George W. Bush and the R-Word
PODHORETZ, JOHN
George W. Bush and the R-Word There's a good reason the new administration is talking recession. BY JOHN PODHORETZ GEORGE W. BUSH and his team have been expressing unflagging concern about the...
...The media have snapped to attention...
...The new president is clearly determined to avoid the ham-handed conduct of the last Republican administration—and the fact that the last Republican administration was his father's only makes matters more interesting...
...It was, he said, "headed for recovery...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ GEORGE W. BUSH and his team have been expressing unflagging concern about the state of the American economy almost from the day the re-re-recounting was stopped in Florida...
...Indeed, it has already come to be a cliché that Bush is just doing what all incoming presidents do upon taking office, which is to blame his predecessor for the tough hand he's been dealt...
...There was even an effort to talk us out of the recession...
...His aides were similarly upbeat, to the point of unintended hilarity...
...Oh, he had plans, the American people were told, but he had decided to wait to announce them in his State of the union address at the end of January 1992...
...The economy, he told visitors to the White House, "had turned a corner...
...The Bible says the sins of the father are passed down to the sons, unto the fourth generation...
...And so, from the moment the economy first dipped into recession during his presidency in the summer of 1990, he and his advisers did everything they could to assure the American people not to worry...
...Not to be outdone, Gephardt pulled out a chart: "You see how consistent consumer confidence has been until Dick Cheney started, really, in December, and the president chimed in, and everybody began to, frankly, Contributing editor John Podhoretz is the author of a book on the first Bush presidency, Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies 1989-1993...
...But political blindness is not sin, and it's heartening to see that George W. Bush knows what his father did wrong—and is determined not to repeat those mistakes, no matter how much Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt want him to...
...Finally, on October 25, Bush ended the happy talk...
...But while that may be part of the story, it's not really the motivating factor behind the administration's gloomy talk...
...Liberal columnists and pundits have fallen all over themselves to blame Bush for "talking down the economy...
...The sense that the elder Bush was out of touch with the suffering of ordinary Americans gave rise to the insurgent Republican candidacy of Patrick J. Buchanan, the rise of Ross Perot's independent challenge, and ultimately the election of Bill Clinton...
...It has not been nearly as good as I would like to see it...
...At a joint press conference on March 15, the minority leaders of the Senate and House sought to pin blame on the president...
...A warning light is flashing on the dashboard of the economy," Bush said in February, and he later told a crowd in South Dakota, "You know better than me that the economy is slowing down...
...He refused to take aggressive measures to deal with the economic slowdown besides his advocacy of a reduction in the capital gains tax, to which the Democratic Congress stood in steadfast opposition...
...By October 1991, Bush's unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of the recession had sliced his approval rating from its unimaginable high of 91 percent at the conclusion of the Gulf War to around 37 percent (where it would remain, flat-lined, until he received exactly that percentage of the vote in the 1992 election...
...Michael Boskin, the head of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, announced with fanfare in June 1991 that the recession had ended—just before the economy did what came to be called a "double dip" back into negative growth...
...I do not think that nationally we're in a recession," Bush the Elder said in September 1990 when the economic downturn was indeed mostly taking place in the Northeast and California...
...In November 1990, he said of the recession: "It will not be deep, and we will come out of it relatively soon—six months at most...
...This turned out to be politically disastrous, for it only made them look woefully detached from reality...
...Office of Management and Budget director Richard Darman had convinced the president to wait because "in the general public's mind, there's a ritual, a rhythm of renewal . . . to the State of the Union...
...I don't think it's the end of the world even if we have a recession," said then-Treasury secretary Nicholas Brady, Bush's best friend—at a time when the unemployment rate was rising near 7 percent...
...scare consumers...
...And Bush was dealt a tough hand indeed: Before he was sworn in, economic growth had already contracted by 80 percent, factory inventories were growing, and the stock market had turned bearish...
...George Bush the Elder subscribed to the same notion that underlies the criticism offered by Daschle and Gephardt—that a responsible president should speak in soothing terms about the economy in order to keep consumer confidence high and prevent panic...
...We'll pull back out of it again...
...But the State of the Union added little that was new—and then-House Speaker Tom Foley criticized it in a response that was exactly the reverse of the Gephardt-Daschle complaint...
...The consequences of this dire talk, according to Daschle, have been severe: "What's happened is that the consumer confidence level has fallen very precipitously over the last few months as a result of the R-word utilization more and more...
...CNN did an evening of shows dedicated to the idea that Bush was at least partially responsible for the nation's economic troubles...
...For too long, we were told to wait, that things would get better on their own," Foley said...
...The recession, he claimed, would not last longer than "a couple of quarters," and would be succeeded by a "robust economy...
...And yet, only six days later, Bush fell back into nice-speak...
...The Bush administration has been talking down the economy now for some time," said Tom Daschle...
...We may be on the front edge of a recession here," Dick Cheney said in December...
...A minute later, Dick Gephardt read off the same talking point in case reporters weren't paying sufficient attention: "I think that what we're seeing is a talking down of the economy, the suggestion of a slowdown...
...The economy has been sluggish," he admitted in a move universally considered a major concession...
...Democrats are shocked by Bush's pessimism...
Vol. 6 • April 2001 • No. 28
