2002 Yearend: President Bush's defining decisions
(Part of UPI's Special series of Reports
reviewing 2002 and previewing 2003)
By Nicholas M.
Horrock, UPI White House Bureau Chief
WASHINGTON (UPI) -- In the 1964 presidential election, Lyndon Baines Johnson won a landslide victory in the popular vote over Republican Barry Goldwater, picking up 486 electoral votes to Goldwater's 52 and carrying districts that had never voted Democratic before.
Less than four years later, on March 31, 1968, a weary and defeated Johnson went on national television and announced he would not seek re-election. He was defeated by a war he had chosen to escalate, basing that decision on the assessment of a glib and arrogant Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, who thought running a war was like running an auto company.
At that moment of victory in 1964, Johnson's party, like George W. Bush's in 2002, controlled both houses of Congress. And like Bush now, Johnson was using that power to launch a major legislative program.
He called it the Great Society, and it was to be the most ambitious national social program since the New Deal -- created by his hero, President Franklin Roosevelt, 30 years before.
As George W. Bush and his political wizard Karl Rove begin 2003, a year in which the president faces momentous decisions, perhaps they should reflect for a moment on the last years of Lyndon Johnson's presidency.
Like Johnson in 1965, Bush begins the year having led his party to an extraordinary political victory in 2002, regaining control of the Senate and increasing the Republican margin in the House. Though not a popular landslide, the win left the Democrats appearing irrelevant to the political process.
Bush chose to escalate his war on terror last January; unwilling to accept victory over the Taliban and disruption of al Qaida's bases, he went after the "axis of evil," Iraq, Iran and North Korea. He, too, based his decision on an assessment of a glib and popular secretary of defense, Don Rumsfeld, calculating that the U.S. war machine can defeat Iraq, keep order in Afghanistan, track al Qaida members to their lairs, defend the homeland and bolster South Korea with nearly 40,000 troops on the DMZ.
If war with Iraq begins, it will largely be carried out by the United States. Bush has said that even if others do not join him, the U.S. will go it alone. He went to Europe in November to try to drum up help from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations, but the only significant, sure-fire ally is Great Britain. Johnson didn't have even that in Vietnam; though the Brits and Australians pitched in token units, most of the U.S. allies like Thailand and South Korea sent troops that were effectively rented at outlandish cost.
To prosecute this war, Bush will have to call up some 100,000 more reservists and National Guardsmen, according to several estimates. There are some 50,000 part-time soldiers on duty now.
Johnson was afraid to call up the Reserves and Guard, afraid of the political reaction if these powerful state and local institutions had to go to war. They then became havens for thousands of young men trying to avoid the draft including Bush, who flew a National Guard fighter on weekend patrols of the Gulf of Mexico.
But Bush has no choice but to activate the Guard and Reserves because the U.S.'s new volunteer services cannot carry out major campaigns without their participation.
Like Johnson, Bush went to Congress and won a resolution allowing him to attack without prior approval of Congress should he deem it necessary. Lyndon got such a resolution after a Navy destroyer reported it had come under attack in the Tonkin Gulf off of South Vietnam. That report was later judged to be dubious.
Like Johnson, Bush has an aggressive legislative program in mind. The White House says the president wants to solidify the conservative agenda, using his power in Congress to increase and extend tax cuts; open new sources of energy, primarily by drilling in places previously off-limits; and give evangelical religious organizations access to government social programs. He hopes to limit abortions and raise money for sexual abstinence programs. At the same, Bush has assigned Tom Ridge to organize the giant Homeland Security Department for which he won support in the waning days of the Congress.
This will be the biggest reorganization of the federal government since President Harry Truman formed the Department of Defense. It will mean bringing 170,000 workers from some 22 agencies under one command and shifting the powers of dozens of congressional fiefdoms.
The economy in which Bush must operate is not encouraging. Johnson had a better economy, though there had been a recession in 1962. Despite interest rate reductions, the current economy closes 2002 still listed in intensive care, though holiday sales after Thanksgiving gave a hopeful sign recovery may have begun.
Just as anxiety-producing for the White House is the plight of state governments. Facing massive revenue shortfalls because of the faltering economy, states and cities will need cash on the barrelhead to carry out federal initiatives like infrastructure defense in the homeland security sphere. The federal budget deficit climbed as well, presenting Bush with the specter of paying on credit to attack Iraq. The price is horrendous, with estimates running from $100 billion to $200 billion.
The war would be fought in part on the oil fields of the second-largest oil producer in the world behind Saudi Arabia, and many economists believe that if Saddam Hussein were to substantially destroy his country's oil production, it would take decades for Europe and the U.S. recover.
The week of Thanksgiving, many top economists included officials at the Federal Reserve Bank were anxiously eyeing indicators that suggested deflation, too, is a danger. Prices on almost everything are falling. Deflation occurred twice in the 20th Century: once in the Great Depression and again in Japan in the 1990s.
Bush and the Republic congressional leadership pledged Thanksgiving week to make the economy a major priority in 2003 -- and the resignation of his two key economic officials in December shows he means it. But the president still regards tax cuts as the fuel of choice to start the engine. His father, incidentally, called this notion "voodoo economics."
Bush the younger got Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to go along with him, but many other economists think it as important to keep up federal programs that transfer funds directly to people's pockets.
Bush comes to this momentous year with some strong advantages. He has had won the confidence of Americans for his handling of Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and the swift prosecution of the campaign in Afghanistan. His war on terror has not faced defeat even if it has not logged major victories. What is clear to some of his planners is that the choice of the war metaphor for the fight against terror might have been the wrong one. It is very like controlling drugs: massive arrests and prosecutions can end one smuggling trail or put one cartel out of business, only to lead to new drugs coming in new ways.
Bush's father learned a little of this. When the senior Bush was vice president, he headed a drug task force in Florida that racked up numerous arrests, and later, as president, he launched an attack to nab Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. But drugs still flow into the U.S. at an enormous rate through its southern border.
So despite Bush's war on terror, at this
writing there is evidence Osama bin Laden eluded death or capture,
and certainly his al Qaida continue to strike from Bali to Yemen
to East Africa to Kuwait.
Bush's third year in office also marks the opening of the 2004
presidential campaign and, despite their poor showing at the polls,
a half-dozen Democrats don't think that Bush is too powerful to
unseat.
Thanksgiving week, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts opened a presidential campaign exploration, and former Vice President Al Gore, Rep. Dick Gephardt and even Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle have ideas about the Oval Office. They know that in this era of instant world communications, the political attention span changes by the minute. Bush's advantages, like his father's in 1992, can quickly disappear.
There have been a million reasons put forward for why Lyndon Baines Johnson's political career ended in such defeat. It was a different world, of course. The Soviet Union and China were hostile powers, always dangerous, requiring the U.S. to maintain an enormous military establishment while fighting in Vietnam.
But Johnson had problems that Bush could face as well. Johnson's greatest antagonist over the war in Vietnam was Democratic Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright, and Bush's path may face resistance from the new hard-right Congressional leaders like Texas' Tom DeLay if he has to make liberal moves in his presidential campaign.
Johnson's greatest problem was that the country could not sustain an endless war and a massive social revolution. Part of it was the sheer financial cost of doing both, and part of it was how it dominated the attention of the White House.
Johnson came to the White House stung by the way he had been treated by the tough Eastern elitists around John F. Kennedy. He had a vision of himself as the president who defeated the communists in Vietnam and constructed the Great Society, and he had a vision of himself in history.
If we are to believe the Washington Post's renowned Bob Woodward in his new book, George W. Bush too has visions of himself as the man who disarmed Saddam Hussein and defeated world terrorism.