United States History - 20th Century - General & Miscellaneous, Executive Branch, U.S. Politics in the Post Cold-War Era, United States History - 20th Century - 1945 to 2000, U.S. - Political Biography, U.S. Politics - History

White House daze

Name: White House daze
Author: Charles Kolb
ISBN: 9780029174951

by Charles Kolb

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Overview

"What happened to 'We are the Change' between 1988 and 1992? The answer to that question explains why George Bush was a one-term President.

The Party of new ideas had become the party of incumbency. Many Republicans now took for granted the "electoral lock", the Southern bloc, and Republican control of the executive branch. Their complacency was reinforced by the President's own high approval ratings through the first half of his term. Yet it's fair to say that for the first two years of the Bush Administration we were still spending down Ronald Reagan's inheritance. Even though the actual policies being implemented in many respects were really at odds with Reagan's core philosophy, the country had not woken up to the fact that under George Bush's stewardship federal spending (along with the deficit) was spiralling upward, taxes would start creeping up again, and regulatory policies would impose billions of dollars of new burdens on the public. This was 'change', allright, but the wrong kind of change...

The cumulative effect of these deviations from Reaganism, combined with the disastrous 1990 budget deal, split the Republican national coalition and contributed to the lingering recession that began in mid-1990...

Many things that Americans had long taken for granted were now changing rapidly, some in ways that would mean a stronger nation, others in ways that the public found unsettling. The country needed sound leadership that was capable of doing two essential things: explaining why the changes were happening and charting a future course to address them.

What the American public got from us instead was slavish adherence to the status quo and an unwillingness or inability to explain all the major developments in a context that Americans could fathom. The country saw its sixty-eight-year-old President traveling the land expressing his own bewilderment and calling 1992 'weird, weird, man'. And 'weird' was not what people wanted or needed to he

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A staunch conservative who served as George Bush's deputy assistant for domestic policy, the author here points fingers at the indecisive, visionless president and his process-obsessed advisers, who, in Kolb's view, missed the chance to implement a domestic agenda. This is a lively, frank and sometimes ideological insider's account of the Bush administration His first target is his boss, Roger Porter, portrayed as a hard-working perfectionist who got bogged down in minutiae. Porter's ineffectiveness allowed the rise of aggressive, ambitious Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, whom Kolb blames for getting Bush to renege on his pledge not to raise taxes. The book claims that Darman opposed creative efforts to develop a ``New Paradigm'' approach to social policy and that Bush ignored education goals developed by his staff. Kolb also argues that euphoria over his popularity following the Gulf War led the president to put off for much too long addressing crucial social and economic questions and that the Republicans' tendency to blur their ideological differences with the Democrats cost Bush a second term. (Nov.)

Library Journal

Kolb's account of working in the White House as Assistant Deputy for Domestic Policy amounts to a condemnation of bureaucratic decision-making of the sort that one political party usually levels at another, not at itself. He convincingly describes issue after issue, occasion after occasion where the fault for inaction and lack of leadership lay within the Republican White House. Kolb's detailed description of who did what divides into two strands--those who failed because they did nothing (President Bush and Roger Porter, the head of the Policy Development office) and those who seized the leadership vacuum and twisted it in wrong directions (the culprits include Richard Darman and John Sununu). Despite the book's ``relatively narrow'' focus--for example, the Bush White House is not systematically compared with other administrations--Kolb captures the Byzantine workings of the White House staff in detail that will be grist for future scholars. Recommended for large public and academic libraries.-- Grace Franklin, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., Ohio

Gilbert Taylor

In this scorching attack on his White House enemies, Kolb speaks for the activist conservatives who gathered under the rubric of the "New Paradigm" and who never got their ideas past the blue-blooded president's blue-blooded gatekeepers. The Lucifer, in Kolb's view, was budget cruncher Richard Darman, who takes a relentless pounding for committing a cardinal political sin--crafting the 1990 budget "deal" and thus surrendering the tax issue--and numerous misdemeanors such as lying, petty intimidation, and outright avarice for power for its own sake. The public Darman, satisfied that he was the master mechanic of government, ridiculed critics like Kolb with faint witticisms such as "Brother, can you paradigm?" but that reflected how caustic the infighting had become between the cautious stewards who didn't want to upset Democratic barons on Capitol Hill and the younger Reaganauts who despaired of Bush's commitment to anything but another Era of Good Feelings. Darman and another aide whom Kolb skewers (Roger Porter) might eventually produce their ripostes, but Kolb and John Podhoretz ("Hell of a Ride", ) are the first out, writing angrily and defining the depth of Republican irritation at the standard-bearer's supine, reactive campaign. Compulsory reading for politicos of either party.