Economic Summit to Focus on Bush’s Priorities

The White House will try to shift the focus of its economic agenda from the messengers to the message next week with a two-day conference featuring hand-picked panels of business supporters and contributors.

The White House Conference on the Economy, to be held Wednesday and Thursday in the Ronald Reagan Building, several blocks from the executive mansion, will consist of six panel discussions on such issues as Social Security restructuring, simplifying the tax code, job training, healthcare and revamping litigation rules.

President Bush will participate in the panels focusing on litigation rules and Social Security, and he will deliver concluding remarks Thursday afternoon. Vice President Dick Cheney will welcome the participants Wednesday morning.

The list of participants, released by the White House late Friday, consists of 35 corporate executives, business economists, academic experts and policy advocates, some of whom have close ties to the Bush administration.

The roster includes Home Depot Inc. Chief Executive Robert Nardelli, Dell Inc. Chief Executive Kevin Rollins, Time Warner Inc. Chief Executive Richard D. Parsons and Harvard economist Martin Feldstein.

About half the participants were political contributors during the 2004 election cycle, donating a total of $195,050 to GOP candidates and party committees, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. Of the total, $40,000 went to the Bush campaign.

Nardelli and his wife, Susan, donated $76,000 to GOP coffers, the center’s analysis showed. Rollins and his wife, Debra, gave $45,000. Parsons and his wife, Laura, donated $9,000, while Feldstein and his wife, Kathleen, gave $7,500, the center said.

Although the conference will be less elaborate than the 2001 and 2002 economic summits held by Bush in Texas, it will mark the first step in a choreographed campaign to promote the president’s ambitious second-term policy priorities.

It will also give the administration an opportunity to focus on the policy message it wants to convey after several weeks of speculation and uncertainty about the composition of its economic team.

On Wednesday, Bush asked Treasury Secretary John W. Snow to stay on board during his second term, ending an embarrassing series of news reports, attributed to high-level administration officials, that Snow was about to be replaced. The president has not assembled a full roster of economic aides for his second term. He has yet to name a replacement for departing White House economic advisor Stephen Friedman, and chief economist N. Gregory Mankiw is expected to leave soon.

Snow will moderate a panel on taxes, the White House said. Other panel discussions will be led by Friedman, outgoing Commerce Secretary Don Evans, departing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and White House Budget Director Josh Bolten.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the conference would focus on economic policy priorities emphasized by Bush during this year’s presidential race. They include letting younger workers open private investment accounts within Social Security, restructuring the tax code and limiting damage awards in medical malpractice cases and other litigation.

“The president is someone who has a strong record of working to implement pro-growth, pro-jobs economic policies,” McClellan said Friday. “We want to use this economic conference as an opportunity to talk about how we can continue to build upon those efforts.”

Independent analysts said it appeared the conference was designed to provide a highly visible forum for the administration to make the case for its existing initiatives, rather than an attempt to develop new policy proposals for a second term.

“It’s more an effort to show people where they’re headed,” said Greg Valliere, chief strategist at Stanford Washington Research Group. “Everyone will get a chance to make their comments and criticism, but it will be clear when this is over that this is the path they’re taking.”

The conference also would provide the White House with an opportunity to reward some of the president’s biggest business backers, analysts said.

“This is payback time for Bush contributors,” said Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. “They get invited to a White House conference. They get to pretend they have some influence. They get their picture taken with the president. And that’s it.”

Although the list of participants includes prominent conservatives who are known supporters of Bush policies, it also features mainstream analysts and academics who are not necessarily perceived as administration allies.

“Our analysis is nonpartisan,” said James Glassman, senior U.S. economist at the Wall Street firm of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and a participant in one of the panels. “The point of the conference is just to share ideas, and to have people present some of the insights that they have.”

Yet Glassman acknowledged that his firm’s economic research had been largely supportive of the administration’s decision to stimulate the economy with big tax cuts that ran up the deficit in the short term. “If we had been obsessed with keeping the deficit in line, we could have had a far worse situation,” he said.

One of the healthcare panelists will be Gail Wilensky, who ran the Medicare program in President George H. W. Bush’s administration and is now a senior fellow at Project Hope, an independent research organization.

She was asked by the White House this month to participate and said she intended to talk about the country’s inability to moderate healthcare costs. “It’s a tough problem,” Wilensky said.

Wilensky said she also planned to discuss ways to ameliorate the problem, including two of the president’s oft-touted solutions: medical savings accounts and community health clinics.