Analysis Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 17 2000 (IPS) — When George W. Bush is sworn in as the next US president here Jan. 20, he will move into the White House in probably the weakest political position of any incoming president in more than a century.

Not only will he be the first US president since the 1870s to have lost the popular vote nation-wide, but the fact that his electoral victory was due only to the extremely controversial intervention of five Republican- appointed justices on the nine-justice Supreme Court, has already rendered hollow any claims to a mandate of the kind presidents normally like to bring to office with them.

He also will be succeeding a man with the highest approval rating of any departing president in the last 50 years, a man who, as a real “celebrity,” will almost certainly remain in the public eye and who is probably not inclined, like Bush’s father, to remain silent about affairs of state after he has left office.

It may even be possible that, by the time Bush takes his oath of office, eager academics or newspapers will have got access to the some 45,000 uncounted ballots in Florida and prove that Vice president Al Gore really did get more votes in that state and hence should be the one raising his right hand to promise to uphold the Constitution.

If the scepticism about the legitimacy of his election is not enough to challenge Bush’s ability to govern, the situation in Congress is little better. Democrats, many of whom are as angry as hornets about the way the election was decided, now control 50 of the 100 seats in the US Senate.

Those numbers ensure not only that Dick Cheney, who as vice president, casts the deciding vote in case of ties in the upper chamber, will have to stick close by the Capitol; but also that Democrats, if united, can effectively veto any legislation submitted by Bush through a filibuster. That means that Bush’s key campaign proposals on reforming social security, slashing taxes, and even building a national-missile defence (NMD) system cannot possibly succeed without major compromise.

On the House side, the Republicans still have a nine-seat majority but appear themselves to be divided, particularly when compared with the other side of the aisle where ranks have closed around a shared sense of righteous indignation over the election’s outcome.

After remaining in the shadows during the campaign in order to make Bush’s appeal to the political centre more credible, the chief power in the House, Majority Whip Tom DeLay, who is allied with the far-right of the party, is desperately urging his fellow-Texan to shun more-moderate voices who are calling for a bipartisan, rather than Republican, agenda.

“This is something I’ve been working for for 22 years,” said the former pest exterminator. “I mean, we got it: we have the House, we have the Senate, we have the White House, which means we have the agenda.”

In fact, it’s been 48 years – since the election of war hero Dwight Eisenhower – since Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency at the same time. Like Bush, “Ike” was an unusually amiable leader known for lax work habits and inattention to detail, who promptly gave back control of Congress to the Democrats in the 1954 mid-term elections, in major part because of the perception that he had let right-wing Republicans, including Sen. Joe McCarthy, run riot in the preceding two years of Republican monopoly.

Many Democrats, needless to say, would welcome a repeat of that experience and secretly hope that DeLay, a protege of the much-despised Newt Gingrich, will prevail.

DeLay’s advice flies not only in the face of that historical precedent. Since the polls closed Nov. 7, conventional wisdom has insisted that whoever won the presidency in such a close election would have to compromise with his opponent’s party in order to govern effectively. As the headline in the influential weekly, ‘Business Week’, put it: “Voters’ Message: Govern From the Middle.”

“The Republican congressional leaders are the key people, because they are going to have to agree to co-operate with their Democratic counterparts,” Vanderbilt University Prof. Erwin Hargrove told the Washington Post this week. “I don’t know how they’re going to keep Tom DeLay quiet, but he will have to be kept quiet.”

Indeed, the signals coming from Bush’s home base in Austin, Texas, and from the transition team here headed by Cheney are all about bi- partisanship.

Bush himself repeated endlessly during the campaign that he was “a uniter, not a divider,” a message echoed by his decision to give his victory speech Wednesday night to the Democratic-dominated Texas legislature. Now the talk of the town is whether Bush could actually recruit a leading Democrat or two or three for cabinet posts and how quickly he will meet with the Democratic leadership in the Congress when he comes here next week.

But, aside from getting a few stray Democrats to sign on to his administration and shaking the hands of Senate Minority Leader Tom Dashle and his House counterpart, Dick Gephardt, for a photo-op, there is some doubt as to whether Bush knows what bi-partisanship means in Washington.

Washington politics is a good deal different from Texas politics where the governor’s power is very limited and the legislature meets only 140 days every two years. In Texas, politics is still mostly a matter for “good old boys” on both sides of the aisle who drink and barbecue together and share a common philosophy of small government, big business, Big Oil, football, low taxes, and the God-given right to carry a gun. In ideology, most Texas Democrats are about as far to the right in the Democratic Party as you can go.

In Washington, the situation is very different, and therein lies the challenge facing Bush if, indeed, he wants to govern effectively. Democrats here are overwhelmingly from the northern and coastal states where the political centre is far to the left of where it is found in Austin.

Not only that, but Democrats are more accountable to strong grassroots organisations, including labour unions, and civil rights, women’s and environmental groups, all of which are so weak in Texas as to be virtually marginal, but which in Washington are so angered and energised by the aftermath of the election and the Supreme Court’s intervention, that it seems they can’t wait for a fight.

All that, of course, is well understood, if not by Bush himself, than by the veterans of his father’s administration who, under “Prime Minister” Cheney, are clearly in charge for now of key appointments, as well as contacts with the Democrats.

That’s what worries the Republican Right, which, with DeLay, is already giving public voice to its unease. “It is always political suicide to forsake your base and crush its hopes and dreams,” wrote Gary Bauer in the New York Times Friday.

Bauer, a former Reagan domestic policy adviser and a leader of the Christian Right, did not need to mention that the right’s alienation in 1992 from the “bi-partisanship” of Bush’s father destroyed his chances of winning a second term.