Sunday, January 18, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

JOHN BRUMMETT: The president who wasn't there

Liberals and Democrats are not going to like this a bit. They were frustrated enough already that the same news media that spent eight years hounding Bill Clinton over transgressions real, imagined, major and minor had given George W. Bush a pass even as his vice president was getting deferred payments from a company reaping profits from no-bid contracts in Iraq.

Now comes a book about a bona fide business mogul and Republican insider who shares highly unflattering firsthand revelations of this Republican president. And the book lands pretty much as a dud with a thud.

"The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill," the story of the fired Treasury secretary written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, portrays George W. Bush as asking no questions in meetings. It describes a pervasive cynicism in the White House by which all decisions are made either in ideological service or from an electoral prism.

Someone wrote the other day that these disclosures would have been scandalous in another place and time.

But we already knew that George W. Bush was intellectually incurious and unpossessed of any particular policy command. We already knew that the Bush administration had a hankering to take Saddam Hussein out in Iraq long before 9-11 provided a dubious, less-than-forthright excuse. We already knew the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was scant. We already knew that Vice President Dick Cheney ran much of the show. We already knew that the Bush administration loved to cut taxes for the well-to-do and believed that the Reagan administration -- its role model from the disengaged cowboy president on down -- had proven that humongous budget deficits didn't matter.

(For the record on that: Deficits must not matter to the economy. Sometimes large ones exist in periods of high interest rates and economic malaise. But sometimes, such as now, they don't. They matter only morally.)

O'Neill is a former Alcoa chairman who'd worked in the Nixon and Ford administrations when Republican presidents were moderate and more pragmatic than ideological. He got dumped because he was too outspoken, not a team player and averse to tax cuts for the well-to-do that ran up deficits.

Of course he is susceptible to charges of vengefulness. But what's clearer from this book and his comments about it is that he still lives in the past -- pre-Reagan and pre-Christian Coalition -- and may suffer from some exotic strain of naiveté.

O'Neill was on "60 Minutes" last Sunday saying he meant nothing disrespectful to Bush by the disclosures, would still vote for him and could not imagine that the White House would react angrily to the simple truth.

Perhaps in his extraterrestrial residence he thought the president and his people would rather enjoy his published reference to White House meetings with Cabinet members and key advisers as "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."

Perhaps he thought on that other planet that the White House would get a kick out of his disclosure of what probably was a mere presidential smart-mouthed quip -- Bush's asking aides why rich people needed another tax cut when he'd given them a nice one already.

Perhaps O'Neill believed Cheney to be a man of good humor who would laugh off the disclosure that he derided O'Neill's concerns about a second round of budget-bursting tax cuts by saying "we won the midterms and it's our due."

When reporters have pressed O'Neill on his motivation, he has said that he hopes his book will expose the failings of divisive contemporary politics and help build a case for finding real solutions to real problems, such as long-term Social Security solvency.

As yet, I've heard no one cite the book as impetus for Social Security reform.

The book is not news. The voters know what they've got for a president. And it's all right for now with a workable majority, at least as long as economic growth sparkles, Saddam Hussein stays in captivity and the occasional terrorist plot gets foiled.

John Brummett, an award-winning columnist and reporter for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.