COLUMN LEFT : The Is and Isn’t President

They appeared together at the White House just the other day, in a rare joint press conference:

President Bush--who courageously drew a line in the sands of the Middle East against an Iraqi madman run amok.

Unpresident Bush--who timidly shrinks from drawing up a budget plan for dealing with the Reagan-Bush deficits that he concedes have run amok.

Just when he was enjoying bipartisan backing for his stand in a sand that is unsurpassed in our times, Bush opted to begin his press conference on the Iraqi crisis by blasting the Democrats over budget problems at home.

The thrust of Bush’s message is that the Democrats have not been acting responsibly because they won’t propose a budget. But Americans know that it’s the President who’s supposed to act presidential.

But he trembles at the notion that it is the President’s responsibility to propose a real budget with real numbers--in short, a real plan for cutting the budget that threatens to put our national security in a stranglehold. Bush prepared a budget and told us just last February that it would wipe out the deficit by 1993 without new taxes. But a few months later, he had to declare his budget inoperative. He had to admit then what all other analysts said the day it was submitted--that all the figures in his rosy scenario were unreal, that the revenues would be far lower, the deficit far higher.

Rather than propose a new master plan and ship it to Congress, Bush asked Democrats to meet behind closed doors with him and help make the tough choices for him--so that he won’t have to ever take responsibility for any unpopular decision (translation: taxes).

And now, in his press conference, he has uttered the most inane explanation of all: that the congressional budgeting monstrosity is the reason our deficit “continues to grow.” Nonsense. The tangle of congressional committees is absurd, but it’s not the source of the problem. The reason our deficits have been soaring is that a decade of Reagan-Bush budgets cut taxes for the rich and well-heeled so drastically that we just don’t have enough money to pay our bills. On top of all that, the Reagan free-market ideologues and a see-no-evil Congress permitted savings-and-loan free-wheelers to gamble with our money.

President Bush has courageously drawn a line in the oil fields of the Mideast. Too bad that Unpresident Bush shrinks from drawing a line on a ledger sheet at home.