Knowing Hard Choices Can Be Painful, Bush Dodges Them

Nothing in politics is more difficult than taking the long view. For politicians, distant gain is rarely a persuasive reason to endure immediate pain. Political scientists would say the system has a bias toward the present over the future. Parents might say politicians behave like perpetual teenagers.

The problem, for politicians as much as teenagers, is that the future has a pesky habit of arriving. And, in politics as in life, decisions deferred usually grow more difficult.

That isn’t exactly a state secret; almost everyone in Washington understands it. Yet they rarely act on it. Politicians facing election in two, four or six years don’t have much incentive to accept the pain of difficult decisions today when the consequences of inaction won’t come due for years--possibly on someone else sitting in the chair they now hold.

That mismatch between (short-term) costs and (long-term) benefits largely explains why Washington has failed to act on slowly compounding problems such as global warming or the unsustainable rise in the cost of Medicare and Social Security. All would be easier to confront if we imposed gradual changes today. But politicians have recoiled from even modest steps that might incite a backlash today and only produce benefits much later.

That same reluctance to accept short-term pain has been shaping the response to two other challenges confronting Washington: the pre-Sept. 11 failures by the intelligence community and the fallout from the collapse of Enron Corp. In each case, President Bush in particular has appeared to place the highest priority on minimizing his near-term political headaches. But in these instances, that calculation may serve neither the national interest nor Bush’s self-interest.

When problems gestate slowly enough--like global warming--the national interest and political self-interest can diverge. The country rarely benefits from delay, but politicians looking to maximize their own chances of reelection often do.

The difference on intelligence reorganization and corporate reform is that the consequences of inaction could come due much quicker. It could easily be Bush, not some future president, who pays the heightened price of procrastination--a price measured in continued vulnerability to terrorist attacks or sustained downward pressure on the stock market. On intelligence reform, there were signs last week that the White House was coming to understand this. On corporate reform, it still appears to be missing the big picture.

Ever since the first suspicions surfaced about FBI and CIA failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the White House response has been consistently myopic. Its instinct has been to view the questions as the political threat to the president. So as the first revelations of missed clues and miscommunication emerged, the White House reserved its greatest outrage for the questioners. Vice President Dick Cheney, showing a passion he hasn’t yet mustered over the breakdowns between the CIA and the FBI, denounced the most pointed questions as “thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war.”

What’s become increasingly apparent, though, is that the threat to the president isn’t the questions but the intelligence failures that provoked them. Polls don’t give any indication that the missed clues at the CIA and the FBI have appreciably undercut Bush’s support. But ultimately, the public--and history--are likely to judge Bush by his success at preventing future attacks. And, while Americans have been understandably reluctant to blame Bush for missteps occurring so soon after he took office, voters in 2004 could be much less forgiving if another attack exposes a failure to take sufficient steps after these initial disclosures.

Which is why, even on political grounds, focusing on the short term may not make much sense for the White House. For the last month, the dominant White House political goal has been to reduce the visibility and scope of investigations focusing on pre-9/11 intelligence gathering. It has been especially determined to block the appointment of an independent blue-ribbon commission.

Does that really serve Bush’s self-interest? It’s true that the more narrow and constrained the investigations, the smaller the chance that the White House will face immediate turbulence over embarrassing revelations. But the widest possible inquiry is arguably in Bush’s long-term interest because it has the greatest chance of unearthing the problems that could contribute to another attack--and creating a political climate in which it’s possible to correct them. Already, without the revelations of failures at agencies from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the FBI, it’s difficult to imagine that Bush would have a chance at passing a reorganization nearly as bold as his new proposal to create a Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security.

On Enron-related issues, the administration has been equally shortsighted, with active encouragement from the business community. Last winter, when Enron was dominating the headlines, Bush joined the chorus of outrage and promised reform. But the administration’s accounting and corporate governance proposals were tepid, and it hasn’t lifted a finger as intense business lobbying has reduced the odds that Congress will pass any changes to discourage more balance-sheet manipulation.

Deadlock might be a short-term victory for an administration resistant to new government regulation. But it ignores a larger cost to the country and to Bush. Over the last week, the chief executives of IBM and the investment bank Goldman Sachs have warned that flagging faith in corporate honesty was spooking investors and depressing the stock market. “I cannot think of a time when business overall has been held in less repute,” said Henry M. Paulson Jr. of Goldman Sachs.

Putting his shoulder behind serious corporate and accounting reform would undoubtedly create short-term tensions for Bush with his business allies. But he probably has more to fear from a sustained slump in the stock market that erodes voter optimism about the economy, just as he has far more to fear from future intelligence failures than from the excavation of old ones. As he charts his course on intelligence reorganization and corporate reform, Bush may well find that avoiding pain now is the best way to guarantee it later.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: www.latimes.com/

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