George W. Bush tossed the nation's press a softball and they hit it
out of the park.
There was not a single good review, not even from his minions at The
Wall Street
Journal editorial page, for the White House's feel-good-about-your-401(k)
jamboree
at Waco. It was a "forum," the critics suggested, in the sense that
the Politburo was
a "legislature." Only Mr. Bush, who is on record as having loved "Cats,"
pronounced
the event a "great show."
But it's Mr. Bush who was right. What his critics miss is that by this
administration's
standards of governance, Waco was a triumph. It was expressly designed
to be
content-free (rather like "Cats," in fact). The goal was never to produce
policy but
solely to serve up a video bite of Mr. Bush looking engaged by the
woes of what his
chief of staff, Andrew Card, referred to on CNN as "so-called real
Americans."
If the White House wanted anyone to listen, it would not have staged
eight separate
panels simultaneously on a Tuesday morning in the dog days of August,
assuring that
complete coverage would be available only on C-Span.
For those few viewers who dipped in, the spectacle was not unamusing.
On one panel,
Mr. Bush could be found in mutual fawning with his campaign contributor
"Chuck" Schwab
— Charles to us — no doubt oblivious to the fact that Chuck had just
placed a nose behind
Enron's Ken Lay and Global Crossing's Gary Winnick on Fortune's "Greedy
Bunch" list of
those executives who cashed out the most stock before their companies'
shares tanked by
75 percent or more. Yet even this touching tableau, on a day when Schwab
was laying off
nearly 400 employees, did not stop CNN, MSNBC and Fox News from switching
to such
alternative programming as a picturesque natural gas explosion in a
suburban California house.
What makes the morning-after outrage of the nation's commentariat seem
a bit over the top
is that the preordained hollowness of the Waco show is not news. This
is how this
administration always governs. Mr. Bush has two inviolate, one-size-fits-all
policies
(if obsessions can be called policies): the tax cut (for domestic affairs)
and "regime change"
in Iraq (foreign affairs). Everything else is a great show designed
to provide the illusion
of administration activity when it has no plan.
The show takes the form not only of the Orwellian slogans emblazoned
on the backdrops
("Small Investors/Retirement Security" loomed above the president and
Chuck in Waco)
but also of bogus announcements of muscular action. At the forum's
final curtain, the president
declared that he would teach Congress a tough lesson about fiscal responsibility
by holding
back $5.1 billion it had appropriated for such low-priority items as
equipment for firefighters
and health monitoring at ground zero. But what about the $190 billion
in wasteful farm
subsidies he has already thrown to the winds?
Besides, he would have to cut spending by $5 billion five days a week
for more than a year
to compensate for the red ink of his $1.35 trillion tax cut. Though
the president's harshest
critics think he's stupid, I've always maintained that the real problem
is that he thinks we
are stupid. He never doubts that his show will distract us from bad
news. Waco was
supposed to make us forget the latest round of economic headlines:
stagnant wages,
slowed growth, new all-time records in personal bankruptcies and consumer
borrowing.
All this is on top of a falloff in the Dow that The Economist measures
as identical in
percentage to that of Herbert Hoover's first 18 months, which included
the crash of '29.
Well, the economy is only money. It's when the same governance technique
is applied to
life-and-death matters like war and domestic security that the farce
curdles. Here, too, there
are new headlines the administration wants us to forget. At the F.B.I.,
a LA Times investigation
revealed, the prehistoric computer system remains in disarray even
as the agency's top executives
are either pushed out or flee for private employment (as the counterterrorism
chief abruptly did
on Thursday). The Wall Street Journal discovered that when the federal
government issued a
terrorist warning to shopping centers four months ago, the Mall of
America learned about it only
by watching CNN. Not only are our airlines collapsing but, according
to Thursday's USA Today,
so is the undercover air marshal program that was supposed to be strengthened
after Sept. 11.
One marshal called it "alaughingstock."
And what does the administration propose as a solution? Last week John
Ashcroft went on TV
to announce what he calls the "first ever White House conference on
missing and exploited children."
It takes an exploiter to know one. F.B.I. figures show a decline in
the kidnapping of children —
except on cable TV. But if you can't crack the anthrax case, why not
create some distracting
hysteria by glomming onto a local law enforcement issue that is the
biggest showbiz phenomenon
since shark attacks? The administration loves the bait-and-switch.
It hyped the cases of "the
American Taliban," John Walker Lindh, and the "dirty bomber," Jose
Padilla, to cover for its failure
to snare the actual Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and the actual bomber,
Osama bin Laden, much as
it has hyped the perp walks of second-rung executives from WorldCom
to make us forget about
Halliburton, Harken and Ken Lay.
Next stop: Iraq. Just as a tax cut is billed as the miracle antidote
to every possible economic ill —
"We've got the best tax policy in the world!" Mr. Bush said at Waco
— so we're asked to believe
that taking out Saddam Hussein will bring democracy to Iraq and the
rest of the Arab world,
miraculously repair the chaos wrought by our disengagement from the
Middle East and win the
war on terrorism all at once. The silver bullet that gets Saddam, it
appears, will cure all
international ills with the possible exception of the arrogance of
the French.
While Saddam is an authentic genocidal monster, there are more plausible
links between Al Qaeda
and our dear friend Saudi Arabia than between Al Qaeda and Saddam;
it could be argued that
toppling him would strengthen Al Qaeda. But what the administration
is mainly hoping is that a
march on Baghdad will make us forget about Al Qaeda, wherever it may
be lying in wait. It's not
good P.R. for our war on terrorism that Islamic terrorists have been
linked to eight attacks abroad
since Daniel Pearl's murder in January, including the assassination
of the Afghan vice president in
Kabul and the slaughter of an American diplomat, among others, at a
church in Islamabad.
The White House keeps saying that no decision has been made about Iraq,
but of course a decision
has been made. Richard Perle, an administration Iraq hawk, gave away
the game in yesterday's
Times: "The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said"
would lead to "a collapse of
confidence." Translation: If Mr. Bush doesn't get rid of Saddam after
all this saber rattling, he will
look like the biggest wimp since — well, his father. Democrats, as
timid in challenging Mr. Bush
on Iraq as they were in letting his tax cut through Congress, keep
calling for a "debate." What world
are they living in? Mr. Bush is no sooner going to abandon his pursuit
of Saddam than his crusade to
eliminate the estate tax. These are his only core beliefs.
The questions left to be debated now are who's going to pay for the
war, who's going to be killed in it,
who's going to police what could be a decade-long cleanup. (So far
the answer to all three seems to
be first and foremost: the go-it-alone Americans.) The loudest voices
asking these questions are
almost exclusively Republican: Brent Scowcroft, Chuck Hagel, Henry
Kissinger, even Dick Armey.
"If you think you're going to drop the 82nd Airborne on Baghdad and
finish the job," said Senator Hagel,
a Vietnam war hero, two weeks ago, "I think you've been watching too
many John Wayne movies."
What's been most remarkable about the Iraq project so far is how an
administration as effectively secretive as this one could spring so
many
leaks of invasion scenarios to the press. It strains credulity to assert
that this is all an ingenious conspiracy to fake out Saddam. The leaks
fake
us out instead, inuring us to the new war to come.
The only mystery is when D-Day will be. Given the administration's
history,
I'd guess that it will put on the big show as soon as its political
self-preservation is at stake. Certainly the White House's priorities
are
clear enough. It has guarded the records of Dick Cheney's energy task
force
and the S.E.C. investigation of Harken far more zealously than war
plans
that might endanger the lives of the so-called real Americans who will
have
to fight Saddam.