It's Your Fault, George

AS ANY contender for the Democratic presidential nomination would tell you, George Bush's first term as president has been a complete failure on the domestic front. Thirty-seven million Americans are without health insurance. The economy is suffering through a prolonged and damaging recession. Unemployment and poverty are on the rise, drugs are widespread and our educational system continues to falter.

But none of this is new. In the past three years, Bush has never had a domestic agenda. The bad news for Bush is that real Americans--not just a handful of Democratic candidates--are beginning to catch on. They're beginning to criticize his neglect of domestic policy. A New York Times/CBS poll released last week shows that Americans are deeply disappointed with Bush's handling of domestic issues. Voters are particularly critical of his failure to bring the economy back to life and solve the national health care crisis.

Lacking any answers to these problems, Bush has reacted to his domestic unpopularity with a characteristic move: an assault on Congress. The president likes to blame the Democratically controlled legislative body for everything from the recession and quotas to the savings and loans fiasco. Last Thursday, Bush viciously condemned Congress, calling it "a privileged class of rulers who stand above the law."

Congress, far from a perfect institution, is often the rightful object of national scorn. But charges of privilege and failure to respect rule of law, coming from George Herbert Walker Bush, are not just inaccurate--they are remarkably ironic.

IT IS HARD to imagine how Bush--a president who vacations in Kennebunkport and applauds Oliver North's crimes as the duties of a national hero--can propose charges of privilege and lawlessness with any sincerity. Here is a president whose Chief of Staff uses taxpayer--funded airplanes to attend stamp auctions, whose idea for solving the recession is tax breaks for the rich and whose club affiliations include Yale's elite Skull and Bones society. There are few better national symbols of wealth and privilege than our president. And Bush still refuses to clarify his role in the best example of governmental lawlessness in the 1980s--the Iran-contra scandal.

Why has Bush stepped up his attacks on Congress? The short answer is that he's in trouble. He sees evidence of discontent with his domestic agenda along with an approval rating that has plummeted from 67 percent to 55 percent in less than a month. Only his high approval rating in foreign policy keeps the overall figure above 50 percent. Voters who continue to approve of Bush's handling of the presidency like him for the Gulf War and the downfall of Communism, not for his domestic acumen. Bush's international successes are old news; American voters are more concerned with their own, more pressing, problems.

The polls suggest that a well-positioned, well-spoken and well-funded Democratic candidate could defeat Bush in 1992 by emphasizing his failure to help the economy and address domestic problems. Unless George Bush can somehow convince the American people that he's not responsible for wrecking their lives in the past three years, he's likely going to be voted out of office next year. And because the truth isn't on his side, Bush must try to pass the blame.

IN CONGRESS, Bush has found the first scapegoat for his re-election campaign. Of course, the strategy of passing blame to different branches of government is nothing new. Presidents often blame opposition Congresses when things go badly, and always claim responsibility when something goes right. But Bush's recent charges are desperate and blatantly political attempts to transfer his guilt to a Congress that is largely innocent.

Take as an example the recession that's now been with us for over a year. The only proposal from Bush to improve the economy--which he finally admits "hasn't been near as good" as he would like to see it--is to cut the capital gains tax rate. That's the refrain we've heard from Bush for over two years. Cutting capital gains taxes, Bush continues to assert, will encourage greater investment and create more jobs.

In fact, the tax cut will only benefit the wealthiest three percent of the country and would do nothing to help the 17 million jobless Americans. The supply-side economics that Bush preaches, as Presidential candidate Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa says, belongs in the "trash bin of history, along with communism." Both economic doctrines, which purport to help everyone, serve only a select sliver of society; the rest suffer.

EARLIER THIS MONTH, Congress passed a bill to extend unemployment benefits for those who were especially hard-hit by the recession. Bush vetoed it, and won a close battle to sustain the veto. The program was too expensive, he said, and unnecessary, because the economy had hit bottom and was rebounding. But despite his denials, the recession has been getting worse. Unemployment today is 6.8%, the highest rate since May, when Bush first began to promise that the United States was in recovery.

In his campaign for re-election, George Bush undoubtedly will present Congress as a wasteful, inefficient lawmaking body that is responsible for the nation's ills, economic and otherwise. To be sure, Congress shares some of the blame. But polls show that Americans are starting to hold Bush accountable for his three years of inaction. Voters are upset at his policy of proposing nothing and vetoing everything. If a strong Democratic candidate can launch a campaign that attacks Bush on domestic issues, he may defy conventional wisdom. He may win next November.

Steven V. Mazie '93, a Crimson editor, is the co-founder of Harvard for Harkin.