WE'LL CALL IT THE GREAT NEW SOCIETY DEAL :

A Nation in Search of Its Mission (DAVID GERGEN, June 17, 2002, NY Times)

President Bush deserves praise for proposing to create a new architecture for homeland security, a reversal of his earlier position. And he will win acclaim if--in reversing his previous hands-off stance on the Middle East conflict--he settles differences within his team and produces a solid plan for that conflict. Too many presidents in the past have stubbornly clung to their ideas, refusing to adjust to changing circumstances and forcing the country to pay a cruel price. Remember Woodrow Wilson? Hoover? L.B.J.? [...]

Demands for sacrifice and a vision of what can come afterward are fundamental to wartime leadership. Mr. Bush can still demonstrate that leadership by linking present sacrifice with a better future in several ways. He can, for example, roll back his tax cuts and propose that the savings be redirected toward a broad social cause like improving the lives of children. If the war is about securing their safety, after all, why should we not be equally concerned about securing their health and education? Why not seize this moment to make the war about something positive, instead of allowing it to be focused exclusively on how we ward off the negative?

Declining deep into self-parody, David Gergen praises George W. Bush for not clinging to outmoded ideas, like Wilson and LBJ did, then trots out the precise outmoded idea that they clung to : big government social programs combined with war. (Hoover, sadly for him, had no war, so he just gave us the big government programs.) Hey Mr. Gergen, how about some new (old) ideas? How about we show we're willing to make sacrifices by cutting the budget by 25%, privatizing Social Security so that it can conceivably pay for itself, voucherizing education so that kids have a choice of who educates them, and providing poor kids with private Medical Savings accounts? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2002 9:02 PM