Bush junior is out of touch

The Daily Star

Commentary
Like father, like son: Bush junior is out of touch
Claude Salhani

Former first lady and current junior senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton’s much-hyped autobiography, Living History, hit bookstores June 9 with an unprecedented 1 million copies going on sale around the country.

Reading a passage where she describes her opinions of former President George Bush pere and the state of the country, it’s as if history is repeating itself in present-day, post-Iraq war America.

“George H. W. Bush was out of touch with most Americans. Although Bush’s popularity remained astronomical in the aftermath of the Gulf War, I thought his performance on domestic issues, particularly the economy, made him vulnerable. I had realized how unfamiliar President Bush was with many of the problems facing America when I spoke with him at an education summit he had convened of all the governors in Charlottesville, Virginia in September 1989.”

Fourteen years and one Gulf war later, much the same can be said about the state of the country, particularly the economy. The parallels with George Bush junior are indeed striking.

Much like his father, Bush junior has become engrossed with the Middle East, much to the detriment of the domestic economy. Bob Herber refers to Bush in the New York Times (NYT) as the “‘What, me worry?’ president,” in reference to Alfred E. Newman, the juvenile, grinning Mad Magazine character associated with that now famous phrase. Bush, writes Herber, is “having fun with his Top Gun fantasies, (as) the economy remains in the tank (and) finances are sinking to record lows.”

New York today has an official unemployment rate of 9 percent, but the NYT says the real rate is much higher. Applicants to join a metallic union which could lead to potential employment waited three days, with some people sleeping on the sidewalk, in order to get a jump on the long queue.

“In George Bush’s America, jobs get erased like chalk marks on a blackboard. There are currently more than 10.2 million unemployed workers in the US, including 1.4 million who have been discouraged and have stopped looking,” laments Herber, who gives the following depressing statistic: “4.8 million people work only part-time.” The NYT says nearly a quarter of a million jobs have been lost in the past two years. And taxes are going up all the time.

The faltering start-stop-starts in Iraq brought about by the early fiasco of the Jay Garner administration, closely followed by his replacement with J. Paul Bremmer, a more seasoned career diplomat, have had little success in providing security, water and electricity to large portions of the Iraqi public. US soldiers continue to die daily in clashes with Iraqis. Regardless, this does not seem to impact the American electorate, who for the most part, remain oblivious to the daily sufferings of the average Iraqi.

While the “war on terror” continues to preoccupy many Americans, the pending threats of attacks by terrorists acts as a unifying force, preventing the Democrats, or anyone else for that matter, from openly assaulting the Commander-in-Chief. The logic is that it would seem “unpatriotic” to criticize the president in time of crisis. Meanwhile, the country remains in a heightened state of alert, at code orange, the second highest status. Bush’s landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier last May, decked out as a Top Gun flyer, drew limited criticism -- mainly from the aging Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, and that was quickly drowned out.

The recent dual Middle East summits in Sharm el-Sheikh and Aqaba in fact strengthened Bush’s position at home, at least in the interim, and until Middle Eastern realities begin to set in. Bush was portrayed as a weathered politician, engaged in the honorable art of peace-making. Another one of his pet peeves, regime change in the Palestinian territories, appeared to have borne fruit, with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas taking center-stage as Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was finally sidelined.

By and large, it’s been a pretty good year for Bush. So far, the war in Iraq has been, overall, sort of a success -- at least as far as the American public is concerned. Even though Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found, or the deposed dictator himself for that matter -- not to mention Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar-- the vast majority of Americans continue to support the president’s war effort. Oh, what short-term memories we have.
As the country rejoiced in the return of its military from one of the longest deployments in decades, in its euphoria and flag waving much of the nation seems to have suddenly suffered amnesia, forgetting why it went to war in the first place. And that, despite a faltering economy. At least Hillary will do nicely given her $8 million advance.

Claude Salhani is foreign editor and a political analyst with United Press International in Washington, DC. He wrote this commentary for the Daily Star.
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