Nothing George W. Bush has said since he took office was more revealing -- or discouraging -- than his press conference answer to a reporter inquiring what citizens were supposed to do when confronted with rising gas prices in the face of record oil company profits.
Bush, who doesn't like press conferences and held this one only because his hallowed death penalty had been jolted into jeopardy by the FBI's big flub in the Timothy McVeigh case, gave a reply that showed how little he understands the power and the obligations of his great office.
He instinctively reached for his cure-all tax-cut. If Americans had more money to spend they wouldn't mind shelling out a little extra at the gas pump.
Bush skated right by the implication of price-gouging by the oil business. Was he indicating to us that a little profiteering by a vital industry is no big deal? Or was he hinting that it is inevitable in the hurly-burly of the marketplace?
Was he saying that the chief magistrate neither could, nor should, intervene when Big Oil is ripping off the consumer? Sen. Ted Kennedy said on "Meet the Press" that when Big Steel started gouging, President John Kennedy hauled in the CEOs and demanded to know what was going on.
We know that George W. Bush does not have an inquiring mind. It is probably his greatest handicap. It's more noticeable now, as we are coming out of the Hundred Days hullabaloo about his new presidency. Whole vats of ink were spilled in recounting of his on-time, short-day regime, so different from the sloppy, open-ended, 24/7 Clinton style. Some summaries suggested we had ourselves a new William Pitt the Younger.
But in his emergency press conference, Bush sounded more like one of the premier non-statesmen of our age, former Washington mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. Addressing a city where half the inhabitants were agitated at the scoundrel's success, His Honor said, "Get over it." Bush and his vice president have assiduously tried to turn the energy shortage into a crisis in the belief, apparently, that it will build support for his tax cut. He certainly isn't going to mess with his countrymen's insatiable demand for oil to cool the passion for the gas-guzzling SUV.
The common good is not a consideration here. The corporate good -- and this includes HM0s and the military-industrial complex -- supersedes all. Ari Fleischer, Bush's press secretary, said indignantly that energy excess is "an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life."
Vice President Cheney, himself a big-time oilman, held his vaunted energy commission meetings in secret. If he called in anyone outside the drill-dig-nuke crowd, to whom conservation is a dirty word, we don't know about it. We learn from Time magazine that William C. Ford Jr., the unblushing greenie who is now chairman of the Ford Motor Co., had a meeting with Cheney. Ford, we can be sure, told the vice president of his dream of housebreaking the SUV, that is of increasing its gas mileage. Even 5 mpg would make a huge difference. That's heresy in Bush-Cheneyland.
The White House didn't call the Energy Project in Massachusetts, which is a reproach to the macho Bush-Cheney policies. The White House doubtless shares the Bush I view of the Democratic Bay State, as "The People's Republic of Massachusetts." Richard Kennelly, director of the project, is an advocate of "efficiency first" as a policy. The state, in collaboration with neighboring Connecticut, has reconstructed five coal-burning plants and replaced the coal with cleaner, cheaper natural gas. "They need half the fuel to generate the same amount of electricity," he says.
But Bush has never left Austin in his mind, never realized how enormous the country is, what talent he can call on. He treats the Bully Pulpit like a La-Z-Boy lounger. The furor over wrongly convicted or executed death row inmates seems to have passed him by. He repeats his campaign sophistries -- no one was ever unfairly dispatched in Texas. It was the winsome featherweight candidate back in full view.
Bush was mortified about the postponement of the execution of Timothy McVeigh, the poster boy for death penalty advocates. Nobody pretends that the 3,000 documents the FBI forgot to send to his defense lawyers would alter his guilt. It's just that the foul-up underlines the core contention of death penalty foes: that governments and people are fallible and should not be allowed to take lives. Lately we learn that Attorney General John Ashcroft, who supervises the FBI, opens every day at the office with prayer and Bible-reading. People with one eye on Heaven often get behind in their filing.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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