There’s been a remarkable flow of emperor’s-new-clothes-type snapshots of the Bush administration from Ron Suskind’s book based on former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s White House recollections. Of all of them, one strikes me as especially outrageous — more so than the charge that Bush entered office intending to oust Saddam (we pretty much knew that already, didn’t we?): Dick Cheney’s dismissal of O’Neill’s concern over his administration’s surplus-squandering, budget-busting, deficit-ballooning, generation-betraying tax cuts.

When O’Neill raised the issue after the 2002 elections, the book says, Cheney told him,
“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”

Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. Matter how, exactly? Reagan proved that you can win re-election despite running up huge deficits — and I suppose what Cheney is saying here is that that is all that matters to him. We can run a huge deficit and still win re-election, so who cares?

That makes a certain hardball sense. But a little voice in the back of our heads nags us with other pieces of history: like the fact that Reagan eventually came to see that bankrupting the government was not a good idea, and both he and his successor — our current president’s father — agreed to tax increases that laid the foundation for the booming, job-creating, surplus-endowing economy of the ’90s.

And then there is the little matter of the impact of deficits beyond the election. I suppose I should not be surprised that our most boardroom-brained, most corporate presidential administration should specialize in the sort of short-term thinking that has plagued so many American businesses. But sooner or later the national debt will come home to roost, engulfing us in runaway inflation, painful tax increases, decimation of services or some miserable combination of these calamities. If the late ’90s was an era of ostrich-like wishful thinking on the part of stock-market speculators who couldn’t imagine the good times ever ending, Bush, Cheney and company are recapitulating the same mentality today — except, instead of playing fast and loose with investors’ money, they’re doing it with the entire U.S. economy.

Deficits don’t matter. Up to a point, sure. But by any measure, we are way past that point. “We will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents, and other generations,” Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address. But his economic policy could fairly be called “leave every child behind.”

That’s the awful, eerie poignance of “Child’s Play,” the winning entrant in MoveOn’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest. May every American voter watch it, and weep.
CORRECTION: Whoops, the spot’s name is “Child’s Pay.” An actual clever title, not the cliche my eyes mistook.

I’m glad that Howard Dean, the doctor running for president, is raising the issue of Bush’s shameful stem-cell research policy. (I wrote about it in 2001, when it was announced.) Bush’s wrongheaded plan restricts vital medical research using a religious rationale that, if consistently applied, would also require the banning of a wide variety of commonly used fertility treatments. That would cause a political uproar, of course, and when has Bush ever cared about consistency? His Rove-driven policies are all about targeting electoral constituencies. Released in the summer before 9/11 with considerable ballyhoo, Bush’s stem-cell research ban (that’s essentially what it is, though he trumpeted a dubious loophole allowing extremely limited research to proceed) got lost in the post-9/11 news torrent. Dean deserves credit for putting this story back in the spotlight and reminding us where Bush went wrong.

The “liberal” label has been on a long journey from its Victorian-era origins — the root is from the Latin for “free,” of course, and the original liberals were proponents of free trade (which means that today’s anti-globalism liberals have now come a full 180 degrees).

Jeff Jarvis has been posting recently about the meaning of the term “liberal” today. Jarvis’s ardent pro-war positions have placed him at odds with a lot of people who think of themselves as liberals, but he’s determined not to give up the label.

Good for him: Liberalism should be a big tent, and surely, just as there were “Cold War liberals” who shared some positions, but not all, with their dovish liberal coevals, there has to be room for “terror war liberals” today — even if their conversations with their antiwar brethren escalate into shouting matches.

This discussion prompted Jarvis to offer extensive quotes from a 1960 John F. Kennedy speech defining liberalism. What’s fascinating to me about Kennedy’s rhetoric is not to try to parse how it relates to today’s war debate (I don’t think it much does at all) but rather to notice the one gigantic thing it’s missing: It’s entirely secular. No mention of God. No dutiful punching of the religious-belief card. All the beliefs are specifically and proudly humanist:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith.

Human dignity — not divine dignity — as the source of national purpose. Faith in our fellow citizens — not faith in a deity or a scripture. For Kennedy, as a Catholic trying to become the first president of his faith, keeping God out of his politics made perfect political sense, but it also made moral sense. It still does.

Kennedy’s speech reminds us that one of the key freedoms liberals hold dear is freedom from state religion. By keeping government out of religion, we keep religion free for each individual. And one of the things that unites liberals today is a deep anger at our present administration’s deliberate efforts to mix up religion with government. There’s a constituency for that, to be sure. But don’t underestimate the liberal constituency. I’ve still got some “faith in my fellow citizens as individuals.”