Reaction to Bush victories indicates there is no more 'left' in U.S. politics
By Matthew Miller
With Bush's detailed budget now out, the appalling Democratic abdication continues.
Oh, yes, we'll hear Democrats moan about how Bush is failing to fund important priorities, but it's mostly a charade, the mere simulation of outrage. We know this because the leading Democratic rants come from a point of departure that is already indistinguishable from a political philosophy that used to be called "Republican."
Consider some of the bizarre features of the evolving "debate":
Joe Lieberman, who big party contributors believe is eyeing his own run for the White House in 2004, is attacking Bush's tax cut for diverting resources from the military buildup America needs.
This is the kind of assault Democratic strategists find "clever" since it outflanks Bush on his right and confounds public perceptions that the party of Bill Clinton is filled with draft-dodging peaceniks.
But we're already spending 90 percent of our average Cold War budget on the Pentagon, more than a decade after the Berlin Wall fell. Bush's new budget would take defense spending from $311 billion today to $362 billion five years from now. And this is before Donald Rumsfeld passes the cup again - once his "comprehensive defense review" is finished. Lieberman apparently wants Democrats to see Bush and raise him. Will this colossal boost in military spending - a theft from countless unmet domestic needs - really happen without a peep from the opposition party?
Will no leading Democrat point out that Bush wants to shrink overall federal spending from 18 percent of gross domestic product to around 15 percent a decade from now - lower than at any time since the early 1950s and leaving government one-third smaller, relative to the size of the economy, than Ronald Reagan or Bush's father dared propose?
You can't find these "spending as a percentage of GDP" numbers anywhere in Bush's new budget, by the way - they're counting on the media to be too lazy to take out a calculator and figure it out on their own.
Even when the press fills the vacuum created by Democratic timidity, it misses the big picture.
Take health care. The White House was apoplectic the other day over a front-page story in the New York Times entitled, "Bush budget on health care would cut aid to uninsured."
I happened to be reporting in the White House that morning and heard aides curse the unfairness of the piece, which focused on planned cuts in several tiny federal programs that amounted to a few hundred million dollars. How, these aides cried, could the New York Times not also include details of Bush's call for $7 billion in new tax subsidies for the uninsured each year - new cash that made these puny cuts look like a sideshow?
The Bush aides were right, of course. But the real question is not, "Doesn't Bush's $7 billion for expanded health coverage make the New York Times dead wrong?" It is instead, "Why is Bush offering only $7 billion a year for the uninsured when his daddy proposed $50 billion a year back in 1992 - when we had big deficits, not big surpluses, and since 7 million more Americans lack health coverage today?"
If we can't get this simple question out of a leading Democrat's mouth, can't we at least get it on front page of the Times?
Meanwhile, the Democratic senators who would be president - men like John Edwards and Evan Bayh - vote "yes" on more than $1.2 trillion in tax cuts and try to pitch it as a "setback" for Bush. A few more setbacks like this and Bush will be able to take the next three years off.
And Bush's spinners are learning from blunders every day. At some point, when they want to do something like cut permitted levels of arsenic in drinking water (but not by as much as Clinton would have), they'll say it like I just did - and not make themselves easy targets through clumsy handling.
When such easy pickings are gone, what will Democrats say, now that they've ceded so many other big arguments?
Less than 100 days into a presidency that won fewer votes than it lost, there's no "left" left at all.