The sky was clear, the air crisp. Washington, D.C., was secure, in the post-Sept. 11 sense: grim-looking snipers on rooftops, cops on every corner, packs of protesters clamoring in the distance.
It was a celebration.
On Inauguration Day last week, President Bush seemed to gleam with faith that everything in his second term would go as smoothly for him as the $40 million ceremony that kicked it off. You could see in his eyes the confidence — or cockiness — that his critics love to hate and his admirers love to rely upon.
That gloat of self-importance, the poker face of the Bush presidency, seeped into all the festivities on Jan. 20, but it found a manifesto in the speech Bush gave to formally begin his second term.
It was irony typical of Bush administration functions: The president spoke on the importance of “liberty” at home and abroad, asserting the primacy of U.S. interests in shaping its foreign policy and warning all those who might stand in its way.
In a 16-minute address, Bush mentioned “freedom” 27 times. He did not mention Iraq by name.
Instead, he opted to stick to his stubborn idealism — that triumphant American trait that Bush has contorted into an excuse for war, turning something for which we were once respected, even loved, into an Orwellian euphemism for arrogance and selfishness. On that cold Washington day, Bush’s faith in his own actions was as unrelenting as ever.
The American people’s faith, however, was not. Inaugural festivities distracted from the fact that Bush’s approval rating, hovering around 50 percent, is one of the lowest ever for the beginning of a second term. It’s a sign that finally — with the United States broke, divided and at war — people may be considering the president’s role in all this misery.
Or it might be a sign of the public’s realization that the arrogant president’s second four-year agenda is even more unpalatable than his first.
Having sufficiently pillaged America’s foreign policy in his first term, Bush is looking to create his legacy through a domestic agenda aimed at demolishing the safety nets of the New Deal and other social programs while casting a veil of conservative Christian values over the country.
His plan to privatize Social Security, which he claims is in crisis, is by far the most disturbing domestic plot hatched by the administration so far. Citing false numbers (generated by the propaganda machine your tax dollars pay for), Bush claims that Social Security will be bankrupt by 2018. His solution for this is privatization of the system, with the formation of individual accounts that would allow users to invest in the stock market.
The problem with Bush’s solution is that a real problem with Social Security doesn’t exist. Economists predict that Social Security may, in 2052, have to reduce payments to 80 percent of what they are now. But that may not happen, and even if it did, solving such a problem would not be a huge expense.
Privatizing the nation’s largest and most successful social program, on the other hand, would be a titanic cost. It would also remove from existence the only definite source of income for many elderly Americans. Even if the stock market continued to grow, which it very well may not, Bush’s plan would still net a loss of benefits for most Americans compared to the current system.
Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security is a plan to run it into the ground. He’s already done that with the federal budget, running a deficit of around $413 billion to pay for the war he started and the tax cuts for the wealthy he wants to make permanent. Even facing a weak dollar and an economy that’s at best keeping its head above water, Bush keeps that stubborn optimism.
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know things are so bad. This, after all, is the president who said he didn’t want to hear bad news about Iraq, who surrounds himself only with people who agree with him, who proudly asserts that he doesn’t read the newspapers.
Is it possible he’s never heard of the 45 million Americans without health care? Or the actual financial crisis that troubles Medicare and Medicaid? These programs, which provide medical care and prescription drug coverage to the poor and elderly, face a serious solvency problem, but that doesn’t bother Bush. He’s content to let them die.
Poor people, apparently, have no place in the “ownership society.”
Neither, of course, do gays who wish to be married, or women who wish to have an abortion. Bush plans to keep up efforts toward a constitutional ban on gay marriage, while openly praising anti-abortion activists who clamor for Supreme Court appointments to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Liberty? Freedom? Only if you fall neatly into Bush’s value systems or can make a significant financial contribution.
The good news is that Bush’s radical second-term agenda is meeting serious resistance, even from within his own party. Moderate Republicans in Congress are already squirming at Bush’s plans for Social Security. Having been alerted to the administration’s tendency to provide misinformation, media outlets everywhere are blaring the truth: Social Security is not in crisis, but the nation’s finances are.
Strident optimism was a fine face to wear on Inauguration Day, but Bush will soon find that it doesn’t suit all occasions. As war casualties and costs rise, and resistance to the Bush administration’s plan to turn America back into the Wild West grows, his expression may change to reflect reality.
And incompetence isn’t so pretty.
