Bush Leads from the Right - 23 March 2001

I had, this week, a letter from Finland. It was nice and new to know that I had a Finnish fan.

I must say it's one of the unceasing pleasures of this weekly effort to be reminded in notes from New Zealand, Libya, Bombay, Australia and Finland, that there are listeners all over to what even some close American friends call "the talk he broadcasts to England".

The gentleman from Finland reminded me that during the first few weeks of Governor Bush's reign as President Bush I'd declined to say how he was doing on the principle - which I've observed every four years - of letting a man settle in and indicate the certain drift or current of his policies before beginning to judge him.

"Don't groan, don't judge, wait and see" has been my watchword for more than half a century.

And in that recent talk I gave dramatic, I hope, examples of how wrong you can be, whatever your political bias, if you immediately deplore a man, not of your political persuasion, the moment he enters the White House.

We went all the way from the astonishing transformation of a farm boy and failed haberdasher from Missouri - name of Truman - into one of the few great presidents of the 20th Century.

We went all the way back to the beloved genius of common sense, the man who more than anybody was the author of the Constitution, all the way back to him - James Madison - and his emergence as one of the worst, most inept, presidents in history.

Well Mr Bush has been now two months in the White House and he has performed with such energy and positiveness that nobody can say they don't yet see the drift of his policies.

"Drift" is quite the wrong word. While we've been preoccupied with the woes of actual daily life - the garish Clinton circus, the plunging stock market, the appalling mismanagement of California's transmission of power - as I talk a half million people have had two to three hour blackouts of all electrical power throughout the 440 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco - we've been so concerned about these brutal fractures in the unbroken nine-year run of America the Prosperous that only the people in and around Congress were really taking note of the immoderate pace and unswerving direction of Mr Bush's administration.

So, in a word - I hear you saying before you go on - what has that been?

Well simply that because of the exactly equal split in the party representation in the Senate, Mr Bush sensibly promised to work with the Democrats - to be fair, patient, to seek feasible compromises on most issues, to be dogmatic on none.

And has he done that? Not quite. All the signs, so far, point to his leading from the far right wing of his party. And so far no compromise with the known moderates, either in domestic or foreign policy.

This is a shocker to the moderates and liberals and a joy to the domestic right wingers and foreign policy old hard hats.

To recite the list of policy actions as briefly and fairly as possible:

He began his rule or reign by cutting off American money that went through international agencies to help poor women abroad get abortions.

The announcement did not mention that the ban applied solely to the procedure of abortion, that almost half a billion dollars was still available for family planning in other ways.

Now whatever your own feelings on what is still, in this country, after a quarter century since the permissive law, still a passionate conflict, it has to be said that as the first act of a new administration it was clumsily done and badly ill-timed. It immediately angered or depressed a flock of European allies.

However, every president is entitled to one early gaffe - Mr Clinton practically stalled his administration for months by his first act, which was to seek open admission of homosexuals into the armed forces. Another seething debate that has not yet been resolved to anyone's satisfaction.

The first big shock in the Bush domestic policy was the president's cancellation of an environmental move which indeed first attracted Mr Christine Whitman - a moderate Republican with an un-Republican concern for the environment - to give up her job as governor of New Jersey and accept Mr Bush's invitation to be head of the department of the environment.

During the campaign Governor Bush said he would put severe limits on the emission of carbon dioxide, something the Greens and most Democrats and Governor Whitman had been praying for.

Suddenly 10 days ago the president announced quite simply he'd changed his mind. He would propose no restraints on carbon dioxide emissions.

In the interval of the mind change industry - the mining industry in particular - had howled with complaints that carrying out the new restraining order would involve them in many unaffordable millions of dollars.

Anyway Mr Bush's critics noted that whereas the proponents of the emission controls had contributed $1m or so to his campaign the coal mining industry alone had put up $3m.

Mr Bush's explanation was at least plausible. He said the California power shortage threatened the whole West and possibly the entire nation with an energy crisis and that this was no time to impose what at another time would be an admirable discipline on industry.

Mrs Whitman, at one moment rumoured to be on the verge of resigning, saved face and her hopes by citing this past week's new California emergency - when one power company went bankrupt and another power generator caught fire.

But now the allies have been naturally eager to discern the coming trend of the Bush foreign policy.

And here there has been, while we were busy elsewhere, a quiet revolution which started only days after Mr Bush entered the White House, the day, in fact, he banned American money to help the international funding of abortion. We now know that the new Secretary of State - Mr Colin Powell - deplored the ban.

We ought to pause here and recall what a formidable figure the new secretary of state is.

Mr now - formerly general - Colin Powell, the black boy from Jamaica. Brought up in the Bronx of New York city, joined the army, and - 30 years ago it would have been inconceivable - became the top warrior of the country, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the strategist of the Gulf War and at the end of it the overwhelming choice, among Republican voters, as the next president of the United States.

He wrestled with his soul awhile and then made a dramatic public appearance to announce that he did not have the fire in the belly necessary to go into politics and run for president.

But he has remained down the Clinton years an almost revered public figure and the man whose early endorsement of Governor Bush brought immediate rejoicing to the Bush camp.

Those happy campers had special cause then to rejoice because way back then General Powell's beliefs seemed to soften the harder edges of the Bush image. Where Bush was absolutely against abortion the general was known to be for it.

But now Mr Bush has declared, through his defence secretary, that America will, from now on, be more selective about moving in to help besieged ethnics.

Just while General Powell was cheering the Nato allies by promising to maintain America's Nato engagements.

Now the Republican Party, in spite of perennial declarations that it wants to embrace all colours, all creeds, attracts never more than 5 - 7% of the black vote, yet here was a black man chosen to be on their side.

He gave once the appearance of belief in Governor Bush's protestations about an all-embracing party sympathetic to all classes and creeds, even if its strong right wing expects all good Republicans to ascend to a Christian heaven.

However, the Washington journalist Martin Kettle has put it neatly: "If the former general embodied the Bush Republican campaign it is increasingly obvious that he does not embody the Bush Republican administration."

Again, Secretary Powell wants to try and stay engaged in some way with the impoverished but dangerous North Korea and watch its missile building. President Bush means to ignore and defy it, sell precious weapons to Taiwan and go ahead with the American missile defence.

Secretary Powell favours the allied plan to reform sanctions against Saddam Hussein. President Bush prefers to handle Saddam in ways he has not defined.

It is not mischievous to wonder how long Colin Powell can take these defeats on what, for him, had been - are - matters of high principle.

Anyway after only two months two things are clear about the Bush administration.

The president has demonstrated, if not proclaimed, that since the votes cast for him were overwhelmingly by conservatives who wished him to be a conservative president, by jiminy - as his father would say - he is going to be one.

The other thing is both plain to see and poignant: The America of George W Bush is a different world from Bill Clinton's America, which is sliding away fast into the history books and no doubt will soon earn itself a descriptive tag, just as the previous decade of dizzy prosperity, the 1920s, later became dubbed "the era of wonderful nonsense".

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