Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (39 page)

In 1992, Defense Secretary Cheney laid out the administration’s rationale for not taking Baghdad, capturing Hussein, and trying to reform the country. It was very different from the arguments that he was to make as vice president eleven years later, when he defended Bush 43’s occupation of Iraq. Hussein, Cheney said in 1992, would have been very hard to find. Moreover, would the United States be able to accomplish significant reform in Iraq? Though Iraq had a sizeable middle class, and might in time establish democratic institutions, such a process might take many years. Given the fratricidal hatreds that divided Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds (a non-Arab people) in Iraq, it was difficult to conceive of a stable alliance of factions that might arise to rule the country. How long would American and coalition forces, besieged by guerrilla fighters, have to remain before Iraq—a product of long ago boundary-making by the British—could become anything like a constitutional republic? As Cheney put it at the time, “Once we had rounded him [Saddam Hussein] up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in his place?” It was also clear in 1992 that the Bush administration, never having intended to undertake such long-range tasks, had given little thought to an “exit strategy” involving postwar occupation and reform.
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The dearth of postwar planning became painfully clear in the spring of 1991 when thousands of Kurdish and Shiite people in northern and southern Iraq, having earlier been encouraged by the United States, rose in rebellion against Hussein’s rule. They were crushed. The savagery of Hussein’s reprisals embittered many Kurds and Shiites, who did not forget that the United States had failed to protect them. Nor did the coalition’s military successes of 1991 advance warm feelings about America among other Middle Eastern people. Arab leaders—all of them authoritarian—continued to worry that the war, having battered Hussein, might stir restless democratic yearnings in their own countries. Many Muslims especially resented the expanded postwar presence of the American military—and of liberal American cultural practices—in Bahrain, Oman, and Qatar, and especially in Saudi Arabia, which was the Holy Land of Islam.
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The close relations that the United States maintained with Israel, which Bush had persuaded to stay out of the war, remained an especially infuriating source of anti-American feeling in the area.

Second-guessing of Bush, however, did not harm his political prospects at the time. After all, the prewar diplomacy had been skillful, and the military triumph had been glorious. The coalition had liberated Kuwait, punished aggression, and preserved Western access to oil in the region. Bush exulted, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”

This was a considerable exaggeration: Many of the administration’s major decisions during the crisis—rejecting the rotation of troops, managing popular perceptions of the war by keeping the media away from the battlefield, reliance on the Powell Doctrine—were adopted in order to minimize the likelihood of another Vietnam-like experience. But there was no doubting the happy political consequences of the war for the president. Shortly after the fighting stopped, a
New York Times
/CBS poll reported that he had a popular approval rating of 89 percent. This was the highest for a president since the appearance of these polls in 1977.

I
N HIS FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS
, Bush deliberately distanced himself a little from Reaganesque foes of big government. He pledged “to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.” But he also reiterated a campaign theme: that government alone could not guarantee a gentler domestic scene. Americans must rely on a “thousand points of light”—“all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the nation, doing good.”

Neither then nor later did Bush imagine that government could ignore domestic policy, but international relations most engaged him. As during the campaign, when he had dismissed “the vision thing,” he did not believe that it was his task to propose a large number of new domestic initiatives. A fiscal conservative, he was painfully aware of the huge deficits that had mounted during the Reagan years—deficits that crippled ambitious domestic ventures. Bush also recognized the obvious: Divided government, the result of large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, would stymie most plans that he might have proposed. He therefore allowed his chief of staff, former New Hampshire governor John Sununu, to oversee many domestic concerns. Sununu, a blunt and undiplomatic administrator, made few friends on the Hill before being forced by revelations about his use of perks to quit in December 1991.
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One policy area that Bush did bring to America’s domestic agenda was education. In this regard he was reacting in part to the ferment that the much-debated condemnation of American educational practices,
A Nation at Risk
, had stirred after its release in 1983.
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Like the commissioners who wrote that report, Bush believed that schools had to adopt higher standards in order to promote greater academic achievement. Though average SAT scores had stabilized in the 1980s, they remained below their levels of the 1960s.
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In the fall of 1989, Bush called the nation’s governors to Charlottesville, Virginia, for an “Education Summit,” which he hoped would stimulate debate at the state level. The governors, notably Bill Clinton of Arkansas, seemed receptive. In April 1991, Bush called on Congress to approve his plan for America 2000. This enterprise envisaged more detailed standards in core academic subjects and encouraged states to develop rigorous testing of children in the fourth and eighth grades. Bush also backed federal demonstration grants for vouchers that would help parents to send their children to private schools.
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America 2000 got nowhere in Congress. Liberals opposed the idea of vouchers and worried about the possible introduction of national testing. As they had since the 1960s, they urged more federal spending for programs such as Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, so as to advance greater educational opportunity for minorities and for the poor. Bush, however, believed that spending for education was primarily a state-local concern. Like most Republicans, he thought that funding for “compensatory education” had not accomplished much. He called for less, not more, federal education money in his budget for fiscal year 1992.
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Still, over time Bush’s emphasis on achievement and standards was significant. No president since LBJ had done more to dramatize the problems of schools. Like
A Nation at Risk
, Bush’s thinking exposed the growth of two powerful trends in ideas about education. The first revealed the force of rising expectations—in this case, expectations that schools should enhance academic achievement so as to promote America’s international competitiveness. A well-educated student of the 1990s, many contemporaries had come to believe, must be equipped to deal with a far more technologically complex world than his or her parents had needed to be. Higher percentages of young people had to be well prepared for serious college-level work.

The second was that what mattered in educational reform was not so much providing wider
access
to equal opportunity—the emphasis of Title I—as ensuring academic
results
. The key, reformers said, was to improve “outputs,” not to focus on “inputs,” such as money for compensatory education aimed at the poor. A focus on achievement—and on hard-nosed assessments via testing—developed bipartisan political support in the 1990s, leading conservatives as well as liberals to support a degree of federal oversight of public schools that Bush 41 scarcely could have imagined while he was president. In 1994, Congress passed a program, Goals 2000, which provided money to states for such purposes. A so-called No Child Left Behind Act, triumphantly signed by Bush 43 in January 2002, empowered the federal government to take an unprecedented role in public education—so much so that many people, raising the banner of states’ rights, came to complain after 2002 of excessive federal intrusion. Not for the first time, “conservatives,” who commonly complain of big government, had drifted from their ideological moorings.
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Concerning most other domestic issues during Bush’s presidency, congressional Democrats took charge. During his four years in office they skirmished repeatedly with him over environmental policies. In this area of policy, Bush had a mixed record. He issued executive orders that protected or restored 1.7 million acres of wetlands and doubled funding for parks and wildlife refuges.
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On the other hand, environmental activists lamented his refusal to sign a treaty that was aimed at preserving the biodiversity of plants. The United States was the only developed nation that did not sign. Bush demanded the watering down of another treaty, to curb the causes of global warming, before he agreed to back it.

Liberals in Congress scored victories on a few fronts. They succeeded in almost doubling appropriations for the Head Start program for children in families below the poverty line. In 1990, their most active year, they expanded federal funding for welfare recipients needing day care, approved amendments that strengthened clean air protection, passed a family and medical leave bill that authorized workers to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave per year in order to deal with family emergencies, and passed a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that among other things established criminal penalties for unauthorized trafficking in Native American remains and cultural artifacts.

Two of the most heralded congressional initiatives in these years also passed in 1990. The first was a civil rights bill that promised to advance the legal rights of minorities who complained of discrimination in employment. These complaints had mounted steeply in the 1980s, keeping the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission busy. Liberals hoped that the measure would counter recent Supreme Court decisions that were jeopardizing non-discrimination in the workplace and minority set-aside programs.
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The second initiative, which Bush, too, championed, was the Americans with Disabilities Act. It countered discrimination against the disabled in employment.
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The Americans with Disabilities Act was a comprehensive civil rights law that prohibited private employers from discriminating against the disabled in employment, public services, public accommodations, and telecommunications. Hailed as the Emancipation Proclamation for the disabled, it significantly advanced America’s late twentieth-century rights revolution. The Clean Air Act was a major accomplishment that among other things toughened enforcement of national air quality standards regarding ozone, carbon monoxide, and various pollutants, but the other measures that passed during Bush’s time in the White House did not reach very far. As in the past, only a tiny minority of women workers received public aid for day care. Only 40 percent of children eligible for Head Start managed to find places in it after 1990. Many Native Americans continued to live in appalling conditions on poverty-stricken reservations, where the rate of alcohol-related deaths remained high.
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Bush, moreover, refused to agree to all that Democrats presented to him. He twice vetoed family and medical leave acts. He vetoed the civil rights bill, maintaining that it promoted racial quotas. The Senate failed by one vote to override this veto, whereupon Congress, slightly more Democratic in its makeup after the 1990 elections, successfully enacted a similar bill in 1991. This law aimed directly at recent Supreme Court decisions concerning discrimination in employment. It enlarged the legal rights of aggrieved workers, notably by enabling them to call for trial by jury. Though it did not end partisan and legal battling over the always contentious issues involving race and employment—the EEOC did a land-office business during the 1990s—it pleased minority group leaders.
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As wrangling over this law indicated, liberals worried a great deal at the time about the rising activism of the Rehnquist Court, as it was called after William Rehnquist became chief justice in 1986. From 1989 on, conservatives on the Court seemed receptive not only to challenges to affirmative action and set-asides but also to suits that jeopardized choice.
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In a widely anticipated ruling in July 1989, the Court upheld a Missouri law that banned abortions in publicly funded hospitals and clinics.
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Advocates of choice, who had turned out for a mammoth 500,000-person demonstration in Washington while the Court was hearing the case, were frightened and outraged by the ruling.

Reporting on the Court’s activity,
New York Times
correspondent Linda Greenhouse dubbed 1989 “The Year the Court Turned Right.” The term, she wrote, “was a watershed in the Court’s modern history. For the first time in a generation, a conservative majority was in a position to control the outcome on important issues,” notably those concerning the rights of minorities and of women.
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While this majority proved in later years to be a little less audacious than Greenhouse had predicted, it was obviously feisty.
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Bush, moreover, was advancing efforts begun by the Reagan administration to appoint conservative Republicans to the federal bench. By 1992, all thirteen federal appeals courts had Republican majorities.
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As in Reagan’s second term, appointments to the courts, which had become ever more influential in the affairs of the nation, continued to spark acrimonious political struggles.