HEY, THEY FIGURED OUT THERE WAS A REVOLUTION EVEN BEFORE THE KING LOST HIS HEAD:

The Bush presidency: Far-reaching changes (Eric Black, October 10, 2004, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

George W. Bush came to the Oval Office vowing to do big things, and he has done them, with big consequences.

Big tax cuts, big deficits. Sweeping new foreign policy doctrines leading to big military operations. A major expansion of Medicare and a major increase in federal leverage over public schools, just to mention a few of the biggest elements of the four-year record that Bush now takes before the electorate as he seeks four more years.

"The starting point to understanding the presidency is that never has so much change been accomplished with so little mandate," said Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. "Out of a dead-heat election and a highly disputed outcome, Bush has managed to orchestrate huge changes in policy."

Bush responded to the 9/11 attacks by jettisoning the former linchpins of U.S. foreign and national security policy -- deterrence and containment. In their place, he embraced a policy of pre-emptive action, with or without international support.

The results of that policy, mainly in Iraq, are now at the center of the argument over whether Bush has made America safer or more vulnerable.

On fiscal matters, Bush has bet his presidency on big tax cuts. He has now signed four of them, including the biggest in U.S. history. During his term the economy slipped into, then out of, recession. It lost jobs over the Bush term, but gained some in the past year. Overall, during his term, unemployment and the number of families living in poverty have risen.

Bush argues that his tax cuts helped make the recession shallow and short and helped the economy weather other stresses, such as the impact of Sept. 11, 2001. His critics say the tax cuts were too big and too generous to the rich, and contributed too much to the return of federal deficits, which have hit record highs each of the past two years.

On domestic policy, Bush's No Child Left Behind law greatly increased federal influence over public schools in the name of raising standards and increasing accountability. Bush's critics say he gave the schools a tough challenge but not the aid they need to meet it. And Bush pushed through Congress a prescription drug subsidy for Medicare, the biggest expansion of that program since it was enacted in 1965.

Bush has been called "the accidental radical." The phrase, coined by journalist Jonathan Rauch in a July 2003 National Journal assessment of the Bush term, suggests that, as the product of a rich family and a Yale and Harvard education, Bush might have been an affable, traditional conservative -- if not for 9/11.

This might be true in foreign policy. The fight against terror converted him from a standard-issue conservative into a neo-conservative true believer, ready to use American might to spread democracy.

On many issues, foreign and domestic, Bush's governing style is marked by a no-regrets certainty that has become a hallmark of his presidency.

Life affords the contrarian few pleasures greater than watching the Conventional Wisdom crumble.

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President Has Aggressively Pursued 'Pro-Growth' Ideas Nurtured in the Texas Oil Fields (RICHARD W. STEVENSON, 10/08/04, NY Times)

They are often on stage with President Bush when he talks about the economy on the campaign trail: entrepreneurs whose business has turned up. There was George Puentes in Beaverton, Ore., whose tortilla-making company has hired more than 30 workers this year; Jim Bell in Derry, N.H., whose electronics company added 17 employees, and others like them in Wisconsin and Missouri and Pennsylvania.

Their stories are the president's reply to those who cast him as a tool of his wealthy benefactors and a captive of corporate interests. He is at heart a small-business man, he suggests, bent on helping risk-takers seize the American dream and build prosperity, job by job.

"The entrepreneurial spirit is strong in the United States of America," Mr. Bush said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Wednesday. [...]

Should he win in November, he has laid the groundwork for a second-term agenda that is far more ambitious - and, his critics say, divisive - than his election-year packaging as, in his words, a "pro-growth, pro-entrepreneur, pro-farmer, pro-small business" candidate might suggest. It includes his proposal to remake Social Security by creating personal investment accounts and the first steps toward overhauling the tax system in a way sure to ignite another debate about fairness. [...]

His positions are often criticized from both ends of the ideological spectrum as too politically opportunistic to be a coherent philosophy. Yet, perhaps by default as much as by design, he has created a new variant of conservative orthodoxy. It emphasizes choice and responsibility, while acknowledging a more substantial role for government than free-market purists would like.

To those who had hoped Mr. Bush would be the ideological heir of Ronald Reagan, the label often applied to him, "big-government conservative," is an oxymoron and evidence that he is not a true believer. To those who see his policies as an effort to come to terms with the reality that most Americans do not want to slash the size of government yet embrace low taxes and have faith in markets, Mr. Bush is redefining conservatism in a way that will prove to have an enduring political appeal. [...]

In the summer of 1975, freshly graduated from Harvard Business School, Mr. Bush drove back to dusty West Texas to try his hand in the stomach-churning world of independent oil drilling.

Mr. Bush, then 29, settled in Midland and quickly found himself caught up in a boom mentality, spurred by rising oil prices, easy money, advantageous tax laws and the perpetual optimism of colleagues in the high-risk, high-reward business of sniffing out the next gusher.

"We used to think of it as entrepreneurial heaven," said Donald L. Evans, who also started an oil business in Midland back then and is now commerce secretary.

Out of the scrappy business culture that Mr. Bush joined came the seeds of his long-running opposition to what he sees as excessive regulation. At the time, independent oil producers in Texas were seething over federal regulations, especially price controls on crude oil and refined petroleum products.

"These regulations just drove them nuts," said John A. Hill, a native of Midland and a former federal energy regulator who dealt frequently with the independent oilmen of West Texas.

Undone by a collapse in oil prices in the mid-1980's, Mr. Bush's career in the oil patch never amounted to much, despite the advantages of his family name and connections, and it ended when he sold out under a heavy debt burden in 1986. But in those years - and to a lesser extent in his subsequent role as managing general partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team - he acquired business experience that few presidents of the last half-century have had, raising money on Wall Street, meeting a payroll, feeling firsthand the effects of government policy decisions and global economic forces.

In campaign appearances, Mr. Bush insists that he cut taxes on the highest income brackets to encourage small businesses, some of which pay tax at the top personal rates. His call to eliminate the estate tax, his push to limit lawsuit awards, his proposal to expand tax-free health savings accounts, his support for reduced taxes on savings and investment income - all are presented as ways to help small businesses, which he says account for most new jobs.

"When you cut taxes, all taxes, you're really supplying additional capital to the small-business sector," Mr. Bush said in an interview in August with The New York Times. "That's how you stimulate growth, is let people keep more of their own money. And so, therefore, when you cut all rates, including the top rate, it affects nearly a million sole proprietorships or small-business owners." [...]

In developing economic policy, Mr. Bush would ultimately weave together all the strands of thought that coursed through his party in the 1970's and 1980's: the rise of the tax-cutting supply-siders, the growing political clout of small-business owners and the influence of Christian conservatives.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 11, 2004 12:43 PM