The New Guy Loves a defecit

wallyburger · March 29th, 2006, 04:04 AM

capitalgames
David Corn

The Nation

Card Folds, and Bush Draws to the Inside

The White House doesn't seem to understand the meaning of the term "fresh blood." It usually refers to new blood that is introduced into an anemic entity--not blood taken from one organ of an unhealthy body and placed in another organ of that unhealthy body.

But that's what the surgeons at the White House have done in the transplant operation that removed Andrew Card (a former lobbyist for the automobile industry) as White House chief of staff and replaced him with Joshua Bolten, the White House budget director. George W. Bush did not select someone who might have a slightly different perspective on his administration. Bolten has been in the White House since Bush was first inaugurated. Moreover, he has overseen one of the larger disasters of the Bush presidency: its fiscal policy. Here's how those radicals at The Washington Post editorial board recently described the situation:

President Bush has presided over a 46 percent increase in the federal debt, from about $5.6 trillion [to about $8.8 trillion]. By contrast, during President Bill Clinton's two terms, the debt grew from less than $4 trillion to $5.6 trillion, a 28 percent increase -- and during the last few years of his presidency, Mr. Clinton actually began to pay down the country's "real" debt....

Mr. Bush has managed to rack up more new debt during his five years in office than the entire debt amassed by the United States through 1988. And there is more to come: The president's budget envisions the debt rising to $11.5 trillion by 2011. This means that an increasing share of an increasingly tight budget must be devoted simply to paying interest -- an estimated $220 billion this fiscal year alone. Remember: This is the president who entered office promising to pay off $2 trillion in debt held by the public over the next decade.....

[A]s the debt ceiling approaches $9 trillion, it's time to pause and consider the unabashed recklessness of the Bush administration's fiscal policies and its unwillingness to alter its tax-cutting course to accommodate new budgetary realities. "Future generations shouldn't be forced to pay back money that we have borrowed," Mr. Bush said in March 2001. "We owe this kind of responsibility to our children and grandchildren." Where is that responsibility now?

Of course, Bush is most responsible for that lack of responsibility. But sharing the responsibility for being that irresponsible is Bolten. And his office has done its best to hide the true impact of Bush's budget decisions. So says the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities in its analysis of the White House's last proposed budget:

A standard part of the President's budget each year is a summary table that shows the impact of the Administration's proposed policies on the deficit. (See Table S-12 on page 364 of last year's budget.) This year, however, the Administration has eliminated that table from its budget publications, presumably to deflect attention from the deficit-increasing impact of its proposals.

Not just the liberals at CBPP believe Bolten's Office of Management and Budget at the White House has been dishonest. The centrist budget hawks of Concord Coalition have also complained:

Bush's budget fails to account for policies the Administration clearly and repeatedly has staked out as goals policies that would significantly increase the short-term and long-term deficit. In addition, the budget resorts to a familiar combination of unrealistic assumptions and scorekeeping gimmicks that understate likely expenses, overstate likely revenues and hide the costs of certain initiatives. Lastly, the budget's five-year window and limited goal of cutting the 2004 deficit in half by 2009 serve to divert attention from the fact that current policy is unsustainable over the long-term.

For weeks, Republicans and pundits have been moaning about the need for change at the White House. On Monday, Sally Quinn, the grand-dame of Georgetown, had an "essay" in The Washington Post that was an open letter to Laura Bush, calling on her to save her husband's presidency by forcing a shake-up at the White House. (The First Lady knows staff changes: she is on her second chief of staff, her second policy director, her second social director, and her third press secretary.) Quinn even mentioned bouncing Card--but in favor of some Washington poohbah with credibility on Capitol Hill and among the commentariat.

That's not Bolten. He is merely another Bush loyalist, whose stewardship of the administration's budget policy hardly inspires confidence in his integrity. Couldn't the White House get a better donor for the needed transfusion? I suppose David Gergen wasn't available. Fred Thompson is too busy making television shows and raising money for Scooter Libby's defense fund. And James Baker? Well, Bush the Younger may still be smarting over his dad's secretary of state's opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

Anyway, the problem at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not who's managing the staff. The problem is the combination of policies, priorities and visions of the fellow who lives there. The mess in Iraq cannot be undone by better staff work. Nearly $12 trillion in debt cannot be erased by a more effective communications strategy. Bush cannot be removed from the bubble of his own policies--and certainly not by a Bush lieutenant. This staff change is not about new blood. It's just the recycling of thin blood already low on oxygen. And the patient remains the same.

wallyburger · March 29th, 2006, 04:08 AM

| Posted 03/28/2006 @ 12:41am

The Soon-to-be-Forgotten Andrew Card
John Nichols

The Nation

After Karen Hughes stepped down as a counselor to the president in 2002, White House chief of staff Andy Card, in a rare moment of candor, told Esquire: "She's leaving when the president has one of the highest approval ratings on record. From here, it can only go down. And when it does, you know who they're going to blame."

Then, Card tapped his chest and added, "They're gonna blame Andy Card!"

As it happens, Card was wrong.

No one blamed him. Few even remembered that he was, technically, in charge of managing the Bush White House.

Card will forever be remembered for one thing: Wandering into camera range and then whispering into the ear of President Bush that terrorists had attacked the United States -- and for not, apparently, imparting the information with sufficient force to get the most powerful man in the world to respond with anything more than a quizzical look for the seven agonizing minutes portrayed in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9-11.

As Bill Maher has suggested: "Watergate was outrageous but it still did not carry the possibility of utter devastation, like a President's freezing at the very moment we needed his immediate focus on an attack on the United States."

Well, Card was the senior aide, who had been placed at the president's side by none other than Father-in-Chief George Herbert Walker Bush, in order to make sure that George II did not freeze at moments such as this. And he failed, miserably. Not only did Bush fail to respond to the whispered news that "America's under attack" for the seven minutes seen on screen, he then spent another twenty minutes posing for "photo-op" pictures afterward.

Bush has taken his share of criticism for fumbling the moment, and then for flying off around the country on a wild goose chase that took him to air bases further and further from where Dick Cheney was actually running things. But Card, as the man the Bush family had positioned to assure that the president didn't fall apart in just these circumstances, was the real fumbler. He did not get the president refocused, he did not rise to the challenge.

As a result, the president was not the president that day. Nora Ephron summed things up well when she wrote last year that, "[If] you remember September 11, 2001 -- and I'm sure you do -- the President had no idea what to do, but the Vice President did. The Vice President took over. He didn't even consult with the President. He put the President on Air Force One and the President spent the day flying from one airport to another, which was something that even the President eventually understood made him look as if he wasn't in charge."

"Cheney was the dominant figure on September 11," observed James Mann, the brilliant analyst of U.S. foreign policy and policy makers who serves as senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Even wire service reports noted that dominance, with United Press International suggesting that it "reintroduced nagging questions about who was realy in charge in the Bush White House." Those questions grew louder after Cheney delivered a minute-by-minute account of the actions he took to secure the nation during an appearance the Sunday after the attacks on NBC's Meet the Press.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley summed up the point of that appearance in an interview with UPI: "It was Cheney telling the world, 'Don't worry about Shrub, I know what's going on.' "

The question that history will ask with regard to Card -- the only question -- is this: As the senior aide at Bush's side on the most significant day in recent American history, did he fail to get the president to focus on the crisis at hand? Or did he do what he was supposed to do: Get a weak and unprepared president out of the way so that the real boss could take charge?

That's a question for historians to ponder.

In the end, however, no one will spend too much time on Andy Card's role. He won't be blamed, as he once feared, for the decline in Bush's fortunes. His will be, by and large, the forgotten service of a man who managed a White House where powerful players -- Cheney, Donald Rumseld, Karl Rove -- constructed a presidency of their own design, while the elected commander-in-chief vacationed and exercised and generally ambled through history.

The truth is that Andy Card may well have failed not just his president but his country by allowing power and responsibility to drift so far from the hands of the elected president. But such failures are the stuff of footnotes and sidebars, not of the main storyline. Indeed, if Card is remembered at all by the great mass of Americans, it will be for that bit role in a Michael Moore film.