Bruce J. Schulman: Bush's Jimmy Carter Problem ... The Limits of Power
[Bruce Schulman is a professor of history at Boston University and the author of "The Seventies" (DaCapo).]
Last week President Bush -- the same president who drives a gas-guzzling Ford pickup truck around a 1,600-acre Texas ranch with seemingly boundless horizons -- asked the nation to recognize some limits.
Trading in his rugged individualism for a summons to collective restraint, this former oilman and avatar of the nation's long-standing faith in endless abundance asked Americans to join car pools and run appliances at off-peak hours. "We can all pitch in by using -- by being better conservers of energy," Bush said in response to a reporter's question, pledging to make the federal government a role model in this regard....
Bush's appeal for national sacrifice represents more than a tweaking of energy policy; it reflects a broader shift in the president's -- and the nation's -- sense of what's possible, and what isn't. For all of his efforts to convey the can-do spirit, Bush reluctantly finds himself echoing the much-maligned pronouncements of the Carter era. He's stuck in a new age of limits....
While President Bush has not embraced the idea of limits the way President Jimmy Carter once did, he's been forced to accept them nonetheless. Bush isn't going to make televised speeches wearing a cardigan sweater like Carter; he's well aware of how that speech hurt Carter by diminishing him and making him seem less presidential. But by embracing conservation measures he had earlier belittled, Bush acknowledges at least temporary constraints on energy consumption. By talking in recent months of pulling even some U.S. troops out of a chaotic Iraq, the White House is implicitly recognizing American military power's inability to remold the world and his inability to rally domestic public opinion. And by quietly abandoning his quest for Social Security reform, Bush has conceded his circumscribed sway over Capitol Hill....
Traditionally, Americans don't like limits. From the beginnings of the nation's history as a distant New World outpost, Americans have remained a people of plenty, convinced (sometimes against overwhelming contrary evidence) of the nation's boundless abundance and limitless opportunity for citizens to reinvent themselves. Endless highways, not dead-end streets, define the national imagination.
But 30 years ago Americans found themselves grappling with the apparent arrival of an age of limits -- on presidential power, U.S. military power and U.S. economic power. Richard Nixon believed that America had exhausted its glory days as the unquestioned world leader and that it faced a more challenging international environment. Gerald Ford concluded that inflation and stagnation would force Americans to curb their insatiable appetite for ever more goods and services. Carter famously declared that "We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits."...
During that past age of limits, Carter presided over a transitional presidency, one in which the old liberal politics no longer worked and no one had yet defined the new model. Conservative George Bush -- the conservationist, the rebuilder of New Orleans, the Mars explorer -- might soon find himself trapped in that same political no man's land. And after he retires back to his ranch on the mythical American frontier, this will be the terrain his successors inherit.
Read entire article at Wa Po
Last week President Bush -- the same president who drives a gas-guzzling Ford pickup truck around a 1,600-acre Texas ranch with seemingly boundless horizons -- asked the nation to recognize some limits.
Trading in his rugged individualism for a summons to collective restraint, this former oilman and avatar of the nation's long-standing faith in endless abundance asked Americans to join car pools and run appliances at off-peak hours. "We can all pitch in by using -- by being better conservers of energy," Bush said in response to a reporter's question, pledging to make the federal government a role model in this regard....
Bush's appeal for national sacrifice represents more than a tweaking of energy policy; it reflects a broader shift in the president's -- and the nation's -- sense of what's possible, and what isn't. For all of his efforts to convey the can-do spirit, Bush reluctantly finds himself echoing the much-maligned pronouncements of the Carter era. He's stuck in a new age of limits....
While President Bush has not embraced the idea of limits the way President Jimmy Carter once did, he's been forced to accept them nonetheless. Bush isn't going to make televised speeches wearing a cardigan sweater like Carter; he's well aware of how that speech hurt Carter by diminishing him and making him seem less presidential. But by embracing conservation measures he had earlier belittled, Bush acknowledges at least temporary constraints on energy consumption. By talking in recent months of pulling even some U.S. troops out of a chaotic Iraq, the White House is implicitly recognizing American military power's inability to remold the world and his inability to rally domestic public opinion. And by quietly abandoning his quest for Social Security reform, Bush has conceded his circumscribed sway over Capitol Hill....
Traditionally, Americans don't like limits. From the beginnings of the nation's history as a distant New World outpost, Americans have remained a people of plenty, convinced (sometimes against overwhelming contrary evidence) of the nation's boundless abundance and limitless opportunity for citizens to reinvent themselves. Endless highways, not dead-end streets, define the national imagination.
But 30 years ago Americans found themselves grappling with the apparent arrival of an age of limits -- on presidential power, U.S. military power and U.S. economic power. Richard Nixon believed that America had exhausted its glory days as the unquestioned world leader and that it faced a more challenging international environment. Gerald Ford concluded that inflation and stagnation would force Americans to curb their insatiable appetite for ever more goods and services. Carter famously declared that "We have learned that more is not necessarily better, that even our great nation has its recognized limits."...
During that past age of limits, Carter presided over a transitional presidency, one in which the old liberal politics no longer worked and no one had yet defined the new model. Conservative George Bush -- the conservationist, the rebuilder of New Orleans, the Mars explorer -- might soon find himself trapped in that same political no man's land. And after he retires back to his ranch on the mythical American frontier, this will be the terrain his successors inherit.