February 3, 2006
Bush’s ‘06 Game Plan: Three Yards and a Cloud of Dust
By Tom BevanLike 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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