[IP] The Bush Leagues Bush the bully

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

From Capitol Hill Blue

The Bush Leagues
Bush the bully
By MICHAEL COLLINS
Scripps Howard News Service
Apr 29, 2003, 08:01

He cajoles. He coerces. And when all else fails, he punishes.

President Bush came to the White House promising to change the tone of
politics in Washington. In one respect, he has.

My way or elseScholars and historians say the Bush administration has set a
new presidential standard when it comes to playing hardball politics with
Congress. 

"The more difficult it is for them to get their program across, the more
aggressive they become," said historian Robert Dallek.

Exhibit I: Bush flew to Ohio last week and ridiculed those who want "a
little bitty tax relief package." The White House denied it, but to many the
trip was a not-so-subtle attempt at bullying Sen. George Voinovich, the
Cleveland Republican who has refused to go along with Bush's proposal for at
least $550 billion in tax cuts.

A similar trip reportedly is being planned for Maine, the home of another
Republican holdout - Sen. Olympia Snowe.

Exhibit II: The administration is furious with Senate Republican leader Bill
Frist, who agreed to a deal that would limit any tax cut to $350 billion.
The White House has demanded that the Tennessee lawmaker make things right
and put him on notice that he will be held responsible if the president
doesn't get the tax cuts he wants.

Exhibit III: The White House punished Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont for
refusing to vote for the Bush budget in 2001. The administration refused to
invite Jeffords to a White House reception honoring a "teacher of the year"
from Vermont, and threatened to cancel dairy support benefits important to
New England farmers.

Jeffords got even by bolting from the Republican Party and becoming an
independent, a move that handed control of the Senate over to the Democrats
for 19 months and stalled much of Bush's legislative agenda.

All presidents resort to tough tactics at one time or another in their
dealings with Congress. But the Bush administration has taken political
kneecapping to a whole new level, even turning on members of the president's
own party who refuse to fall in step, political experts say.

"He has shown an "in your face, my way or the highway' approach," said
Norman Ornstein, who researches politics and Congress for the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Part of the reason is that Bush must try to push his programs through a
Congress in which Republicans hold a razor-thin majority. Any defections
from the GOP ranks could spell defeat.

"What you're seeing is kind of a Hail Mary approach, or almost a desperation
kind of approach," said Dallek, who has written books on the American
presidency. 

Bush has been "arrogant, dismissive, contemptuous" of Congress, said Thomas
Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"George Bush is trying to do more with less than any president in modern
history," Mann said. "More in the sense of pushing an ideological agenda
that at times seems not well-aligned with the problems he faces. And less in
the sense of no electoral mandate, no signs of public support for the
particular proposals he's pushing. I don't recall a president who has really
acted in this fashion."

Some scholars say, you have to go all the way back to Richard Nixon to find
a president who tried to manhandle Congress as aggressively as the Bush
administration. 

Nixon ignored Congress's demands to end the Vietnam War and widened the
conflict while the lawmakers were in recess. When Congress appropriated
funds for programs that he didn't believe in, he refused to spend the money.

In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt tried to purge Congress of the conservative
Democrats who stood in the way of his New Deal programs. The results were
disastrous: His party lost seats in both the House and the Senate, as well
as 18 of 27 gubernatorial elections that year.

Recent presidents have been more diplomatic.

Ronald Reagan deftly dealt with a Democratic House by holding out as long as
he could, then backing off and taking whatever he could get, Ornstein said.
George H.W. Bush was a "go along to get along" president who backed off from
his "no-new-taxes" pledge, a decision that may have cost him the White
House. 

Not everyone thinks the current administration is being overly aggressive.

"I don't think that is over the top at all," Tripp Baird, a former top aide
to Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., said of Bush's recent venture onto Voinovich's
home turf. He added, "I don't think it's hard enough in some ways."

But Baird and others agree it's a strategy that's unlikely to produce
results - and one that might even backfire. "It's not going to score lots of
points with people in Congress - or people out there in the public," Dallek
said. 

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