Time for Dubyah to lead at home, too

One of the greatest advantages President Bush has had in the last six years is that he's effectively governed without an opposition.

The article 'an' is the key word in that sentence. Obviously there is opposition, i.e., people opposed to both the President and to his policies. In fact, he and his predecessor, Bill Clinton, have each been opposed more vehemently than all but a handful of the Chief Executives in our history.

But each has lacked an opposition- that is, a thoughtful, carefully articulated alternative agenda for the nation from the opposing party. Such a thing is built into the parliamentary system that operates, say, in Britain or Canada or Australia. There, the largest party in Parliament other than the governing party is actually known as "The Opposition," and has a carefully constructed role to play in the governance of the nation.

Each cabinet minister has a designated opposite number on the other side of the hall, who presumably would take his portfolio should the next election bring the Opposition into power. These spokesmen are expected to serve as the Opposition party's resident experts on the matters in question. The prime minister, unlike our president, is actually required on a regular basis to answer to the House of Commons on every aspect of the government's policy, with the various cabinet ministers doing the same in a subordinate role; the leader of the opposition, and his shadow cabinet, "spokesmen," or whatever local custom calls them, are cast in the role of critics and proposers of alternatives, and lead an attack against which the government must defend.

It's a much more intentionally deliberative system than ours. It forces the party out of power not simply to criticize the policies of the government, but actually to think through and advocate alternative policies of their own. No wonder our year-long circus of straw polls, primaries,platform hearings, conventions, and so forth seem strange and alien to the Canadians and the Brits. Under their system, what the opposition party stands for is a given. When an issue becomes sufficiently divisive in the nation that the prime minister is no longer able to win a confidence vote on a given issue, or when he feels that a new election at a specific moment would be advantageous. he simply sets the date. The campaign is over in a matter of weeks.

The dynamics of the system focuses attention on ideas, rather than exclusively on personalities. Though this is a controversial notion these days, I maintain that ideas are good things. Even bad ideas warn us by their very shortcomings of decisions to avoid. Debates about ideas have a strong tendency to create light, as well as heat; the Lincoln-Douglas debates are legendary not because of the personalities of the two great men who participated in them, but for the degree to which they explicated the two alternative paths open to American society on the eve of the Civil War. Lincoln- whom Douglas defeated when the Illinois Legislature chose the state's U.S. Senator- became a national figure even in defeat because of the ideas he represented, and his ability to articulate them.

Back to Dubyah's lack of an opposition. I've made the point over and over again that he hasn't been challenged in the realm of ideas. Even the 2004 Democratic presidential campaign was less a presentation of an opposing agenda than a negation of Mr. Bush's, taking the form of a shrill, strident, and repulsively ugly non-stop series of ad hominem attacks rather than thoughtfully conceived and presented alternatives. We all knew, by election day, what the Democrats were against; what was by no means clear is what they were for. And that can be a drawback for a party aspiring to power. As someone once said, you can't beat somebody with nobody- and you can't beat an agenda, no matter how flawed you believe it to be, without an alternative.

My personal conviction remains that more than anything else, it was the Kerry campaign's deplorable lack of substance and its disturbingly ad hominem character which re-elected a very vulnerable president. John Kerry, when he appeared on television, literally frightened children. That angry, scowling man whose every word was a hyperbolic attack on his opponent simply didn't give the American people a choice.

No choice at all. One of the moments in this blog's history which stands out in my mind most vividly was an occasion during the 2004 campaign in which I passed along a challenge- made by somebody else, elsewhere- to supporters of Sen. Kerry to articulate a single reason why people should vote for Sen. Kerry, rather than against Mr. Bush. There were no takers. In fact, the only response was from a Kerry supporter who couldn't take me up on my challenge, but only sputtered that I made him sick.

In the end, the election was, as someone said, not between Bush and Kerry, but between Bush and NotBush- and Bush won, being the only actual candidate in the race!

But the inability of the Democrats to focus on ideas hasn't only hurt them. It has also hurt the President. Lacking the stimulation and impetus of an actual debate about ideas, it has been all too easy for Mr. Bush to make precisely the mistake this article thoughtfully points out: of becoming fixated on his own partisan agenda rather than the nation's welfare- not so much, I think, out of self-absorption as because he's been allowed by the lack of a coherent debate on the very real issues facing the nation to confuse the two.

The author of the piece, Robert Samuelson, is right: the fault lies chiefly with Mr. Bush. He doesn't get to blame the Democrats. If anything, the absence of a coherent opposition offers Mr. Bush the opportunity to drive the nation's agenda more forcefully and more compellingly than he might be able to otherwise. As Samuelson observes, there are hard choices that are pressing upon us, and need to be made. This is a time for leadership- and Mr. Bush, who has always gotten high marks for being a leader, when all is said and done is plummeting in the polls for lack of leadership in the making of those choices.

Samuelson wisely avoids discussing Iraq and the War on Terror. Those who speak in opposition to Mr. Bush on these matters are not wrong in every detail, but they have a strong tendency to speak nonsense borne of the necessity of opposing decisions which, at the time they were made, looked as compelling to his critics as they did to Mr. Bush. The Democratic politician who cries "Bush lied!" is lying himself, even more demonstrably than the garden variety Bush-hater; after all, he probably is having bought the same intelligence Mr. Bush did, and is probably on record as saying so!

Samuelson is excessively hard on what is, after all, a wartime President. The Bush legacy will inexorably tied to the outcome of the war in Iraq- and a war on terror we are winning, though the President gets little credit for it. Al Quaeda has been foiled again and again- and the best measure of our success in what is, in all but name, the Third World War is the fact that despite Islamofascist in Europe and all over the world, America has not been attacked again since 9/11. While I doubt that it will happen quickly enough to do the Republicans or Mr. Bush much good in November, I expect the war in Iraq to have been effectively turned over to the Iraqis within the year. Even now, the relatively small numbers of Americans fighting in Iraq is belied by the rhetoric of the media and the Democrats. Far from lacking an exit strategy, the task of exiting when the time comes doesn't look all that complicated.

The economy is booming, and unemployment is at its lowest level in years- though again, the President gets little credit for it. No, this presidency is anything but a failure. Samuelson's implication to that effect is a bit of partisanship showing through in an otherwise insightful article.

But we are worried now not only about the threat from without, but also the problems we face within. There , Mr. Bush's programs have been either ill-conceived- his Social Security plan comes to mind- or non-existent.

We are in the midst of a passionate national debate on immigration. Part of George Bush's political legacy is the inroads the Republican party has made under his leadership among Hispanic-Americans. Samuelson is right; it's hard to see how the President can pursue that partisan political agenda while dealing effectively with the nation's. There can be no "guest worker" program, which solves nothing ; the problem of illegal immigration cannot be resolved by the naive assumption that illegal immigrants who have thus far fooled the system will now identify themselves and voluntarily either go home or put themselves at potential disadvantage by cooperating. Nor can the American infrastructure absorb the additional pressure uncontrolled immigration from Mexico will put on our capacity to care for our own poor, no matter what we call the immigrants or what their official status.

As hard a thing as this is for a person facing retirement age in a decade or so, Medicare and Social Security do not need to be expanded in ways which make them even less economically viable; they need to be reformed and saved. Whatever the merits of partial privatization, the idea just isn't going to fly; the solutions will have to come from elsewhere. The retirement age needs to be raised, among other things. Health care is becoming increasingly less affordable, and a large percentage of the American public lives without adequate health insurance. Contrary to the party line of the Right, the problem is increasingly common even among the middle class; contrary to the party line of the Left, every system rations health care, and the nation needs leadership in deciding how to go about it in such a way as to make the maximum benefit available to the maximum number of people. And while tax cuts do indeed stimulate the economy, without fiscal restraint they are a prescription for disaster.

Doctrinaire conservatives may argue that, with the exception of the last item, these matters are not the concern of government. They are wrong. In our modern, complex society, government cannot be kept out of the process of proposing and organizing solutions to complicated problems. To a significant extent, that is precisely government's role in the Twenty-First Century, and an archaic fondness for a minimalist philosophy of government which history has left behind will only leave the pressing problems our nation faces without solutions until, inevitably, the Democrats get their mojo back, and bad solutions are adopted by default. Keeping government's role to a minimum remains an admirable goal, but it is simply no longer realistic to speak of areas of national policy in which the government does not need to provide direction and leadership, at the very least.

Better it should be Dubyah than the Democrats, if only because his solutions are likely to be fresher, more innovative, and have a better chance of succeeding. But time is running out. He dare not allow the lack of an opposition where the great issues of domestic policy are concerned become an excuse for a lack of leadership. He needs to set the agenda- to lead as boldly in his domestic policy as he has has in his foreign policy, lest events lead him.

The way out of his current, sad political plight is for him to do on all these matters what he does best: lead.

HT: Real Clear Politics