You see President George Bush on television and immediately your stomach turns. You watch him make his tired and oft-repeated cases for invading Iraq or perhaps for the tax cut for his rich friends. You know that he puts his corporate buddies at Halliburton ahead of regular people.
I decided to take some time to look over President Bush’s record, and I am not convinced that these initial reactions are accurate. In fact, President Bush has supported many viewpoints that traditionally have been held by progressives. A thorough review of the Bush policy will show that it rivals President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. I invite you to take a second look at President Bush, and hopefully you will come to the conclusion that he indeed advances the progressive cause.
In office, he has supported a bill to crack down on chief executives, despite his reputation for having corporate buddies. This was only after the Enron scandal, but the fact is that when the issue actually came to table, he supported the initiative. He even supported the tougher Democratic version over a more corporate-friendly version that came out of the House of Representatives. The law increased penalties for chief executives that make false statements. It also made chief financial officers personally responsible for the financial reports of their companies. The law required corporations to prepare an incredible amount of additional paperwork to document their numbers.
President Bush was able to achieve passage of one of the main planks in his 2000 platform, the “No Child Left Behind Act.” President Bush has taken an aggressive stance against poorly performing school systems, and offered a large amount of money to back this up. He has a core conviction that the old policy of “social promotion” should be considered just a, “soft bigotry of low expectations.” That phrase refers to those who feel that some children just cannot learn. After some compromise that made the bill even more progressive, President Bush’s NCLB Act earned the endorsement of Senator Edward Kennedy.
President Bush has also advocated for large increases for Head Start and early-childhood education. He is providing additional funding for research on how children develop reading and math skills. Instead of calling for the removal of the federal government from education, he has vastly increased federal funding in nearly all areas surrounding education.
On healthcare, he called for the largest overhaul of Medicare since its inception, providing an additional $400 billion to fund a prescription drug benefit for senior citizens. It utilizes private insurance companies to deliver the benefit instead of a costly government bureaucracy, but the fact remains it is a huge entitlement designed to benefit our senior citizens. President Bush pushed this bill through Congress over the objections of many conservatives.
President Bush has also secured additional funding into research on renewable sources of energy. George Bush is committed to the vision of a day in which our economy is not based on fossil fuels; he only differs from other progressives in that he knows that in the meantime our oil-based economy cannot be shut down.
He is also the first president to fund stem-cell research. Contrary to popular opinion, the President has not tried to ban stem-cell research. Private corporations have been investigating this avenue of research for some time now. President Bush recognized the potential of this research, and has set aside federal money for this line of research. He only ran into opposition when he limited the new public funding to areas that are consistent with preserving the dignity of life at all stages. The research has found new momentum thanks to Presidents Bush’s support.
Since the party of President Bush has the majority in both the upper and lower houses of Congress, it allows him to have more of a free reign. Republicans are eager to please President Bush and many conservatives roll over and support more generous spending because they want to support the president. Unless the democrats can win outright control of Congress, a democrat in the White House will inevitably lead the conservatives in Congress to stand firm against expansion of most social programs. This is evident from a comparison of the amount of spending between President Clinton’s and President Bush’s times in office. Do not get me wrong; I am talking about non-military, social spending.
Human rights are an issue important to most progressives, and here as well, President Bush has advocated for the rights of people around the world. Michael Moore makes the argument that President Bush invaded Afghanistan for an oil pipeline project, but even most Democrats support the effort there. In Iraq, there is less support among Democrats, but I am not going to review the arguments for and against going to war. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the rights of citizens, and most especially women, have been utterly transformed. While there is still violence in both countries, the future is now extremely hopeful for its citizens. Freedom and human rights have expanded worldwide under President Bush.
I know in the past when you saw President Bush on TV, you saw a simple-minded cowboy. Next time he is on television, I ask you to reevaluate your core beliefs, and see if you now agree that President Bush works hard toward solving the problems of today’s suffering world. Perhaps you too are a member of the new emerging republican majority; this is President Bush’s new compassionate majority.
Eric Magazu is a UMass student.
