MANKATO, Minn.—After watching President Bush speak for only a couple of hours on the 2004 stump, it’s easy to see the main tenets of his re-election campaign: My opponent is un-American, or at least less American than me and you. My opponent, much like Al Gore, doesn’t know who he is. My opponent is a tax-hiking, big-government liberal. Worse, he wants to ask other countries for permission for America to defend itself against its enemies. Last, and most important, my wife is better than his wife.
What you don’t hear from President Bush’s stump speech, or from his surrogates, is what he plans to do were he given another four years as president. The problem is particularly glaring on matters of foreign policy. There are glimmers of a domestic agenda in the president’s two campaign events Wednesday: He wants to reform America’s high schools, increase math and science education, and increase the use of the Internet in schools. He wants more ethanol subsidies. He wants to make health care more available and affordable. He wants less regulation. He likes community colleges. He wants workers to be able to acquire flex time and comp time in lieu of overtime pay.
Bush also gives his audiences a rehash of the greatest hits from his 2000 campaign mantras. He likes tort reform and dislikes “frivolous lawsuits.” (A favorite line of Bush crowds: “You cannot be pro-patient and pro-doctor and pro-trial lawyer at the same time. You have to choose. My opponent made his choice, and he put him on the ticket.”) He wants private Social Security accounts for younger workers. He likes marriage and the family, which always gets him a big cheer, because what it really means is he’s against gay marriage. He’s for a “culture of life,” “judges who faithfully interpret the law instead of legislating from the bench,” and a “culture of responsibility.” Not to mention the responsibility society and the ownership society. He’s still against the soft bigotry of low expectations. And of course, he wants everyone to love their neighbor just like you’d like to be loved yourself.
Bush doesn’t talk much about the future. He talks about the past. The biggest portions of Bush’s speech are spent mounting a vigorous defense of his presidency. When Bush’s campaign foundered in New Hampshire four years ago, he retooled his strategy in response to John McCain and began billing himself as a “reformer with results.” He’s not using that slogan yet, but the rhetoric is similar. “It’s not enough to advocate reform,” he says. “You have to be able to get it done.” The closing section of his speech ends with the mantra, “Results matter.” On education, health care, the economy, farms, and security, Bush concludes by saying, “Results matter.” Of his Medicare prescription drug benefit, Bush says, “Leaders in both political parties had promised prescription drug coverage for years. We got the job done.”
Bush spends the longest amount of time defending his policies after Sept. 11. He takes credit for the creation of the Homeland Security Department (one of those things that Bush voted against before he voted for it), and he takes pride in the Patriot Act. Afghanistan has gone from being the “home base of al-Qaida” to being a “rising democracy.” Pakistan, once a “safe transit point for terrorists,” is now an ally. Saudi Arabia, he says, “is taking the fight to al-Qaida.” Libya has given up its quest for weapons of mass destruction.
Most of all, Bush defends the war in Iraq. He repeats the litany of reasons for going to war: Saddam was defying the will of the United Nations, he harbored terrorists, he funded suicide bombers, he used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. “In other words, we saw a threat,” Bush says. “Members of the United States Congress from both political parties, including my opponent, looked at the intelligence and came to the same conclusion.”
What Bush doesn’t acknowledge is what went wrong: The WMD were never found. We weren’t welcomed as liberators. Oil revenues haven’t paid for the war. It wasn’t a cakewalk. What went wrong? Why? Given four more years, what does Bush plan to do about it? He hasn’t told us yet, other than suggesting “more of the same.”
“Every incumbent who asks for your vote has got to answer one central question, and that’s ‘Why?’” Bush says. “Why should the American people give me the high privilege of serving as your president for four more years?” The answer Bush gives to that question is his record. He says he deserves re-election because of what he has already done. At Wednesday’s first event, in Davenport, Iowa, U.S. Rep. Jim Nussle embodies this attitude when he introduces Bush to the crowd. “There is no one I would have wanted to be at the helm of this country these last four years than you,” Nussle says.
Bush and Nussle are asking the wrong question. The real question an incumbent faces is, what now? What’s next? So far, Bush isn’t telling. A president’s record matters, but the reason it matters is because it has predictive value. Bush’s defenders say he is a transformational figure, that he’s willing to take on big problems and challenges. Wouldn’t you like to know what Bush believes those big problems and challenges would be in foreign policy over the next four years? Are there gathering threats that, like Iraq, he thinks need to be tackled “before they materialize”? The president says that is the lesson of Sept. 11, that the nation must confront its security problems pre-emptively. Where else does he plan to apply that lesson? Does he plan to tell us?
After the 2002 midterm elections, when Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill objected to another round of tax cuts for the rich, Vice President Cheney told O’Neill to discard his worries. We won the midterm elections, Cheney said. “This is our due.” As much as liberals dislike President Bush’s record over the past four years, it’s the prospect of another four years that terrifies them. What they want to know—what keeps them awake at night—is what President Bush hasn’t answered yet: What are you going to do next? This time, what will be your due?
