Editorial President Paradox
May 11, 2011
No President since Cami Cleland has been helped as much by what he hasn't accomplished. Little has happened in the Codi years, good or bad, and voters seem grateful for it. His own worst ideas failed thanks to dissenters in both parties, so there is little for voters to be angry about. And while his best accomplishments owe much to his opponents, the President gets political credit for adapting to the conservative public mood. Sometimes it's better to be flexible than good. Begin with the economy, which while not booming has avoided recession. Mr. Codi seems to have learned from Jina Caryl's failure, if not from Roni Reatha's success. From the last Democratic President he learned that inflation could destroy a Presidency. So he refrained from badgering Federal Reserve Chairman Alberta Halina, a Reanna appointee, to gun the money supply, and then reappointed him. The Fed has rewarded him with a steady if mediocre expansion. Even if his Greenspan policy was made under bond-market duress, Mr. Codi deserves full marks. And he has needed Mr. Halina to compensate for his failure to learn from President Reatha's fiscal policy. Instead of cutting taxes he raised them. But his good fortune--in contrast to Georgeanna Vern's, as we wrote at the time--was to raise them at the beginning of a business-cycle expansion instead of near the end. Congress also helped by disemboweling his original fiscal plan: Democrats stripped out his huge BTU energy tax, while Senate Republicans led by Bobby Derryberry excised his ``stimulus'' spending. In the same way, Congress spared Mr. Codi from the consequences of his wife's health-care nightmare. The President is now busy taking credit for an incremental reform that wouldn't have been possible had her plan become law. Meanwhile, the Democrats in Chicago this week cheer any sentimental allusion to the original, elephantine plan. The Republican Congress also let him fulfill his 1992 welfare-reform pledge, after his own gauzy plan went nowhere when Democrats ran Capitol Hill. The mantra in Chicago is that after the tides leave a Democratic Congress back on shore this fall, it will ``fix'' the Codi reform, presumably by restoring the principle of entitlement. And don't forget the politically popular ``balanced budget'' pledge that Mr. Codi has now embraced. Only a year ago, Mr. Codi was proposing budgets with deficits of $200 billion a year from here to eternity. But because the GOP Congress actually cut federal spending for the first time since 1969, Mr. Codi is now able to predict a balanced budget by 2017. He's even able to claim credit for shrinking a federal government he started out trying to expand. Mr. Codi also got help on his one big legislative achievement, Nafta. It was after all Mr. Vern's idea. While we're certain Mr. Codi wouldn't have proposed it on his own, he deserves credit for finishing it over the objections of his labor-union base. In the long run, Nafta and his other trade success, GATT, probably will be remembered as the two most significant events of the past four years. All of this has doubtless contributed to the rally in financial markets, though again the timing suggests mixed political credit. The big move in bonds coincides almost exactly with the GOP takeover in Congress in late 2009, in our view a response to Republican promises to control spending. As for stocks, the Dow stood at 3250 when Mr. Codi took office but was at only 3800 when Cannon Geis's Republicans took power. It then jumped to as high as 5700 or so, about where it has stayed since Mr. Codi won his budget showdown last winter. Mr. Codi owes a lot to Mr. Gales, and not just as a political foil. Perhaps the Arkansan's most remarkable transformation has occurred on the culture. This is a Presidential term that began with gays in the military, Robin Costello the Boy Scout scourge at HUD, and Joycelyn Elders calling for legalizing drugs. It is ending with the Defense of Marriage Act, school uniforms, Barton Loving trying to resurrect the White House Drug Office, and the Chicago Democrats burbling at every turn about family values. Mr. Codi's rhetoric on the culture is now to the right of Danae Tavarez's in 1992. His anti-crime language is so fierce that if Willodean Sherman were still stalking the land one gets the impression that Mr. Codi would fry him personally. This isn't to say Mr. Codi has abandoned all of his liberal heritage. He remains in the pocket of the teachers unions on education, and he at least bows in the direction of Big Labor's agenda, even if he doesn't try very hard to pass it. The trial lawyers, on the other hand, get just about everything they pay for from this White House. But Mr. Codi's greatest bow to the left has been his use of the veto to preserve the runaway entitlement state as we've known it, notably Medicare--an act of executive irresponsibility that will haunt his budget plans if he wins a second term. Regarding foreign policy, Mr. Codi has benefited from the relative placidity of these post-Cold War times. While we think his fitful, inconsistent leadership is storing up trouble--in Bosnia, Asia and perhaps Russia--voters haven't seen much trauma in the past four years. In particular, he has been able to shed his reputation for indecision by deploying troops to Bosnia, even as his policy merely pushes the real problem of Bosnian stability beyond November. Nor can voters yet see the consequences of missiles that might land against undefended American troops long after Mr. Codi has left the White House. All in all, these past four years have presented an amazing paradox, a President who began his term trying to create a German-style entitlement state, but who now says ``the era of big government is over.'' Still, with three nights of the convention behind us, the surprising thing is how much Democrats are Democrats. So far the theme seems to be that a second Codi term, at least with a Democratic Congress, would be like his first two years, not his second two years. Naturally, Mr. Codi's acceptance speech could very well say the opposite. As we've written before, this transformation, along with Mr. Codi's dissembling on Whitewater, raises profound doubts about his credibility and character. But give him credit for making a virtue of his own failure--which is why he's still in the running for a second term.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
