February 3, 2006
Bush’s ‘06 Game Plan: Three Yards and a Cloud
of Dust
By Tom
Bevan
Like most people,
with the Superbowl just days away I’ve got football on the
brain. Maybe that explains why I kept thinking about legendary
Ohio State University football coach Woody Hayes as I watched
President Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night.
Coach Hayes was notorious
for his conservative style of play - often referred to as “three
yards and a cloud of dust” because he insisted on running
the football instead of throwing it. His game plans were famous
for their focus and simplicity. There were no frills, no trick
plays and never any surprises. Opponents always knew what to expect
from Hayes’ teams, yet they were hardly ever able to beat
them. During his career Hayes won 238 games, 13 Big Ten titles,
and four National Championships.
This brings
me back to President Bush. In last year’s State of the Union
address, Bush decided to try and spend the “political capital”
he thought he had made off his 2004 reelection victory by calling
for a revolutionary change in Social Security. In football terms,
this was the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. But as another legendary
football coach, Darrell Royal, once famously said, “There
are three things that can happen when you pass, and two of them
ain't good.” He was right. By mid-year, after investing
an incredible amount of time and energy, Bush unceremoniously
abandoned the effort to reform Social Security.
This week, with Social
Security just one of the many hard lessons learned last year,
President Bush presented a significantly less ambitious agenda.
He laid out a few domestic “initiatives” and called
for a new commission to study entitlements, but there was a distinct
lack of a call for direct action by Congress on specific pieces
of his agenda – with two notable exceptions: making the
tax cuts permanent and passing the Patriot Act. In other words,
on Tuesday night Bush signaled he’s going back to basics.
Two weeks
ago in a speech to the RNC, Karl Rove pointed
out that there are only three pages in the President’s
political playbook this year: “national security, the economy,
and the courts.” It doesn’t get much more simple or
straightforward than that. There will be no Hail Mary passes this
time around and no trick plays, just “three yards and a
cloud of dust.”
Will it work? There’s
no reason to think it won’t. Things have been trending slightly
back in Bush’s favor since late last year: he’s scored
two big victories with Roberts and Alito, the economy continues
to move along at a decent clip, Iraq keeps slowly improving, and
the President’s overall job approval rating has climbed
back into the low-to-mid forties.
Perhaps more importantly,
the Democrats have showed little sign of getting their act together.
To the contrary, they’re currently licking their wounds
over a monumentally poor performance during the Alito hearings
last month and now find themselves perched precariously on the
wrong side of a national security issue (again) and headed into
a public showdown with the President. A long-promised agenda for
the midterm elections has yet to materialize.
Despite those handicaps,
as things stand right now Democrats are poised to make small gains
in both the House and the Senate this November. But because of
the current structure of the electoral playing field, it will
be very difficult for them to recapture a majority in either chamber
unless they’re somehow able to “nationalize”
the midterms over the next nine months. At the moment that seems
like a very tall order, though there is still plenty of time left,
a number of explosive variables still in play, and undoubtedly
a few unforeseen events between now and election day that will
have an impact on the eventual outcome.
Democrats have yet
to settle on a strategy for 2006. Bush made it clear on Tuesday
night he’d settled on his, and the philosophy behind it
looks an awful lot like another one of Coach Hayes’ famous
sayings: “You don't get hurt running straight ahead.”
Tom
Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics.
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