A Defining Moment: the Presidential Election Of 2004 by Crotty William J.;

Author:Crotty, William J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Incumbency, Politics, and Policy

Detour or New Direction?

Jerome M. Mileur

DOI: 10.4324/9781315706887-9

In the final years of his presidency, Bill Clinton spoke often of building a bridge to the twenty-first century. In the 2000 presidential election, American voters, with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court, chose a different partisan firm, the Republicans, and a new engineer, George W. Bush, for the job. This new party had a different design for the project that took the bridge in a new direction, one that promised to recast the landscape of American politics. In office, mixing compassionate conservatism with neoconservatism, Bush moved to transform the role of the national government both at home and abroad and in doing so framed the central question of the 2004 presidential contest: Was the first term of President Bush a detour or a new direction in the nation’s politics?

George W. Bush of course entered the White House in 2001 after one of the more unusual presidential elections in the nation’s history. Having lost the popular vote to the Democrat Al Gore by a half-million ballots, he won in the Electoral College by five votes—a victory that came only after the Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision with justices voting along partisan lines, ended a recount of votes in Florida with the effect that the state’s 25 electoral votes went to Bush.1 The election had left the nation deeply divided between the religious right and other voters, between the big cities and rural areas, between working women and homemakers, gays and straights, union members and nonmembers—divisions that were made sharper by questions of the legitimacy of the Republican victory. Bush inherited a nation at peace, a balanced federal budget with a $5 billion surplus, and a strong economy that had boomed through the 1990s. In his campaign (and later in his inaugural), he put forward an ambitious program that included reform of education, Medicare, and Social Security; a reduction in the role of the national government in the delivery of social services, and greater reliance on the private sector and local government; a reduction in taxes for all Americans; and strengthening the nation’s defense capacities including a missile defense system. But the question asked widely was how Bush—a minority president with narrow majorities in both houses of Congress—could and would govern.2 With good times at home and abroad, many concluded that the prospects for the Bush administration realizing its program were uncertain at best and wondered about what the future held for the president and his party.3

On the tenth day of his presidency, Bush announced his faith-based initiative to provide federal funds to religious groups for the delivery of social services. But there was nothing dramatic in the first 100 days of his presidency, which saw withdrawals from international agreements and a number of changes in environmental and workplace rules friendly to business, as well as proposals for education reform and a $1.6 trillion tax cut—both of which were subsequently enacted by the Congress. In his State of the Union

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