Bush Proves Partisanship Didn’t Go Away With Clinton

As President Bush’s budget rumbles through a gantlet of near party-line votes in the Senate this week, it increasingly appears his presidency is perpetuating--and perhaps intensifying--the cycle of partisan hostility he pledged to end as a candidate.

Bush is not inspiring the personal antagonism that President Clinton did. But the early evidence suggests Bush’s agenda is polarizing the country and Congress as quickly as his predecessor’s.

The prime example is Bush’s budget. Like Clinton’s initial economic blueprint in 1993, Bush’s tax and spending plan has failed to attract virtually any support from the opposition party.

Just as strikingly, public opinion about Bush is dividing as quickly, and almost as sharply, as it did about Clinton. Already in national surveys, a 2-to-1 majority of Democrats say they disapprove of Bush’s performance as president. Among newly elected presidents since World War II, only Clinton drew disapproval from a majority of voters in the opposition party this early in his presidency, according to the Gallup Poll.

“With Clinton, the polarization formed even before he took office; for Bush, with an election that went into extra innings [in Florida], that is even more true,” says Lee M. Miringoff, director of the nonpartisan Marist Institute in New York.

The two parties apportion blame for this continuing division in predictable directions. Republicans say Democrats have shown too little willingness to bend toward a new president. Democrats insist Bush has undermined his campaign promise of bipartisanship by adamantly refusing to compromise not only on fiscal policy but other high-profile issues.

“In order to work together, we have to work together on substance, we can’t just have nicknames,” said Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), referring to Bush’s tendency to apply friendly monikers to legislators in both parties. “And on the substantive issues, he’s taken very partisan positions.”

Whichever side bears more of the blame, the result is that the early stages of this presidency are inciting almost as many firefights between the parties as a Clinton White House that Bush denounced as “the most relentlessly partisan administration in our nation’s history.” That means Bush could face the same risk Clinton did in his first months in office: gradually alienating centrist voters by pursuing an agenda seen as overly partisan and ideological.

“It’s the same thing that happened to Clinton in reverse,” said Bruce Reed, Clinton’s top domestic policy advisor and now president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. “Bush will be forced to take a much more conservative line if he’s relying entirely on Republican votes to pass his agenda, and that will cost him the next time he and his party have to face the electorate.”

Without dismissing those dangers, one White House official said the internal consensus is that it is more important for Bush to demonstrate strength by passing a budget as close as possible to his original plan.

“The alternative argument is that if you lose on the budget, you’re neutered,” said the official, who asked not to be identified while discussing White House deliberations. “That doesn’t mean there won’t be changes in the budget later; it just means he enters the later stages of the negotiation with a stronger hand.”

Adds Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas): “Bipartisanship is not having a Republican president pass what Democratic congressmen want; bipartisanship is having Democratic congressmen at least in part support what a Republican president wants.”

The rapid reversion to partisan conflict in Washington may be exacerbating the partisan split in public opinion, which in turn encourages more conflict in Washington, many analysts believe.

At this point in their term, almost every new president in Gallup polling that traces back to Dwight D. Eisenhower enjoyed strongly positive job approval ratings from both voters in their own party and the opposition party. In March of their first terms, for instance, significantly more Democrats gave positive rather than negative assessments to both Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the current president’s father.

Democratic Voters’ Disapproval Is Strong

But in a Gallup Poll conducted in late March, Democrats said they disapproved of Bush’s performance in office by 54% to 26%. Only Clinton inspired comparable early resistance from voters in the opposition, with Republicans disapproving of his performance by a 3-to-1 ratio.

Matthew Dowd, a Bush political advisor, says the public division largely reflects long-term political trends. “There’s a long-term problem of polarization in the country that has just increased and increased,” he said.

Dowd notes that the share of Americans expressing unfavorable opinions of a new president has steadily grown over time. During John F. Kennedy’s first 100 days, polls showed that only 6% of Americans, on average, disapproved of his performance, Dowd has calculated; by Clinton’s presidency, that number spiked to 32%. So far, Bush has faced an average disapproval rating of 25%.

Dowd argues that in an environment where voters are less inclined to give a new president the benefit of the doubt, those loyal to the other party are quicker to move into outright opposition when an administration advances ideas they dislike.

But others believe Bush has fed the polarization by pursuing an agenda that is more hard-line than he signaled during the campaign.

‘He’s not seen as being in the center of the fairway,” Miringoff said. “There is a perception that things are getting a little more bitter in Washington and that makes people pick sides around the country.”

As Democratic voters have shifted against the president, Democratic legislators feel more comfortable opposing him. That’s true even in areas where the president ran well. Bush carried the districts of 46 Democratic House members, according to Polidata, a firm that analyzes political trends. But only two of those 46 lawmakers voted for Bush’s budget when it cleared the House last month with just three Democratic votes overall.

The same pattern is emerging in the Senate. The GOP once hoped that Bush’s budget would win votes from some Democratic senators up for reelection next year in states Bush carried--such as Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu. But now, the universe of potential Democratic votes for the budget appears to have shriveled to just two: Georgia’s Zell Miller, who has expressed his support, and Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, who hasn’t closed the door.

Many Democratic moderates, including Nelson, have complained that the White House has failed to even discuss possible modifications in Bush’s budget blueprint.

Republicans counter that they are caught in a zero-sum situation: Any concessions they made to win votes from Democratic moderates could lose votes from Republican conservatives and still leave Bush’s package short of a majority in the 50-50 Senate.

Yet, like the Clinton administration in its first two years, the Bush White House has clearly placed a higher priority on maximizing party unity--and minimizing discontent from its political base--than on trying to broaden its appeal by offering compromises that might attract Democrats in Congress and the country.

Officials say the White House hope is that if the budget outline passes--even on a virtual party-line vote--more Democrats will decide to support a tax cut close to what Bush wants when the details must be worked out. The administration also hopes bipartisan cooperation will emerge on other issues, such as education reform, where Senate Democrats on Wednesday night announced a broad agreement with the White House. Still, the accord left unresolved several contentious issues, such as Bush’s push for school vouchers, which will divide the parties when fought on the Senate floor.