New administration getting the job done
Bush lives good life promoting policies to friendly states, visiting Mexican leader

By Brian Wesley Portugal
Skiff Staff

The new administration in Washington, D.C., is doing well, as maybe you’ve noticed. Even if you haven’t paid much attention to policy, there are clear signs the president’s honeymoon lingers.

Take the whole shooting affair outside the White House. The unhappy event occurred at about 11 a.m. Eastern time, and Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary, told us the president was working out in the residence. Meanwhile, our vice president and de facto Israeli prime minister was in Bush’s office. Dick Cheney probably reviewed the president’s tax cut proposal and was trumping Condoleezza Rice on Soviet (er … I mean Russian) policy while on the phone with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, insisting he would have fried chicken at the lunch meeting that Friday afternoon and shrugging off that chest pain.

Maybe all this has to do with Bush. He’s taken the oath, but does he realize he’s the president? Last week after a wonderful speech to a joint session of Congress, he went on the road to campaign for his tax cut proposal. Where did he go? Nebraska!

Have you seen an electoral map of the last election? Check out Chris Matthews on “Hardball” some time — he’s fond of showing it — as well as pointing out that the president has yet to venture outside his “win zone,” other than living in Washington, D.C.

Granted you want to project popularity, but I guarantee every Democrat in Florida will have a game plan for the voting booth in 2004, so I’d count on needing to win one of those states up north. It’s not as if it’s beneath him. He was humorous enough to point out he lost Philadelphia in his speech to Congress. Why not start early this time?

Maybe he just doesn’t want to leave Texas foreign policy. In a real power play, the president embarked on his first visit to a foreign state: Mexico. Yes, he and Mexican President Vicente Fox were pretty good friends prior to the election, but I doubt it’s the “Ich bin ein Berliner” the hawks of the administration were looking for. But the Cold War is over, if maybe you hadn’t noticed. In his first trip abroad, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was charged with the diplomacy of the president’s missile defense initiative, which leaves one to ask where the Secretary of State was in all of this.

Then again, success is inevitable when the opposition is suffering from an identity crisis.

The word around the campfire is that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had it out after the election, with Clinton going on to fame as the villain of the party, Gore the martyr. Then there’s the Left. Did you watch the president’s address to Congress? Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., looked horrible and just plain old. The funny thing is, so did Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. With former President Clinton’s emergence as a centrist (which is why he won) and Gore pretending to be one (which is why he lost), the Left is kind of hanging out there, and some would say that’s nothing new.

The Dems would have a “mini” majority in the Senate if only they could keep their members in line and jump on board a moderate Republican’s legislation, like campaign finance reform. The speculation is that this would tip fundraising in favor of the Republicans, but political capital is much harder to come by these days than money. Besides, who better to aid the Dems in poking the Republican establishment than someone from the opposition who is wildly popular, and probably should be president. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., may have endorsed Bush for president, but he certainly doesn’t see eye to eye with the president on a lot of things. The point is, there are moderate Republicans out there, and one of them is a senator from Texas.

So the president is doing well. His approval ratings are high, and his solutions to the problems that face us are as simple as black and white. What’s more American than that?

Brian Wesley Portugal is a senior history and political science major from Fort Worth.
He can be reached at b.w.portugal@student.tcu.edu.

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