Two inaugurations, one president

Posted January 19, 2009

Reading The Times' Jan. 21, 2001 editorial responding to George W. Bush's first inaugural address, and you get the impression that the prevailing opinion at the time was that the Bush presidency wouldn't be a terribly significant one. After dinging Bush for his apparent discomfort with public speaking, The Times launches into a boilerplate preview of Bush's policy reform goals. Click here to read a transcript Bush's first inaugural address.

Four years (and another election, two wars and the worst terrorist attack on American soil) later, the paper had reason to regard Bush's presidency as the undeniably consequential one it had become. Most notably, the optimistic deference surrounding a president's first inauguration had been replaced by four years of Bush's policy in action. In other words, the editorial board in 2005 had far more information to go on than it did in 2001, and it disagreed sharply with the president's most important actions. Click here to read a transcript of Bush's second inaugural address.

January 21, 2001
A Welcome Beginning

President George W. Bush often gives the impression of someone who isn't overly comfortable with words, which may be why he used relatively few of them in his inaugural speech Saturday. But what the 43rd president did say after taking the oath of office he said well. While sticking close to familiar themes of his campaign, Bush used fresh and elegant language to define the broad principles by which he hopes to govern: "To advance my convictions with civility; to pursue the public interest with courage; to speak for greater justice and compassion; to call for responsibility, and try to live it as well." The American people can ask for no more from their presidents, and should settle for no less.

Bush can be expected to launch his administration by focusing on a few key legislative issues, as he did while governor of Texas. Improving the nation's schools heads his agenda. Congressional Democrats, whose cooperation is essential for most of what Bush hopes to accomplish, are comfortable with that priority, though conflict looms over Bush's interest in experimenting with school vouchers and requiring greater teacher accountability. Bush has pledged to bolster the integrity of Social Security, another goal with broad bipartisan support, though his support for partially privatizing the system invites a major battle. Medicare, like Social Security also threatened with a coming demographic tidal wave, must also be addressed.

More questionable is Bush's determination to press for $1.6 trillion in tax cuts and to begin work on a comprehensive and enormously expensive military shield against missile attack. A compromise on taxes seems all but inevitable. On national missile defense, Bush should not risk his credibility by trying to persuade Americans that he can give them foolproof protection using a system for which the technology simply doesn't yet exist and for which the need is far from proven.

The president is not an enthusiast of campaign finance reform, but the swelling scandal that finds big money greasing the way for special interest influence on government makes that imperative. Bush's commitment to effective and durable environmental safeguards is also uncertain. An early test could come when he reviews President Clinton's recent expansion of protections over some federal lands.

Clinton spared the new president one burden by admitting, on his final day in office, that he "knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers" under oath--in plain words, that he lied--in a 1998 deposition that figured prominently in his impeachment and trial. The admission was part of a deal that spared Clinton possible indictment and trial after he left office, and it spared Bush both the distraction of such an event and a possible decision about pardoning a former president.

The deal Clinton struck with special prosecutor Robert W. Ray deserves the bipartisan support it has received. It blots the last page on a sad and sordid chapter of our national political life. Americans are left to wonder what might have been had Clinton chosen the course of candor much earlier.

The presidency Clinton served so equivocally now belongs to George W. Bush, who has pledged "to make our country more just and generous; to affirm the dignity or our lives and every life." Americans join in hoping to see that purpose achieved.

January 21, 2005
No Country Left Behind
President Bush's speech was impressive, and also frightening to those who suspect that he really meant it.

President Bush stood at the apogee of his life Thursday, and he rose to the occasion. A small man (in our view), who became president through accident of birth and corruption of democracy, he has been legitimized by reelection, empowered by his party's control of all three branches of government and enlarged by history (in the form of 9/11). His second inaugural address was that of a large man indeed, eloquently weaving the big themes of his presidency and his life into a coherent philosophy and a bold vision of how he wants this country to spend the next four years.

To summarize: Having won the Cold War, the United States was on "sabbatical." Then, on the "day of fire" -- Sept. 11, 2001 -- America learns that it is vulnerable. The "deepest source" of our vulnerability is that "whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny." Therefore, "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Furthermore, all people are entitled to liberty because "they bear the image of the maker of heaven and Earth."

And "it is the policy of the United States" to promote democracy "in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Every president talks about America's sacred mission of promoting freedom, and Thursday's speech was peppered with caveats. But from the speech itself and the official spin around it, we are clearly supposed to understand that Bush means something new and more ambitious. And even -- or especially -- Bush's critics have learned to respect his determination to do what he says he'll do, however much it may contradict the advice of those critics, or reality.

We take this president at his word. And the words are startling.

Bush's counterpoint of freedom and tyranny sounds like Ronald Reagan's, but the underlying analysis is much more radical. The threat to the United States, in Bush's formulation, comes not from the tyrants themselves but from the victims of their tyranny, who are radicalized by oppression and turn their hatred toward these shores. During the Cold War, the United States often supported or promoted tyrannical regimes, as long as they were anti-communist. This was realpolitik--the cynical, Machiavellian approach adopted by presidents since Harry S. Truman signed off on the policy of containing communism.

Bush the Elder was a master practitioner of realpolitik, but the aspirations Bush the Younger declared Thursday are closer to those of Woodrow Wilson: freedom and human rights everywhere, actively promoted by the U.S., by diplomacy and leverage if possible but by war if necessary. And Bush's analysis sounds nearly Marxist, with its emphasis on the radicalizing effects of oppression. When he says that "common sense" dictates that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," he sounds like Jimmy Carter.

There are reasons to be impressed by Bush's new doctrine. There are also reasons to be very afraid. It would be good if this country's foreign policy more closely tracked our professed ideals. It would be disastrous if self-righteous hubris led us into bloody and hopeless crusades, caused us to do terrible things that mock the values we are supposed to be fighting for, alienated us from an unappreciative world and possibly brought home more of the terrorism our neo-idealism is intended to suppress. There is an illustration of all these risks close to hand. But the word "Iraq" did not cross the president's lips Thursday. He referred obliquely to the war there, only in order to say that our troops were fighting for "freedom" -- which was not the main reason they were sent over.

Ironically, the dangers of self-righteous hubris in foreign policy were a theme of Bush's first presidential campaign, in 2000, when he called for humility in our global ambitions and pounded the Clinton-Gore administration for what was then called "nation-building." Bush and other Republicans specifically objected to the use of American troops to promote democratic values, as opposed to national security.

Not only does Bush now think otherwise -- in the most sweeping terms -- but he does not even acknowledge that there is a cost involved or another side to the argument. He makes it sound simple. Terrorism is bad, freedom is good. Coherence comes easier when you don't sweat the details.

For example: It's a lovely thought that freedom invariably saps the will to plant a car bomb. But is it true? When freedom and democracy came to the Balkans, people were liberated to do atrocious things to other people in the name of nationalist enthusiasms. In the Middle East, there is always danger that a "regime change" -- by election, rebellion or invasion -- will produce a theocracy rather than a democracy.

Bush, or his speechwriter, is not unaware of this, but the president does not brake for anomalies. Bush's rhetoric Thursday chased itself around in circles, declaring that America's goal -- freedom and democracy, so that people can choose their own way -- is not forcing people to adopt our way, which happens to be freedom and democracy.

In his brief discussion of domestic issues, Bush astonished again by endorsing a "broader definition of liberty" than the one in our founding documents. Bush's domestic agenda, in contrast to his foreign policy, is mostly a conventional Republican brew of tax cuts, deregulation and subsidies for undeserving businesses. But the language is more Democratic than today's Democrats. Liberty does not just mean freedom from government oppression. It means "economic independence," he said. This is civic religion as promulgated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his famous "Four Freedoms," but by no other president, Republican or Democrat, ever since.

In most other presidents, we would take all this talk with a grain of salt. But we suspect that Bush means it, which will make the next four years interesting, if nothing else.