What we know of his background suggests President Bush is a natural risk-taker, someone who was wiped out when oil prices crashed in 1992 but won his subsequent bet that a publicly financed baseball stadium was his ticket to personal wealth.
The risk-taker in Bush has blossomed again as he seeks to manage the gamble that he can talk down the American economy without convincing markets and consumers that it's going to hell. As crapshoots go, it may present more favorable odds than a state lottery. But that's not saying much.
Bush appears to be betting he can stampede Congress into approving his $1.6 trillion tax cut without provoking the herd mentality that underlies consumer confidence or igniting hysteria in a stock market that has been broadened in recent years to include vast numbers of easily spooked small investors. The problem with Bush's strategy is that it is most likely to fail in its stated intentions and succeed where it doesn't mean to.
If his real intent is to drag the economy out of its short-term difficulties, the Bush tax cut offers precious little short-term relief. This, after all, is a tax cut that was designed by candidate Bush last summer when there wasn't yet a hint of the economic slowdown that is now apparent. By some estimates, most of its effects will take place later in this decade and barely $6 billion will find its way into the economy in the current year. Throwing $6 billion into a $10-trillion-a-year economy is like turning a garden hose on the Chicago fire.
Bush has a perverse resistance to being told anything good about the economy. Don't tell him, for instance, that unemployment is still very close to a 30-year low. Last month, when it was reported retail sales had risen encouragingly, Bush practically put his hands over his ears.
"Oh, I think it's one good statistic amongst a sea of some pretty dismal statistics," the president said of the sales figures.
"This may be the first time in the history of the country where a president and vice president have waged a campaign to convince the country that things are going to be worse," said Gene Sperling, a Clinton economic adviser. He warned that Bush's relentlessly dismal outlook "has become a self-fulfilling prophecy."
It is, however, a refreshing change from 1991 and 1992, when Bush's father was frantically trying to talk voters into the idea that the U.S. economy was a flower garden of incipient prosperity. The unemployment rate, which was at only 4.2 percent last month, averaged 6.8 percent in 1991 and 7.5 percent in 1992 just as the elder Bush was facing re-election. Consumer confidence in 1992 sank to a 17-year low.
The problem is, of course, that the elder Bush was at the very end of his first term and his son has nearly four years left in his. The luck of the draw gives him the luxury of bad-mouthing the economy now because even if he succeeds in discouraging us and we have a particularly wretched recession this year, it could set the stage for an expansion that might last at least through November 2004.
Presidents are prisoners of the business cycle. The worst recession since the 1930s happened on President Reagan's watch but the recovery was well under way in time for his 1984 re-election.
Bush's frantic promotion of his tax cut as recession insurance suggests a cynicism that is as transparent as it is troubling. This particular tax cut is simply not the kind you would design if you wanted to head off a recession. Most of its effect comes too late.
Most of it would go to the rich, not to families who would be most likely to spend it with stimulative effect. The 2 percent of taxpayers who would benefit most are not the kind of consumers whose loss of confidence is what is troubling the present economy.
Turbulence in the stock market last week suggests Bush is playing with fire if he thinks that when he bashes the economy people will dismiss it as politically inspired drivel. Someone must tell him he's president now.
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