Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
For well over a year, the Bush administration has used its power in the wrong way. In 2000, I argued that the Bush-Cheney ticket was being bankrolled by "a new generation of special interests, power brokers who would want nothing better than a pliant president who would bend public policy to suit their purposes and profits." Some considered this warning anti-business. It was nothing of the sort. I believe now, as I said then, that "when powerful interests try to take advantage of the American people, it's often other businesses that are hurt in the process" - most of all smaller companies that play by the rules. This view was based on a plain reading of the history of Republican governance under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. And every passing day demonstrates that it was merely the truth. I believe Bill Clinton and I were right to maintain, during our 1992 campaign, that we should fight for "the forgotten middle class" against the "forces of greed." Standing up for "the people, not the powerful" was the right choice in 2000. And in fact it is the Democratic Party's meaning and mission. The suggestion from some in our party that we should no longer speak that truth, especially at a time like this, strikes me as bad politics and, worse, wrong in principle. This struggle between the people and the powerful was at the heart of every major domestic issue of the 2000 campaign and is still the central dynamic of politics in 2002. The economic debate, now as then, is fundamentally about principle. The problem is not that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney picked the wrong advisers or misunderstood the technical arguments, but that their economic purpose was and is ideological: to provide $1.6 trillion in tax giveaways for the few while pretending that they were for the many, and manipulating the numbers to make it appear that the budget surplus would be preserved. It was pre-Enron political accounting. For them, incredibly, it is also post-Enron accounting. And the result is the replacement in one year of a surplus with another massive deficit. It is not just the stock market that has gone down. It is confidence in the honesty of government. If President Bush wants to pursue integrity in the White House he should make public the names of the energy company lobbyists who met with Vice President Cheney to help draft energy and environmental legislation, and he should call for the release of the Securities and Exchange Commission files on the controversy surrounding his role in certain stock sales. But what is far more important than the pursuit of a few bad apples in the White House is the need to recognize that what has been put at risk is nothing less than the future of democratic capitalism. And it cannot be rejuvenated unless the people and the politicians focus on the question: What is good for the whole? Ideally, Bush should lead that effort. For the president is the only person in the constitutional framework charged with representing all Americans. Presidents from both parties have risen to meet that responsibility when the interests of the people were at risk from the unrestrained greed of the powerful. A Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, met that challenge, even though it earned him the hatred of his patrician social peers as a "traitor to his class." A Republican, Theodore Roosevelt, prevented the magnates of his day from consolidating their grip on both political and economic power. We are at such a moment again. Uncommon power has combined with uncommon greed to create immense deceptions and losses. Millions of average Americans have been victimized. So have thousands of honest American corporations and the people who manage them, own stock in them and depend upon them for a livelihood, for sending their children to college and for their retirement. A major correction is needed in the course of our nation. Now is the time for all Americans to stand up to the powerful on behalf of the people. The writer was the U.S. vice president from 1993 to 2001. A longer version of this comment appeared in The New York Times. Copyright © 2002 The International Herald Tribune |