Behind the Bush agenda lies a lot of political manoeuvring

Daniel Lak

There was more than a whiff of hypocrisy in the Bush administration’s decision to spurn the Kyoto protocols on climate change “because tough standards don’t apply to third world and developing countries”. George W Bush—“Dubya” to his friends and enemies alike—is an oil patch Republican. Nothing more, nothing less. And his decision to ignore carefully negotiated and far from satisfactory compromises on curbing carbon emissions is the action of a man with crude on his cowboy boots and politics behind his every move.

Can you see it now, the President and his advisors sitting around the White House, getting all aggrieved because India and China don’t have to play by same rules as the poor old United States of America?
No, I think not. The President’s men were motivated by narrow petroleum industry interests. And I believe I know why. Oil votes Republican. The new and exciting companies in America producing clean, green technologies don’t. It’s that simple. Silicon Valley and its counterparts around the US are solidly Democrat, or even Green. In fact, I submit that the President who came to power promising to heal a nation divided is actually involved in a political engineering project that makes social Darwinism look like a game at the fun fair.
Never has America had a chief executive whose political position is so precarious. Never mind the election result which gave Mr Bush fewer votes than Al Gore. Democrats are no threat, it’s the President’s own party that he has to worry about now, a situation rather familiar to the current inhabitant of 7 Race Course Road, New Delhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. And when you’re in that sort of trouble, your every move has to be solidly political.

It’s been obvious from the beginning that Mr Bush had a powerful partisan agenda, whatever his talk of compromise and bipartisanship. His first decision upon assuming office, to ban federal government funds from going to aid organisations that weren’t explicitly anti-abortion, had nothing to do with his personal feelings on ending pregnancies.

If that were the case, he would try to take the politically difficult step of reversing the existing American consensus that allows legal but somewhat limited access to abortion. That would be tough, and polls show most Americans don’t want change in either direction. So to placate religious fundamentalists in his own Republican Party, he, in effect, condemns countless thousands of women in poor countries to backstreet abortions, possibly painful deaths.

If that seems a little histrionic, consider Nepal where I live and where abortion is totally illegal. More than half of all admissions to Nepalese gynaecological wards are because of unsafe terminations carried out by quacks and scoundrels. No change in that anytime soon, not on Dubya’s watch.

Whining about the developing world getting too easy a ride from Kyoto is a similar piece of cynicism. Yes, there is every justification for constant monitoring and debate about how growing economies in India, China, Brazil and others are handling their emission targets. I submit that indigenous environmental groups, especially in the democracies, will do that with vigour and dedication. Their voices will call loudest and most effectively if quotas are breached, or prove to be too lax. But the single largest carbon emitter of all, the United States of America, is not renouncing Kyoto because it’s seriously worried about that. Mr Bush is doing what the oil patch wants, securing his “vote bank” as we call it in South Asia. He’s also spitting in the face of those Democrats and Lefties who were developing other technologies that could make his country even richer.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but isn’t there something a little strange about a President and his team who start talking the economy down, especially the high technology sector, before they formally take office? Mr Bush and Dick Cheney did that in December, after they, ah, won the US presidential election. Their predictions came true in spades.

At the moment, America’s economic outlook is worse than any of its major trading partners. That’s largely due to poor performance by technology companies and the interdependencies that have grown with other sectors. Examine a few voting patterns again, and see if the most hard-hit in this current American-lead downturn, are not from the non-Republican, non-traditional parts of the mighty American economy. There is, at very least, a statistical correlation, even if you factor in the sheer idiocy of the more overheated days of the dotcom boom.
And put this, admittedly extreme, case to one side. A recent edition of New Yorker magazine featured a thought-provoking essay by Nicholas Lehman. Mr Lehman has long written about Washington with great dispassion and a reporters’ eye for motive and opportunity. And he’s no conspiracy theorist. Mr Lehman uses, as his jumping off point, the apparent cornerstone of Mr Bush’s economic programme—the most comprehensive tax cuts in American history. Using cold factual data and quotes from senior Republican Congressman, Mr Lehman slowly builds a case for partisan political gain driving the tax cutting zeal of the President, not any perceived need to jump-start a sagging economy.

Fair enough, I can hear you say. Bush campaigned on this issue relentlessly, and those who cast their ballots for the Texas governor—a minority of American voters remember—wanted some cash in their pockets. Mr Lehman is not raising any of the traditional liberal, Democratic arguments against tax cuts when he points out that the benefits of the Bush plan fall lavishly into the wallets of the rich, especially the ultra-rich top 1 per cent of Americans.

In fact, the reporter makes an equally compelling case that Bill Clinton, in his time in office, slowly shifted the bulk of the tax burden to the top-rated tax payers as a way of rewarding traditional Democrats at the lower end of the income scale. But it’s different with Mr Bush. He, according to the New Yorker, is doing two things at once; rewarding the faithful at the top of the income scale, many of whom are also in his cabinet. Vice-President Cheney gets to keep nearly $44,000 more each year if the Bush plan passes. But the President is also creating more Republican voters, bumping up their income with tax cuts, buying their ballots in effect. So he is keeping his existing vote bank happy and at the same time, making deposits in a new one.

Uttar Pradesh goes to America. It’s ingeniously simple. Probably works too. Mr Lehman doesn’t try to tell us that any of this is morally right or wrong. He just wants us to be aware of what motivates political leaders in America. And that is getting re-elected as often as possible. Nothing—not the requirements of international development, the health of Third World women, the frightening acceleration of global warming, perhaps even the health of the New Economy in America—can get in the way of that.