Robert Kuttner: Bush's To-Do List
Robert Kuttner, in the Boston Globe (6-15-05):
Somewhere, in a parallel universe, real leaders in a country very much like our own are dealing with real problems. Imagine what America might be like if our top officials were addressing the genuine challenges that confront us.
Domestically, the president might have responded to the 9/11 attacks by calling for equality of sacrifice, as presidents have done in every other wartime emergency. Instead, our president pushed through a succession of upscale tax cuts and urged people to go out and shop.
In the parallel universe, the American leader is serious about securing our country. Here, it fell to the opposition party to demand that something as basic as airline security not be left to private, minimum-wage contractors. Nearly three years after 9/11, America's ports and other vital infra structure are still sitting ducks. While the Department of Homeland Security played Keystone Kops with color-coded alerts that seemed suspiciously timed to alarm the public in an election year, the different agencies that were merged into one are still working on how to communicate with each other.
In that other universe, the president surely would have enlisted America's allies to combat terrorism. Had war between the United States and Iraq come, it would have come with the full participation of the world community, so that Iraq's reconstruction and the burden of keeping it secure would have been broadly shared instead of falling upon American taxpayers and GIs.
One can imagine a whole to-do list of the president's national priorities:
Repairing American democracy. American citizens still have no assurance that their votes will be accurately counted. Big money is crowding out citizen participation in politics more grotesquely than ever. More ominously, our ability to decide to rise up and throw the rascals out is being eroded by partisan trickery.
Fixing our retirement system. Corporate pension funds have been allowed to
become dangerously underfunded. The public Social Security system will need
an overhaul to match it to longer lifespans. In our parallel universe, both
parties would work together to make the necessary, fairly minor, adjustments.
In this universe, the ideological goal of privatizing the system blocks fixing
it...