BUSHWHACKER : THE PRESIDENT FACES A CRISIS, BUT WHAT’S HIS URBAN AGENDA?

Washington is in a crisis mode. We know that because the President and Congress are behaving strangely. They are pretending to get along.

Last week, President Bush and congressional leaders set aside their differences and proposed swift action to bring relief to the nation’s cities. The words “George Bush” and “action plan” are rarely in the same sentence--at least when it comes to domestic policy. But there the President was, holding an impromptu news conference in the Oval Office, with a chart propped up next to him showing a six-point “action plan.”

For Bush, holding an impromptu news conference was a departure. Bush is not good at impromptu. The week before, he told the wife of a critically injured Los Angeles fireman, “I’m sorry Barbara’s not here. She’s out repairing what’s left of our house (in Kennebunkport). Damn storm knocked down four or five walls.” When Bush speaks, Lord give us promptu.

The President acts goofy when he gets nervous. Congress is nervous, too. Some of Bush’s most ferocious critics have pledged to work with him and support his program. Last week, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who represents South Los Angeles, became irate when she was not invited to a meeting Bush had with Democratic congressional leaders. So she crashed it. Afterward she said, “I’m extremely encouraged. This is a time when both sides of the aisle must rise above partisan politics in the interest of the country.”

As a result of the Los Angeles riots, the urban crisis has been thrust on the national agenda. Congress and the Administration are under pressure to seem responsible and concerned. They have to demonstrate that they are doing something, even if they can’t do much.

Bush’s “action plan” consists mostly of programs he proposed in the past, like school choice and enterprise zones, that were never approved by Congress. “It’s new. It has not been enacted,” the President said, somewhat defensively, last week. “A proposal that hasn’t been tried is new.”

The consensus is fragile. Urban Democrats in Congress are already complaining that the plan doesn’t do enough for the cities. GOP lawmakers are reporting rural and suburban resentment over the aid.

According to one Democratic leader, however, “The marching orders are to work something out with the Administration in the short term, and then in the longer term, we work on the fundamental urban ills.”

The bipartisan consensus in Washington illustrates the basic rule of American government: Nothing gets done in Washington unless there is a sense of crisis. Out of the Great Depression of the 1930s came the New Deal. Out of the Great Inflation of the 1970s came Reaganomics.

Without a sense of crisis, nothing happens. The reason is simple: The system was designed that way. The Founding Fathers distrusted strong government. They gave us checks and balances and separation of powers to make sure government would be weak and inefficient--unless there was an overwhelming sense of public urgency.

That is what’s happening now. The violence in Los Angeles convinced the American people that Washington must do something about the nation’s long-neglected urban problems. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be funneled into Los Angeles. Ed Rendell, the mayor of financially strapped Philadelphia, complained last week, “You shouldn’t have to riot to get money.”

Unfortunately, you do. Philadelphia just did it wrong a few years back, when former Mayor W. Wilson Goode firebombed a neighborhood in a shootout with a radical cult. If the mayor burns down the city, that’s ineptitude. If the people burn down the city, that’s a crisis.

The very nature of this crisis is a big surprise to political experts. Many predicted deep racial divisions and a law-and-order backlash comparable to the 1960s. But that’s not what’s happening.

Law-and-order backlash? When asked the best way to prevent urban unrest, both whites and blacks chose job-training programs over strengthening the police by overwhelming margins, according to one poll.

Racial polarization? The evidence points toward racial consensus. When asked about the verdict in the Rodney G. King case, whites agreed with blacks. In one poll, two-thirds of whites and more than 90% of blacks said they would have found the police officers guilty.

You don’t hear much of the get-tough rhetoric that dominated the public’s response to urban violence in the 1960s. The prevailing public response today is not “shoot looters” but “do something” about the nation’s urban and minority problems.

It’s not back to the ‘60s. Why not? For several reasons. First, racial attitudes have improved. Whites are measurably less racist than they were in the 1960s. Back then, a considerable body of opinion was opposed to racial integration. “Segregation forever” was George C. Wallace’s rallying cry. How much have things changed? Check out how David Duke did in this year’s presidential primaries.

Second, white voters have moved to the suburbs. They are less directly threatened by urban violence. They feel less competitive for jobs and turf with inner-city minorities.

In the 1960s, the racial backlash was strongest among white voters who lived in close proximity to blacks. The higher the proportion of blacks in a constituency, the better Wallace did among whites.

But most white voters who had an urban problem solved it by moving out of the city. Today, those on the front lines of the urban battleground are not whites. They are Asian and Latino immigrants. The law-and-order constituency used to be Italian and Irish. Now it’s Korean.

These days, the suburbs are populated by “new collar” voters, children of the Silent Majority and the Reagan Democrats. The late political analyst Samuel Lubell captured their values perfectly when he wrote, 20 years ago, “In all my interviewing since 1950, I have found that the main concern of most white voters has never been racial justice. Always the balance of sentiment has swung to the course of action that seemed to them to offer the best prospect for racial peace.”

Today, that course of action appears to mean solving urban problems--getting people jobs, getting them off drugs and, if possible, getting them out of the city.

You get racial peace by defusing tensions. In one survey, 71% of whites agreed that “the recent rioting is a warning to the United States that race relations must improve to prevent more trouble and violence.” Simi Valley may be a suburb, but the values of that jury were not those of suburban America.

Finally, the political context is far different today. Liberals were in charge during the 1960s, and they got blamed for everything that went wrong. But conservatives have been running the show for a dozen years now. They’re the ones responsible. Last week, the Gallup Poll asked, “Which would you say is more to blame for today’s urban problems, the Great Society programs of the 1960s or the Reagan economic policies of the 1980s?” No contest. People blamed Ronald Reagan more than Lyndon B. Johnson by better than 2 to 1.

That doesn’t mean they believe the Great Society was a rousing success. Only one-quarter of the public thinks the programs of the ‘60s made things better for the poor. The prevailing view is that they didn’t make any difference. As Reagan is fond of saying, “We declared a War on Poverty, and poverty won.”

Reagan also said “Trees cause pollution,” a statement that held the record for monumental stupidity--until the White House announced that Johnson’s Great Society caused the violence in Los Angeles. The Administration failed to notice that Democrats were not following the GOP script. Bill Clinton was supposed to call for massive spending programs to bail out the cities. Then Bush could say, “He just wants to throw money at problems, like Johnson did.”

But Clinton never called for massive spending programs. Both he and the Democrats in Congress are being cautious. They are targeting “the forgotten middle class” this year. What characterizes those voters isn’t racism. It’s the fact that they are cynical about government. Middle-class voters don’t believe the federal government knows what to do about urban problems. The ‘60s didn’t work. But the ‘80s didn’t work, either. That’s the lesson of Los Angeles: Neglect is not an acceptable urban policy.

The President’s urban agenda will cost several billion dollars. Where’s the money coming from? The Administration and Congress plan to declare a budget emergency, permissible under the 1990 budget deal, and take the money out of the deficit.

That means we’re making one problem worse--the deficit--to deal with another problem--urban unrest. There’s a difference between the two, however. Los Angeles is a crisis. People got killed. The deficit is not a crisis. There’s no great sense of public urgency about it.

The deficit does do terrible things. It reduces the nation’s savings, limits our investment, cuts productivity and slows down our rate of economic growth. But it does not do the one thing it would have to do for Washington to take it seriously. It does not cause a national crisis.