(4 of 6)
Discipline is not what Congress is best at. It prefers being a dispenser of largesse to being a moral policeman or stern taskmaster. Leadership is generally left to the President. Yet George Bush seems to have as much trouble as ever with "the vision thing." Handcuffed by his simplistic "read my lips" campaign rhetoric against a tax increase as well as by his cautious personality, Bush too often appears self-satisfied and reactive.
His long-term goals, beyond hoping for a "kinder, gentler" nation, have been lost in a miasma of public relations stunts. The President's recent "education summit" with the nation's Governors produced some interesting ideas about national standards but little about how to pay the costs of helping public schools meet them. His much trumpeted war against drugs was more an underfinanced skirmish. Bush told voters last year that he is an environmentalist, but the most significant clean-air proposals put forth this year -- stringent new standards on automobile emissions -- were adapted from California's strict limits for the 1990s.
Abroad, Bush tends to turn Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum on its head by speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. He did offer important new proposals on conventional-force reductions in Europe. Otherwise, he has allowed the Kremlin to trump him with a variety of strategic-arms offers, while he nonchalantly dusted off Dwight Eisenhower's "Open Skies" plan (to allow each superpower overflight inspections of the other's territory) and suggested a reduction in chemical weapons that Congress had long since ordered him to make. His offer of economic assistance to Poland and Hungary, as they attempt to loosen the shackles of the Communist economic system, seemed to be just another example of big talk and small deeds -- an impression offset only slightly when Congress pressured him to increase a proposed grant to Poland from a measly $115 million to a ho-hum $315 million.
In its day-to-day conduct of affairs, meanwhile, the Federal Government is suffering from malnutrition. The Administration still has not nominated anyone for 77 senior Cabinet department positions. The Departments of Interior, Education, Labor and Health and Human Services have become nearly invisible.The Federal Aviation Administration's staff is still well below the level that existed before Reagan fired striking air controllers in 1981 and is using outmoded equipment to track near gridlock in the skies.
Long-standing neglect at the Energy Department led to the dangerous deterioration of Government-run nuclear-weapons plants, and the department is currently dragging its heels on an estimated $150 billion effort to get the program back into shape. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, new Secretary Jack Kemp is busy mopping up after eight years of Reagan-era mismanagement and scandal. The losses are running beyond $4 billion.