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Tonight’s the Night: What’s the Plan? : No other issue is as important for Bush as the economy

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President Bush has a difficult task tonight. He knows it, his supporters know it and of course his opponents know it. The job is to lay out some vision for improving the economy. Little that Bush has done or said during his term offers a clue as to what he might say in his acceptance speech on a topic to which he has devoted little evident attention. Tonight therefore is his chance to begin to address that issue.

Virtually everyone knows that the economy is the No. 1 issue now. Not that it is the only problem facing the nation today, but it is the paramount one. By comparison many other issues raised in the current silly season are pathetically less worthy. For instance, current and would-be First Ladies who have strong views must expect to have to defend those views. But surely a close textual analysis of what Hillary Clinton wrote in a 1973 academic journal, raised to the level of major campaign brouhaha, isn’t going to help America figure out how to end the recession and get this economy popping again. Nor is dissecting the recent interviews and speeches of Barbara Bush going to shed any light on the economic issues facing the nation. So let’s all be clear about the real issues that ought to be the framework for the presidential campaign.

So much depends on the American economy getting back on track. Jobs. Government revenues at the federal, state and local levels. Social services for the poor and handicapped. U.S. international competitiveness. If the economy can’t be gotten right, very little else is going to be gotten right. Perhaps it is too much to ask of a political convention that it concentrate on the real issues, rather than conduct snippy partisan business as usual. But if ever there was a time for just such a sense of heightened responsibility, this is it.

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THE DEMOCRATIC PLAN: The Bush economic plan has been feeble to date but neither is the Democratic plan a candidate for the Nobel Prize in economics. The Democrats’ plan is filled with questionable proposals for cutting fat (anyone heard that one before?) and relies too much on a near-magical upsurge in economic growth to fuel new programs. Most of all, its deficit-reduction plan is squishy.

Even so, the Democratic Party has at least placed on the table a semi-comprehensive domestic economic plan, and that is more than the Republican Party has offered to date and that is what President Bush needs to begin to do tonight. Bill Clinton’s approach strongly emphasizes capital formation, incentives for business investment, tax credits for research and development, and a capital-gains tax cut for small-firm start-ups. It also addresses the need for investment in infrastructure and human capital.

THE REPUBLICAN PROBLEM: By contrast, the Republican Party has to defend a dreary economic record. Sure, the worldwide recession is hardly the Republicans’ fault--it’s an international mess, and even the once-thought-invincible Japanese economy is in the throes of the recession blues. But the U.S. slowdown is very troubling. Few jobs are being created and many are disappearing. And jobs increasingly feature little or no health care benefits and little or no retirement protection. And the top U.S. industrial companies are “restructuring”--and in the process employed 3.7 million fewer workers last year than 10 years ago.

It’s not realistic to expect George Bush to admit his failures as a domestic President. But if he is going to point to his successes in foreign policy--and indeed he has some to be proud of--he cannot ask America to permit him to rest on his laurels. He cannot fairly expect to be deeply convincing in his call for four more years if his domestic economic policy would be no less lackluster than in the last four. The incumbent President needs to use this occasion to paint a picture of how he would help America get back on its economic feet.

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