Recalculating: Steve Chapman on a New Century. Steve Chapman
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make money during periods of glut and aren’t allowed to make money during periods of shortage, when exactly are they supposed to make money? Unless the Salvation Army wants to take over the business and turn it into a charity, profits are needed at least once in a while.
Since Ronald Reagan deregulated the industry in 1981, the nation has enjoyed an era of cheap and abundant supplies, with only occasional exceptions. But we could always go back to the days when federal meddling in the petroleum market gave us both acute shortages and high prices. If you’ve forgotten what that was like, there are some politicians who could refresh your memory.
Bush’s foreign policy would be an education
Thursday, July 13, 2000
Parents sometimes gush a bit when talking about their kids, so you have to excuse former President George Bush if he gets carried away in making the case for his son, the presidential candidate. Asked if George W. knows as much about foreign affairs as he did when he arrived in the Oval Office, Dad replied, “No. But he knows every bit as much about it as Bill Clinton did.”
Swell. Eight years ago, Republicans warned the American people of the dangers of turning the leadership of the Free World over to a greenhorn governor who wouldn’t know Bahrain from Bolivia. Now they’re using Bill Clinton as a model.
As if that weren’t high enough praise, the senior Bush kept talking. In an interview last week with The New York Times, he was asked if his son knows as much about foreign affairs as Al Gore. “Gore’s had eight years of experience there,” Bush admitted. But never mind: “You get good people. George knows enough to do that . . .”
Message: Worse than Gore is today, but no worse than Clinton was eight years ago. Sound like a good campaign slogan?
Republicans who in 1992 stressed the critical importance of international expertise have developed a new tolerance for foreign-policy novices. Back then, they extolled Bush the Elder’s vast knowledge of the subject, based on his service as ambassador to the United Nations and China, his missions abroad as vice president and his prosecution of the Gulf War.
President Reagan made a campaign speech praising Bush as “a trustworthy and level-headed leader who is respected throughout the world.” And his opponents? “Foreign policy to Ross Perot and Bill Clinton is just that — foreign,” sniped Republican Party chairman Richard Bond. When Pat Buchanan appeared at the GOP convention to get behind the party nominee, he said Clinton’s foreign experience “is pretty much confined to having breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes.”
An unkind observer might point out today that George W. has international experience only in the sense that Texas, as the tourism slogan says, is “like a whole other country.” The father was on a first-name basis with every foreign leader who mattered. The son, when a radio talk show host quizzed him on who was in charge of several important foreign countries, couldn’t even come up with last names.
Being unschooled on international relations is not entirely his fault. Governors have little to do with such matters, beyond the occasional trade mission to urge foreigners to buy Idaho potatoes or Texas watermelons. They are obligated to focus on more parochial concerns, and they are wise to admit as much. When he was first running for president, Clinton made an unintentionally comic effort to enhance his foreign-policy credentials by reminding voters that he had served as commander-in-chief of the Arkansas National Guard.
But there was nothing to stop Bush from boning up on the subject on his own. And he does not inspire confidence when he suggests that his unfamiliarity with regions east of Kennebunkport isn’t important because he can always find smart people to tell him what he needs to know.
This brings to mind William Kristol, the neo-conservative policy intellectual who, after joining the staff of George Bush’s vice president, became known in Washington as Dan Quayle’s brain. Bush adviser Condoleeza Rice may be the best foreign-policy thinker any president could have. But it would be comforting to know she won’t be doing all the thinking.
The Clinton experience, contrary to Papa Bush’s suggestion, offers no grounds for optimism. Clinton’s foreign policy in his first term consisted mainly of taking promises he had made during the 1992 campaign and breaking them. He vowed to cut off normal trade relations with China, then embraced them. After criticizing Bush for failing to take tough military action in Bosnia, he shied away from doing it himself. He said Bush’s insistence on returning boat people to Haiti was “cruel” and “illegal,” which didn’t prevent him from doing the same thing.
What Clinton learned is that it’s a lot easier to formulate U.S. foreign policy at campaign rallies than in the Oval Office. International relations, unfortunately, is not one of those subjects you can master between Nov. 7 and Jan. 20, or even between the time you become a presidential candidate and the time you enter office. It takes years of study, thought and travel — an effort that Al Gore, for example, has made but Bush has not.
Eight years ago, Republicans warned us that it was risky to elect a president who would need on-the-job training in dealing with our foreign allies and enemies. It turned out they were right. So why do they want to run the experiment again?
Is this any way to choose a veep?
Thursday, July 27, 2000
Becoming president is not easy. George W. Bush is the prospective Republican nominee only because he persuaded a majority of GOP voters to choose him in the presidential primaries, and he will move into the White House only if he can induce about 45 million people to cast ballots for him in November. Becoming vice president is a bit easier. You don’t need 45 million votes. All you need is one.
Our political system has all sorts of mechanisms for fostering public control of government, plus various checks to prevent too much power from lodging in any single place. But nothing of the sort exists when it comes time to choose a vice president. The presidential nominee, acting strictly on his own, makes the choice, and everyone else has to live with it, for better or worse. It’s the most undemocratic feature of our constitutional framework.
Whoever ascends to the second highest office in the land has a reasonable chance of becoming president — as 14 presidents have done. In that case, the American people find themselves being governed by someone over whom they had no say.
Oh, sure, we have a sort of say in the matter when we go to the polls. If you don’t like the idea of Dick Cheney as president, you can vote against George W. Bush. But that’s like saying we have a voice in whom the president marries or how many kids he has. We could vote on that basis, but virtually no one does.
Same thing for running mates. Dan Quayle? Spiro Agnew? Henry Wallace? None of them could have been elected White House janitor in a truly democratic election. But placed on a national ticket, where voters essentially had no power to reject them, each ended up one heartbeat away from the presidency. Only in the most formal, meaningless way do voters have any control.
Quayle proves the case beyond all doubt. When George Bush chose him in 1988, Bush was trailing Michael Dukakis badly in the polls, and Quayle looked like the perfect way to turn a difficult race into an impossible one. He somehow managed the feat of starting out as a national joke and then declining in public esteem.
But come Election Day, Bush and Quayle won easily. And only one out of every 20 people who voted for Dukakis gave Quayle as the reason. In the end, one of the worst running mates ever was utterly irrelevant.
Ignoring the second name on the ticket is a sensible strategy for the informed citizen. Whoever is elected veep probably won’t become president — but whoever is elected president almost certainly will. So even if the presidential candidate you like makes a terrible choice and his opponent makes an excellent one, it would be crazy to let that decide your vote. The only smart course is to vote for the better of the two top nominees and gamble that the resulting vice president will never rise above that office.
But the result is that this critical decision is left entirely to one person. We’d never think of