Bush Presidency Means No Political Reform

by Molly Ivins

I don't know who wrote the script for this election, but it was so far over the top that the perp should be chucked out of the screenwriters' guild.

Naturally, we can think of reasons to be chipper about the outcome. George W. Bush is not a mean man, and he is not a nincompoop. This may strike you as faint praise, but media expectations about Bush have been so low that it sometimes seems necessary to report, "Look, he can jump over a matchbox."

Besides, he has that same daffy inability to get a grip on the English language that his father has, thus providing glorious material for political humorists.

I happen to think that Bush is quite good at the political end of politics -- at holding together a disparate coalition, at reaching out to unlikely suspects and at making himself generally liked. There is much talk of a national-unity kind of government, rather like the one that Ehud Barak is trying to create in Israel. (Put a Democrat or two in the Cabinet.)

The trouble is, when you win a close race, you owe all the members of your coalition big-time. You can't say to the National Rifle Association or the Confederation of Roof Manufacturers, "Go take a leap -- we could have won without you." You pretty much have to say, "So what do you want?"

The only reason to be down about a Bush presidency is the money. We may well have just lost our last shot for a very long time at getting anything done about the money in politics. Unless John McCain makes fixing soft money the price of his participation -- and the Bushies may not want him on the inside -- we're not going to see campaign finance reform.

A House led by Tom DeLay and Dick Armey and a Senate led by Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell are not going to commit public campaign financing. Business just outspent labor in this election by more than 15-to-1, and the business folks ran the table, as they say in pool. They took it all.

And that means they're going to be even more difficult to dislodge next time, because it's harder to beat incumbents.

So it really will have to get worse before it gets better, as radicals often argue -- and if the special interests lose their heads and go into a greed frenzy, as they did with tax cuts at the beginning of the Reagan years, that's what's going to happen. We already have a political system painfully close to legalized bribery, and it could get worse.

Because Bush is not interested in public policy -- it notoriously bores him -- what we've gotten in Texas is staff-driven policy. Texas doesn't have a Cabinet form of executive; in Washington, Bush could theoretically put a team of Republican all-stars in the Cabinet and govern that way, which might work out quite well.

There is still some question in my mind as to just how ideological Bush actually is. He is widely held to be a moderate. But he made an unnerving comment years after his 1978 congressional race: "At that time, Jimmy Carter was president and he was trying to control natural gas prices, and I felt the United States was headed toward European-style socialism."

You pretty much have to have a worldview shaped by the Petroleum Club in Midland to see the Georgia peanut farmer as a socialist. Some of Bush's early appointments as governor, especially the trio of pollution-loving watchdogs he put in at the state environmental protection agency, were quite eye-popping. But we've rarely seen hard-edged ideology from him in recent years, and he certainly ran well toward the center, and indeed ran away from the more right-wing parts of his own record.

All of which indicates that he's quite a fast learner. When you approve of a politician, this is known as flexibility; when you don't, it's called lack of principle -- but in fact, politics requires accommodation. I'd be a lot more worried about Bush if he hadn't demonstrated flexibility.

If Bush has a mandate, it is to be a uniter and not a divider, to work with Democrats as well as Republicans and to restore civility in Washington. True story: In 1992, a governor named Bill Clinton told me that he thought the main reason he would be a good president was because he had been able to work well with Republicans in Arkansas.

May Bush have better luck.