
...Republicans, though, are not Bush's problem...
...Not a moment too soon...
...Would a compassionate leader really chop programs during an economic downturn marked by large layoffs...
...A more accurate name, however, might be "the end of the honeymoon speech...
...Daniels says the budget will be "realistic but restrained...
...It's not a State of the union address...
...This is the shifting of money from one agency to another, allowing some like the Education Department to get more funds while others, such as the Labor Department, face cuts in their projected growth...
...A more popular title around the White House, given that the Senate and House will convene together to hear Bush, is "the joint session speech...
...And the next day, he'll dispatch the 2002 budget in all its mind-numbing detail to Capitol Hill...
...Agencies whose budgets don't rise faster than the rate of inflation will be characterized as victims of Bush's tax cut...
Vol. 6 • February 2001 • No. 23
