The Responsibility President
EDITORIAL The Responsibility President All presidents need a little help from their opponents, and George W. Bush's opponents in the Democratic party and the media have done him a favor. First...
...Well, there may still be a few pink diaper babies who cling to the Woody Guthrie worldview that pits rapacious and polluting corporations against the common man, but most people have a more complex view of the world...
...But responsibility really is central to the Bush presidency...
...In his inaugural address, he said, "America at its best is a place where personal responsibility is valued and expected...
...Under the traditional environmentalist model, the government assumes responsibility for keeping the air, land, and water clean...
...There is a vision of environmental responsibility in the Bush approach as well...
...Moreover, Bush himself has muddied the waters by calling himself a compassionate conservative...
...He is compassionate, but it isn't compassion that motivates his strong stands on taxes, missile defense, Social Security, and budget discipline...
...On policy matters, he has already championed a bankruptcy reform act that demanded that people take responsibility for their debts, rather than just walk away from them...
...When he ran for office, Bush said that Americans needed to ring in a new "responsibility era...
...But as Lynn Scarlett (whom Bush has nominated to be assistant secretary for policy at the Interior Department) has observed, this nanny-state model is counterproductive...
...It is punitive and generates huge amounts of litigation and conflict...
...If you happen to be a mom or dad, you have the awesome responsibility of loving your children with all your heart and all your soul...
...So their fall-back cliché is that Bush and his team are tools of corporate America...
...David Brooks, for the Editors...
...he's a neck-snapper...
...First they tried to persuade America that George Bush is an imbecile who doesn't know enough to be an effective president...
...But now that he's run a successful presidential campaign and performed well in his first few months, that stereotype won't work...
...Now, it's easy to see why, during the campaign, Bush talked more about compassion than responsibility...
...The distinctive thing about the Bush approach is that it tries to introduce a responsibility ethic into energy and environmental thinking...
...And in an address in Little Rock on April 25, Bush said, "We need to usher in a period of personal responsibility, where each of us understands we have the awesome responsibility to be a good citizen...
...This theme has surfaced even in ways that are unexpected for conservatives...
...Whether through education, tax, or housing policy, Thatcher wanted to encourage Britons to be independent, enterprising, loyal with friends, and fierce against foes...
...The impulse to hold people responsible extends even to unexpected areas like the current debate over energy policy and the environment...
...Let them be responsible for pollution-control innovation...
...It attempts to segregate pollution into discrete categories—air, water, waste—so polluters end up shifting pollutants from one medium to another...
...He supports tax cuts to give taxpayers more control over their own earnings...
...He hasn't spent much time attacking Hollywood for polluting culture...
...In her book The Anatomy of Thatch-erism, the British philosopher Shirley Robin Letwin noted that Margaret Thatcher's policies all promoted "the vigorous virtues...
...These regulations emphasize process over performance...
...Parents are responsible for controlling what their own kids see...
...He insists that meetings start on time...
...In short, he acts like a man who expects that everyone around him will behave responsibly...
...it is a call to conscience...
...Democrats have an advantage when policies are considered separately, because their positions, taken one at a time, are often more popular, or at least sound more appealing on the evening news...
...But it is a decent and admirable vision...
...He's more conservative on some issues than many expected, but more liberal on others, such as education...
...It is a vision for a nation trying to repair its moral fabric in a time of affluence...
...As Paul Gigot recently reported, the Bushies present their plan as the anti-Gray Davis approach...
...Encouraging responsibility is not a search for scapegoats...
...If someone were to attempt an anatomy of Bushism, they would say that so far Bush policies encourage the responsible virtues...
...The compassionate conservative is a more appealing figure than the responsibility conservative, who stands up and says you have to own up to the consequences of your actions...
...This may not be a heroic vision...
...The Bush administration has taken responsibility for the national mess that was left to it...
...You watch him heading right and then—bang!— he caroms left...
...This debate has been vulgarized by Washington pundit culture, which divides energy policy into production (deemed evil) and conservation (deemed virtuous...
...It certainly doesn't embody the grand national aspirations that leaders like Lincoln, TR, or Ronald Reagan had for America...
...He supports Social Security privatization in part to give citizens greater responsibility for their retirement funds...
...If you're a fortunate citizen in this country, you have the responsibility of putting your arm around a neighbor in need and saying, 'Brother or sister, somebody loves you...
...The California governor has tried to blame everybody but Californians for the mess there...
...Give them incentives to protect the environment, and let them devise the means...
...Somebody cares.'" Responsibility is also more than just a key word of the Bush administration...
...Scarlett has called for an incentive-based rather than a punishment-based model for environmental policy...
...And the Bush energy and environmental proposals begin what one hopes will be a long process of shifting responsibility for pollution control away from the bureaucrats in the EPA and to the citizens who work at and manage American companies...
...When asked about the V-chip, he said, "Well, how about the off-knob...
...And if the president were to talk about it more, it might connect his various policies into a coherent and compelling whole...
...Republican vision trumps Democratic wonkery...
...Government agencies impose a series of minute and prescriptive regulations on industry...
...He insists on jackets and ties in the Oval Office...
...Usually, the truth about a politician is hidden in plain sight, and this turns out to be the case with George W. Bush...
...In a tribute to Pope John Paul II, Bush declared, "The pope reminds us that while freedom defines our nation, responsibility must define our lives...
...No business and no individual thinks this way...
...Successful leaders promote policies that encourage a certain set of virtues...
...They encourage Americans to be disciplined about their own lives, devoted to taking care of their families, and attentive to the needs of their neighbors...
...The essence of the education reform package he sent to Capitol Hill was that schools and school administrators had to be held responsible for their successes and failures...
...Indeed, it might actually help the president to be more explicit about this, rather than rolling out one policy proposal after another, each seemingly unconnected to the next...
...Even in his demeanor, Bush seems to understand that he has assumed a serious responsibility...
...It is a vision in tune with the temper of the times...
...If you are going to devise an energy policy, of course it is going to include both production and conservation, which indeed the Bush plan does...
...If you read through them, you discover that there is a theme to the Bush presidency, and the theme is "responsibility...
...Reporters are now running around trying to figure out which category is given greater emphasis in the Bush plan...
...We almost feel sorry for Bush's critics, because Bush is surprisingly enigmatic...
...They mandate certain technologies and methods that industries must adopt to meet environmental goals...
...He's not a triangulator...
...But Republicans have an advantage when policies are presented thematically, because their big ideas are often more popular than Democratic ideas...
...In the comments of the Bush administration figures, you can sense a tone of contempt for those who want to burn energy but are unwilling to face the tough choices involved in producing it—for the people who want electric cars, but not electricity generators, clean skies but not nuclear power...
...The Bush administration has helpfully compiled some of the president's early speeches in a pamphlet...
...That's inane...
...It is a vision of a bourgeois nation shaking off the last effects of a cultural wave that excused and even celebrated irresponsible behavior...
Vol. 6 • May 2001 • No. 35
