It Doesn’t Hurt That He’s One Lucky Man

Maybe George W. Bush really means it. Maybe he really is a compassionate conservative. If the older President Bush was notorious for his disinterest in domestic policy, the inaugural address of the younger President Bush dwelt on little else.

The 43rd president spoke of “children at risk” and “hidden prejudices.” And he promised to “reclaim America’s schools before ignorance and apathy claim more lives.”

But Bush’s compassion is grounded in religiosity, not bureaucracy. The man who said during the campaign that Jesus was his favorite philosopher because “he changed my heart” filled his 14-minute speech with biblical references, notably the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Yet Bush, whose plan for “charitable choice” would put faith-based institutions on the front line of social uplift, showed that he is keeping up with the multicultural times; he would enlist in this good fight, he said, “church and charity, synagogue and mosque.”

If Bush is keeping faith with faith, he is also keeping faith with his campaign promises, from the easy ones, such as “build our defenses,” to the more controversial ones, as in “reform Social Security and Medicare,” “reduce taxes,” to perhaps the most difficult pledge of all: “confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors.”

So in his easygoing, delegating style, Bush seems to have thought through his initial approach to what looks to be a domestically reconstructionist presidency.

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to be lucky. And he has indeed been a fortunate son, starting with his last name and continuing with his victory over Al Gore last year, notwithstanding his loss in the popular balloting by more than half a million votes.

Since then, he has had even more luck. Any incoming president following a president of the opposite party would naturally want to say he was pushing a clean-sweeping broom for the nation, but few presidents in U.S. history have left so much trash to be cleaned up. Happily for Bush, the American people needn’t take his word for it; they can know the words of Bill Clinton, the Plea-Bargainer-in-Chief. And the stench wafting from Clinton’s last-day deal with Independent Counsel Robert W. Ray was compounded by the outgoing president’s pardon of Susan McDougal, his intimate from the Whitewater days. Bush was generous to Clinton on the podium on Saturday, but then it’s easy to be nice to a political rival who has just admitted, once again, that he’s a liar.

And if there was a certain stillness in the streets of Washington yesterday, that’s because yet another vociferous critic of Bush, Jesse Jackson, was in seclusion after revelations that he fathered an out-of-wedlock child.

Bush has been lucky in other ways, too. During the campaign, the rap on the Bush-Cheney ticket was it was big-time Big Oil; yet in the past few weeks, the reality of the California energy crisis has underscored the emerging national issue of energy production. The Democratic opposition might well say that conservation is the better option, although, of course, that wasn’t an argument that Clinton or Gore made last year, when they uncorked the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an effort to push down prices. Bush may still have a hard time opening, for example, the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, but he will get a better hearing now that the Golden State is browning out.

The 43rd president may be a lucky man, but these are also lucky times for America. A decade ago, the Soviet Union still existed, and the U.S. was mired in recession. Twenty years ago, it was Iranian-held U.S. hostages, and the Red Army was threatening the world. Thirty years ago, there was Vietnam, domestic turmoil and malignant figures in the White House plotting Watergate. Forty years ago, the Cold War was at its coldest. Fifty years ago, the U.S. was bleeding in Korea. Sixty years ago, the world was at war. Seventy years ago, there was the Depression.

One must go back 80 years, to 1921, when another Republican, Warren G. Harding, took over from a two-term Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, to find another presidential transition that took place in such sunny times. Of course, Harding, who promised “normalcy,” turned out to be an abnormally bad president.

Bush’s luck will not always hold, and then he, and all Americans, will find out what he is really made of. But on Day One, at least, he is holding true to what he campaigned on: a modest but meaningful agenda of improvements and the hope for a more perfect union, or, as Bush put it, “a single nation of justice and opportunity.”