[Reader-list] George Bush: the contradictory conservative

[Rana Dasgupta]

Excellent article from The Economist assessing impact of Bush 
administration.

R



The contradictory conservative

Aug 26th 2004 | WASHINGTON, DC
 From The Economist print edition



Despite the narrowness of his mandate, George Bush has done more to 
alter America's profile abroad, and its government at home, than any 
president in years




NEXT weekend, the Republicans, meeting in New York, will anoint George 
Bush as their candidate for a second term. His approval ratings in his 
own party stand at around 86%. Among Democrats, they run at around 8%. 
Few presidents have been loved and loathed as heartily as Mr Bush; few 
have so starkly polarised the country; and few have done so much to 
change both the way America's government behaves at home, and the way it 
is perceived abroad.

The Bush presidency has proved a radical unsettling force, from AIDS 
policy in Africa to education reform at home; in different ways, for 
good and ill, it has undermined the rulers of both Saudi Arabia and San 
Francisco. Rather than offering a compendium of all that Mr Bush has 
achieved, this special report will focus on three projects that history 
may eventually judge the most controversial: the alleged “revolution” in 
foreign policy, the pursuit of big-government conservatism and the 
dramatic expansion of presidential powers. These may not prove the 
deciding factors in the coming election; but they may be the ones that 
resonate longest.

Begin with foreign policy. Mr Bush has had a bigger impact on diplomacy 
than any president since Harry Truman. After the second world war, 
Truman set up the system of alliances that ensured the Soviet threat 
would be contained and American leadership of the West would continue 
after Europe recovered. Ronald Reagan turned Truman's creation into more 
of a public challenge to what the Soviet Union stood for, but he did not 
fundamentally alter its structure.

Mr Bush did. After the end of the cold war—long after, in fact—he argued 
that the old world order had run its course. He rejected both a supposed 
cornerstone—the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty—and some later 
additions, such as the Kyoto accords and the International Criminal 
Court, both also rejected by Congress.

But Mr Bush's foreign-policy revolution actually came in two steps. The 
rejection of the treaties was the first and, since it came to terms with 
a geopolitical fact, the Soviet collapse, it may well prove the more 
lasting. The second step came only after the September 11th attacks, 
with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In response to the atrocity, NATO 
for the first time invoked its article 5 provision that an attack on one 
member is an attack on all, signalling a willingness to help America 
militarily. The Bush administration was slow to pick up the offer. 
“Coalitions of the willing” took the place of traditional alliances. 
Then, in Iraq, Mr Bush put his doctrine of prevention and possible 
pre-emption into effect. In an age of global terror, this said, 
self-defence meant acting alone and pre-emptively, if need be. Working 
through the United Nations—ie, waiting for others—could be suicide.

These two steps obviously had much in common. Both said that treaties 
can constrain America's freedom of action and that, when they do, they 
should be ignored. Both imply that the exercise of power alone may be 
enough to achieve American aims. Still, the second step went beyond the 
first. It proposed new rules for going to war and a substitute for 
traditional alliances—the willing coalitions.

Over the past few weeks, however, these additions have begun to look 
shaky. Is the Bush revolution in foreign affairs reaching its limits?

It may be. In May 2003, on the flight-deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, 
Mr Bush argued that once upon a time, “military power was used to end a 
regime by breaking a nation. Today we have the greater power to free a 
nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime.” Experience in 
Iraq contradicts that optimism, or at least suggests that “freeing a 
nation” requires more than just bringing down a troublesome regime. 
Legitimacy, it turns out, matters. It does not spring up spontaneously 
if American motives are pure, as some in the administration have argued. 
And coalitions of the willing do little to confer legitimacy.

Moreover, as Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and Jim Lindsay of 
the Council on Foreign Relations have argued, the doctrine of 
pre-emption supposes that the intelligence services will be good enough 
to warn America of threats before they are realised. The catalogue of 
errors is not reassuring on this point.

Lastly, problems in Iraq have strained the unstable coalition that is Mr 
Bush's foreign-policy team. Neo-conservatives, who argue that America's 
destiny is to spread democracy round the world, are losing influence. 
The world-view of assertive nationalists (notably Dick Cheney, the 
vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence), who say 
military might will be enough to deter America's enemies, has not been 
dethroned. But it has been weakened, and their unilateralist instincts 
look more problematic. The “soft power” diplomats—Colin Powell and the 
State Department—have become more important. All this raises questions 
about support for Mr Bush's foreign policy even within his own cabinet.

As if to confirm the doubts, the past few months have seen a new look. 
Having handed over sovereignty to the Iraqis and got the Security 
Council's blessing, as it always meant to, America has also asked 
Europeans to endorse its “Broader Middle East Initiative” and appealed 
to NATO to help train Iraqi troops. The big question now is whether 
these changes are part of a profound reappraisal of American foreign 
policy, or whether they are just tactical adjustments to recent 
difficulties.

The honest answer is that it is too early to be sure. But the changes 
are probably tactical. Despite the presence of heavyweights in his 
cabinet, Mr Bush has always been the author of America's foreign-policy 
transformation, and he has repeatedly denied any new change of course. 
This is not to be discounted; in foreign affairs, the president has 
usually signalled what he is planning to do very clearly.

It is true that Iraq has raised doubts about the doctrine of prevention 
and pre-emption. But the debate has shown that the alternative “rules 
for going to war” are, from America's viewpoint, far worse. This is the 
claim, particularly espoused by France and Germany, that, except in the 
case of actual attack or imminent threat, countries cannot use military 
force legitimately without the approval of the Security Council. No 
American president would ever accept, or has ever accepted, such an 
idea. If others insist that the alternative to unilateralism is the UN, 
America will stick with unilateralism.

Most important, the underlying rationale of Mr Bush's transformed policy 
has not really changed. This is that there is a huge gap in military 
power between America and everyone else, that the country has 
opportunities denied to anyone else and that traditional alliances are 
therefore useful rather than necessary. Iraq has shown that the exercise 
of American power is harder than the administration thought; but the 
exercise of power is still what matters most to Mr Bush. In that sense, 
his foreign policy is being refined, not retooled.

Mr Bush once campaigned as a proponent of a “humble” foreign policy. In 
practice, he has not provided one. On the domestic front, he has been 
equally surprising. And despite the narrowness of his mandate, he has 
proved as polarising at home as he is abroad. Consider, next, the 
peculiar character of the president's domestic conservatism.


A big-government guy

This is one of the most conservative politicians ever to inhabit the 
White House. Mr Bush has fed red meat to the various groups that make up 
the conservative coalition—opposition to abortion, gay marriage and 
stem-cell research for social conservatives; the invasion of Iraq for 
neo-conservatives; tax-breaks and deregulation for business 
conservatives. He has driven liberals stark raving bonkers. “Among the 
worst presidents in US history,” proclaimed Jonathan Chait in the New 
Republic. “Incomparably more dangerous than Reagan or any other 
president in this nation's history,” wrote Harold Meyerson in the 
American Prospect.

But exactly what sort of conservative is Mr Bush? Ever since Barry 
Goldwater's quixotic bid for the White House in 1964, American 
conservatism has been a small-government philosophy. Ronald Reagan 
regarded government as the problem rather than the solution, and 
therefore shrank social programmes. Newt Gingrich's troops assaulted not 
just Lyndon Johnson's Great Society but also a pillar of FDR's New Deal, 
the welfare system.

Mr Bush's track-record has been very different. While cutting taxes in a 
dramatic way that Mr Reagan would surely have applauded, he has 
relentlessly expanded both the scale and scope of central government—in 
order to advance the conservative cause. Mr Bush has tried to preside 
over the birth of a new political philosophy: big-government conservatism.

The Bush presidency has seen the biggest increase in discretionary 
spending since his fellow Texan, Johnson, was in the White House (see 
chart 1). In his first term, according to the 2005 budget, total federal 
spending will rise by 29%, more than triple the rate of increase in Bill 
Clinton's second term. The Bush administration raised spending on 
education from $36 billion in 2001 to $63 billion in 2004, a 75% 
increase; it has also pushed through the biggest expansion of Medicare, 
the federal health-care plan for the old, since the programme was 
created in the 1960s. More people now work for the federal government 
than at any time in history.

It could be argued that the expansion of government under Mr Bush is the 
unfortunate consequence of events, particularly the September 11th 
attacks. The terrorist threat more or less forced the government to 
create a giant new homeland-security apparatus, which Mr Bush at first 
opposed. Mr Bush has promised conservatives that he will try to get 
spending under control; the 2005 budget envisions domestic discretionary 
spending rising by only 0.5% and calls for the abolition of 65 federal 
programmes, saving $4.9 billion.


Not just homeland security

Yet this argument seems unconvincing. The war on terror accounts for 
only part of the increase in government spending. As for Mr Bush's 
promise that he will eventually get spending under control, the White 
House has already embraced commitments that could keep government 
growing for years. On some estimates, the Medicare bill alone could end 
up costing $2 trillion in its second decade.

Mr Bush's big-government conservatism goes beyond a mere blind response 
to events. During the 2000 campaign, he made it clear that he had a 
different attitude to government from his fellow conservatives. He sang 
the praises of “focused, effective and energetic government”. Rather 
than calling for the abolition of the Department of Education, like the 
rest of his fellow conservatives, he called for its expansion. He even 
had a good word to say about Johnson's Great Society.

Mr Bush's big-government conservatism also goes beyond a mere 
willingness to spend public money. He has reversed a long-standing 
Republican commitment to decentralisation by giving the federal 
government a greater role in setting education standards than it has 
ever had before. He has also reversed a long-standing Republican 
suspicion of government bossiness by trying to use government to promote 
conservative values. The Education Department is promoting abstinence in 
sex education. The Department of Health and Human Services is trying to 
use the welfare system to advocate the virtues of marriage and 
responsible fatherhood. John Ashcroft's Justice Department has ridden 
over states' rights to prosecute people who believe in assisted suicide 
and the medical use of marijuana.

Where has all this come from? Mr Bush turned to big-government 
conservatism as an antidote to growing problems of the small-government 
kind. As the 1990s wore on, Mr Gingrich and his merry band increasingly 
tried America's patience with their bomb-throwing radicalism. The middle 
classes had been happy to advocate tough love for the poor, but they 
were much less happy when the tough love involved cuts to Medicare or 
student loans. Not unfairly, Mr Bush calculated that making peace with 
government was the only way to re-endear conservatism to the middle class.

Many of his fervent supporters regarded tax cuts as their highest 
priority: cuts that Mr Bush duly delivered. But many elements in the 
conservative coalition also looked to government to solve their 
problems. Business people wanted the government to subsidise their 
industries at home and promote their interests abroad. Corporate America 
had been calling for educational reform for years. Social conservatives 
were keen on using government to promote “virtue” or eradicate “vice” 
(from assisted suicide to pot-smoking), a position highly attractive to 
a president who starts every cabinet meeting with a prayer. The White 
House and the Republican majority in Congress worked assiduously to 
shower government largesse on Republican-leaning interest groups. 
Agricultural legislation involved a huge give-away to agribusiness; 
prescription-drugs legislation provided a bonanza for the pharmaceutical 
industry.

The neo-conservative intelligentsia has played as vital a role in 
promoting big-government conservatism as it did in promoting the Iraq 
war. Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism, sees the growth 
of the state as “natural, indeed inevitable”. His son Bill uses his 
Weekly Standard magazine to lead a crusade to replace “leave-us-alone 
conservatism” with “national-greatness conservatism”. Mr Kristol and his 
supporters argue that “wishing to be left alone isn't a governing 
doctrine”, and that loving your country while hating its government is 
not a sustainable philosophical position. Besides, there is no need to 
hate government if it is in the right (Republican) hands.



A lasting philosophy?

The most compelling argument in favour of Mr Bush's policies is that he 
is doing more than just expanding government. He is increasingly tying 
public spending to competition and accountability. The No Child Left 
Behind Act, the most interesting reform of American education for a 
generation, uses a combination of national standards and standardised 
testing to measure children's progress: if too many children in a 
particular school fail to hit the required standards, then parents have 
the right to move them elsewhere. The Medicare reforms have been a way 
of introducing medical savings accounts. The proposed individual 
investment accounts in Social Security (federal pensions) will give 
individuals more responsibility for managing their nest eggs. This 
emphasis on accountability explains why public-sector unions loathe Mr 
Bush, despite his big-spending ways.

Yet attempts to introduce competition in schools or health care have not 
gone very far. There are good reasons to doubt whether the educational 
bureaucracy will ever have the guts to close down failing schools. The 
Bush administration signally failed to use the expansion of Medicare as 
a lever for introducing structural reforms, such as means-testing. Mr 
Bush's only real chance to build choice into the heart of a government 
programme lies in his mooted Social Security reforms.

Even if these programmes can be made to work, big-government 
conservatism undoubtedly has drawbacks. The new creed's biggest problem 
is simple: if you cut taxes deeply while increasing spending lavishly, 
you end up with a gigantic deficit. This newspaper is not about to argue 
that cutting taxes is wrong in principle: the Republican Party's 
instinct that it is better to leave money in voters' pockets than to 
give it to bureaucrats has been one of its most attractive features. But 
big, persistent budget deficits also put a burden on people. If the 
Republicans continue to tax like a small-government party and spend like 
a big-government one, deficits could average $500 billion a year for the 
next decade—an alarming prospect. Mr Bush should be preparing for the 
retirement of the huge baby-boomer generation.

Nor is big-government conservatism the political cure-all that it might 
seem. It is alienating big chunks of the Republican coalition. 
Libertarians don't want to be told whether they can smoke pot by Mr 
Ashcroft. Old-fashioned conservatives don't want to see Washington 
extending its power over local schools. And good-government types don't 
want to see the deficit balloon out of control.

Senator John McCain has reprimanded Mr Bush for failing to use his veto 
to control a Congress which is spending money “like a drunken sailor”. 
Rush Limbaugh has complained that Mr Bush's legacy may be the greatest 
increase in domestic spending, and one of the greatest setbacks to 
liberty, in modern times. “This may be compassionate”, says Mr Limbaugh, 
“but it is not conservatism at all.”

A third problem lies with unintended consequences. Forty years ago, the 
founding fathers of neo-conservatism criticised the Great Society on the 
grounds that its soaring intentions often produced bad results: rent 
control reduces the availability of affordable housing, for example. The 
biggest unintended consequence of Mr Bush's efforts may be that 
big-government conservatism morphs into big-government liberalism. 
Government is by its nature a knife that cuts to the left, in part 
because government employees tend to be on the left, in part because 
government programmes promote dependency. Rather than twisting 
government to conservative ends, the Republicans may simply be creating 
yet more ammunition for future Democratic administrations.

Mr Bush is nothing if not ambitious. If his new philosophy endures, he 
will be a transformative figure in the history of the modern 
conservative movement. If it fails, he will be seen as a domestic 
policymaker who doomed himself by ignoring the central insight of the 
revolution that began with Goldwater: that the essence of conservatism 
lies in shrinking government.

Mr Bush's presidency has been radical not only in what he has tried to 
do, but in the way he has gone about doing it. His term has seen an 
extraordinary change in style. Partly by his own efforts, partly as a 
result of underlying forces, he has increased the power of the 
presidency at the expense of other branches of government. This is the 
third great project of his presidency, the least noticed outside 
Washington, DC, and perhaps the most worrying.



Imperium revisited

Mr Bush came to office arguing that restrictions on presidential 
authority, especially since Watergate, had harmed decision-making. The 
implication is that good government requires a certain period of privacy 
in which officials can thrash out policies. The public should judge only 
the result. In 2002, his vice-president, Dick Cheney, said, “I have 
repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the 
president of the United States to do his job.” He said he and Mr Bush 
had talked about the need to “pass on our offices in better shape than 
we found them to our successors.” They have succeeded, after a fashion, 
but at a heavy cost.

Unified government, with the administration and Congress under the same 
party's control, tends to boost presidential authority anyway—the more 
so this time, as the Republican Party is fairly disciplined. Tom DeLay, 
the majority leader in the House of Representatives, has defined his job 
simply: “How do I advance the president's agenda?” The party's narrow 
majority keeps troops in line. Lest there be any backsliding, Mr Bush's 
personal campaigning in the 2002 mid-term elections reminded congressmen 
and senators of their interest in keeping on good terms with him.

More important, wars always increase the powers of the executive branch. 
Because it has implications for America's domestic freedoms, the war on 
terror may well end up increasing executive power more than most.

But Mr Bush's ambitions have gone beyond what these underlying forces 
make inevitable. One measure of his ambition was the claim of the Office 
of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department (the administration's main 
source of legal advice), made in August 2002, that the president's 
authority as commander-in-chief was in effect unlimited in the conduct 
of a war. As the legal opinion put it, he “enjoys complete discretion in 
the exercise of his commander-in-chief authority.”

This claim showed how expansive Mr Bush's view of his powers could be. 
No former president had gone that far. In fact, it was too far. The 
Supreme Court said the constitution did not warrant such a reading and 
struck down the policy based on it: holding detainees from the war in 
Afghanistan without charge. But the case was unusual only in that the 
high court overruled Mr Bush. More commonly, he has had his way.

The most important check on a president's authority is Congress, 
formally the sovereign power. To see how Mr Bush and his allies have 
treated the legislature, consider the Medicare bill.

In January 2003, the White House sent Congress a proposal for reform of 
the health-care system. The price tag, it said, was $400 billion. The 
real cost was $534 billion. Medicare's chief actuary was told not to 
answer congressional questions on pain of dismissal. After the House and 
Senate passed different versions of the proposal, the Republicans began 
work to reconcile the two. They refused to let five of the Democrats 
nominated to the process take part in deliberations—and rewrote the bill.

Even then, they fell short of a majority when voting began, at 3am. 
Defying precedent, the House leadership held the vote open for three 
hours while arms were twisted. The bill finally passed just before 6am. 
Norm Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called 
it the ugliest breach of congressional standards in modern history.

Making laws has always been like making sausages (don't look closely). 
When the Democrats were in charge, they did not always run Congress as 
prescribed in the civics textbooks. Some of Congress's hallowed 
traditions could do with pruning, especially the power of committees.

But the Republicans have put forward none of this in mitigation. 
Instead, they have claimed, in essence, that the ends justify the means. 
Mr Bush, they say, has pushed big tax cuts and education and health-care 
reforms through a closely divided, bitterly partisan institution. The 
alternative to such strong-arm tactics was legislative gridlock, which, 
they argue, would have been worse.

Even if you think the ends are good, the means have inflicted 
institutional harm on Congress. The committee system for amending bills 
has all but collapsed. Bills are now written by the leaders and their 
staffs, in concert with the White House. Debate is often cut off: many 
controversial measures are voted on under a “closed rule”, which bars 
amendments. The conference stage, when different versions of a bill are 
reconciled, has been turned from an occasion for compromise into yet 
another opportunity for partisan gain. Sometimes the conference 
committee does not meet at all. Sometimes Republicans have ignored the 
rule that says the committee can only iron out differences, and have 
fundamentally altered bills at the last minute. The budget process is in 
tatters.



Dozing watchdogs

As for Congress's other main job—oversight of the administration—that 
has declined too, with a few exceptions (the Senate Armed Services 
Committee held useful hearings on the Abu Ghraib scandal). Serious 
investigation has been left to special commissions, such as the one that 
looked into the September 11th attacks. The responsibility for this lies 
largely with congressional Republicans: they are reluctant to 
investigate one of their own. But Mr Bush has not exactly shown 
deference to Congress's oversight role. The White House refused to let 
Tom Ridge, the head of homeland security, testify in 2002. It declared 
it would not answer questions from Democrats on budget committees. Mr 
Bush refused to testify before the 9/11 commission. In all these cases, 
the administration finally backed down. But at a time of dramatic 
change, the watchdogs of Congress have been dozing.

Congressional oversight is at the heart of the administration's claim 
that excessive intrusiveness is harming executive decision-making. The 
cause célèbre in this case was the new energy policy. When Democrats 
attempted to force the vice-president to reveal whom he had met while 
formulating an energy bill, Mr Cheney refused, arguing that the 
constitution protects the president and vice-president from 
congressional attempts to reveal details of their deliberations. As the 
solicitor-general argued to the Supreme Court, “Congress may neither 
intrude on the president's ability to perform these [deliberative] 
functions, nor authorise private litigants to use the court to do so.” 
On this occasion, Mr Cheney prevailed. His victory will encourage future 
administrations.

But the administration has not stopped there. The power of the president 
is limited not only by the might of Congress but by a host of smaller 
laws and administrative rules: freedom-of-information requests, the 
power to classify documents, and civil-service procedures. Partly in 
response to domestic security worries, the discretionary power of the 
executive has increased substantially in these areas.

The best-known examples come from the Patriot Act, which boosted 
law-enforcement powers and surveillance. That act, at least, was passed 
by Congress and is subject to congressional review. More commonly, the 
administration has increased its powers by asserting them. Soon after 
September 11th, Mr Ashcroft issued new guidelines on 
freedom-of-information requests. The attorney-general reversed the 
Clinton-era policy of rejecting such requests only if to allow them 
would cause “substantial harm”. Public-interest groups complain that 
requests are now often denied, even over matters that seem to have 
nothing to do with security, such as pollution or car safety.

According to figures from the National Archives, around 44m documents 
were classified in the first two years of the current administration—as 
many as in the whole of Mr Clinton's second term. More 
officials—including, for some reason, the secretary of agriculture—have 
been given the power to classify materials. This is more than just a 
response to September 11th. Mr Bush has issued an executive order 
overturning the rule that presidential papers are automatically 
declassified 12 years after presidents leave office; instead, he said, 
former presidents could decide whether to disclose their papers during 
their lifetimes, and the incumbent president would also have power of 
review.



In the details

A subset of this reaction against scrutiny is the use of what might be 
called government by small print: slipping additions into law at the 
last minute or tinkering with the wording of rules that implement laws. 
As a recent series in the Washington Post argued, such changes often 
appear minor but can have a big impact. By changing the word “waste” to 
“fill” in a rule governing coal-mining, for instance, the administration 
allowed an increase in strip-mining in West Virginia. By adding two 
sentences about scientific evidence to an unrelated budget bill, it gave 
itself increased authority to rule in regulatory disputes.

Perhaps the most disturbing way in which the administration has 
increased its power has been through its public-relations machine. 
Thomas Jefferson said long ago that a well-informed electorate is the 
most important constraint on government. By issuing partial and 
sometimes misleading information, the Bush administration has hampered 
such scrutiny.

Consider for instance the arguments for tax cuts. Here, Mr Bush made 
claims about the cost of the cuts and their distributional impact that 
he should have known were misleading. In 2000, he claimed the first 
round of cuts would cost $1.6 trillion over ten years, a quarter of the 
budget surplus at that point. On his own figures, the share was a third, 
not a quarter, and he arrived at the figure only through outrageous 
accounting gimmicks that he is now campaigning to forbid.

He also asserted that the cuts would provide “the greatest help for 
those most in need”, providing a Treasury study to back up his claim. In 
the past, Treasury studies have been impartial. But this one arrived at 
its conclusion by leaving out the parts of the tax cut that most 
benefited the wealthiest (such as the repeal of the estate tax). By any 
normal measure, the tax cuts have been regressive—hardly “the greatest 
help for those most in need”.

Taking facts out of context, politicising government studies and 
presenting anomalous examples as typical are hardly unique to the Bush 
administration. But they still do damage. The system of checks and 
balances—indeed, democracy itself—requires voters to be able to 
understand the impact of actions taken on their behalf, so they can 
apportion credit or blame fairly. If it is impossible to tell how much 
of the administration's arguments for war were vindicated or disproved, 
or who the tax cuts really helped, then proper public accounting is 
impossible.

Beyond that, members of the administration have occasionally acted in 
ways that have discouraged public debate directly. In May 2002, the 
White House's communications director, Dan Bartlett, argued in the 
Washington Post that Democratic criticisms of administration actions 
before September 11th were “exactly what our opponents, our enemies, 
want us to do.” Mr Ashcroft had earlier conflated civil-liberties 
activists with terrorist sympathisers, telling Congress: “To those who 
scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is 
this: your tactics only aid terrorists.” All this came near to arguing 
that, after September 11th, debate itself could be treasonous.

Mr Bush has frequently said that voters will give their verdict in 
November, and that he looks forward to it. But quadrennial elections are 
not the only means of restraining government. The genius of the American 
system is that administrations must work within a system of checks and 
balances. These checks have themselves been checked.

Congress is the main competing source of power. It has become more like 
an adjunct to the administration. Information encourages public 
scrutiny. The flow has been reduced. The administration's actions are 
filtered through civil-service rules and procedures. The rules have been 
chopped and changed. A free press is essential to the working of 
democracy. Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, rejected that 
view, arguing “I don't believe you [the press] have a check-and-balance 
function.” On occasion, the administration has even crossed the line 
separating the interests of the state from the party by using taxpayers' 
money to finance advertising for the Medicare bill.

Almost all governments bend the truth. This one has seldom resorted to 
outright falsehood; instead, the administration has manipulated public 
information and breached basic standards of political conduct in 
Congress, the civil service and public debate. Whatever the merits of 
increasing presidential authority, Mr Bush has achieved his aim less by 
winning support for more power than by weakening the authority of other 
institutions.



In the round

Mr Bush's supporters may regard carping on about this expansion of 
powers as a distraction from other more visible achievements of his 
presidency. Look, they may argue, at the way that the White House has 
set about reducing nuclear proliferation, or at his plans to build an 
ownership society at home, or at the long-term economic stimulus of his 
tax reform. From the other side, his critics complain that the 
administration has trashed the environment, or worsened inequality, or 
schemed to roll back abortion rights.

It usually takes some time for the true significance of any presidency 
to emerge. Mr Bush's most contentious projects may come to seem 
relatively unimportant. For now, perhaps the most remarkable thing about 
this presidency is the extent to which it has already confounded 
expectations. When Mr Bush was elected, it was widely believed that his 
power would be slight and he would achieve little. For better or worse, 
those predictions were refuted. Whether this will help or harm him in 
November remains to be seen.