Friday, Nov. 5, 2004 | 4:38 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
November 6 - 7, 2004
George W. Bush is a president in a hurry. He is correct when he says his 51 percent to 48 percent victory over Sen. John Kerry, and the Republican gains in both the House and Senate, gave him some "political capital." The plans the president announced last week for his second term are ambitious but not surprisingly so -- the midterm elections in 2006 could change the makeup of Congress and impede the fulfillment of his agenda. So he wants to move fast.
Affirmed twice by the electorate, and with at least two years for his proposals to pass through a Republican Congress, President Bush could choose over the next several months to bypass bipartisanship and aggressively pursue his conservative proposals. We hope, however, that he will remember the 55.4 million Americans who voted for Kerry, and respect their views by listening to their representatives in Congress. As the Bush agenda goes forward, we would like to see a spirit of compromise prevail. Without it, Bush may succeed in getting most of his agenda passed, but at the price of further dividing this increasingly divided country.
The president should also bear in mind that most Americans who voted for him did so because they felt more secure with him at the helm as we fight a war on terrorism. They also felt that it would be unwise to change the administration as we fight the war in Iraq. Polls do not show that people supported him because of his domestic agenda, which, when outlined last week, seemed extremely aggressive in comparison with the narrow election margin and the slight political capital that came along with it.
Included in his agenda is a reform of Social Security. No reform would likely be needed if payroll taxes to support the program, first levied in 1937, had been placed in a separate account and were released only to supplement the retirements of those (or their spouses) who had been paying the tax. But Social Security evolved as an entitlement program, meaning it was funded automatically without needing a congressionally approved appropriation. Payroll tax money left over from paying current beneficiaries went into the federal general fund for other programs. Today Social Security has an unfunded liability of more than $2 trillion and will be unable to pay anything within 20 years or so if something isn't done.
We believe President Bush is right to move Social Security reform to the front burner. He is committed to an idea envisioned by a bipartisan panel he established in his first term, principally, to allow workers to divert a portion of their current Social Security payroll tax into a private account. The account would be guaranteed to be there, with accrued interest, when the worker retired. This plan would begin the road to privatization of Social Security, which has many critics. As more of the tax is diverted, for example, the government will have less revenue, meaning there will be fewer benefits for those now of retirement age. We hope Bush can resist his usual impulse of charging ahead, convinced of his own infallibility. He needs to encourage debate and adopt reforms that do not penalize generations of taxpayers.
This same hope applies to the rest of Bush's domestic agenda. All along he has wanted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil exploration. And he favors an overall energy policy chock full of incentives to traditional power producers who rely on nuclear and fossil fuels. His call for research into hydrogen power was a concession to renewable energy advocates. Will he honor that concession, back away from the ANWR and compromise on an energy bill with more emphasis on conservation? This would be a good way to reach out to the 48 percent of the electorate who voted for Kerry.
On other issues: Will he nominate judges who are conservative to the extreme? Will he acknowledge the obvious shortcomings of No Child Left Behind and work with educators and Democratic critics to fix them? In the face of a projected multitrillion-dollar federal deficit over the next decade, will he concede that it isn't prudent to make the tax cuts permanent? Will he support amending the prescription drug plan, to make costs for consumers more affordable?
"I will reach out to everyone who shares our goals," Bush said after his victory last week. What did he mean, though, by "our." His fellow conservative Republicans? Or all Americans, whose goal is a more united country -- united through the spirit of tolerance and the politics of compromise? The next two years will tell.
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