Washington — Comedian Billy Crystal made the line famous in his Saturday Night Live skits: "It's better to look marvelous than to feel marvelous." In other words, to play on Clinton's 1992 winning slogan it's the packaging, stupid. Appearances count in life, and in politics image is so powerful that it can overtake reality.
This is the age of image politics, and President George W. Bush is its foremost practitioner. He is so skillful at it that Democrats have been left in disarray, trying to figure out whether to copy him or keep trying to convince us that the emperor has no clothes. They should do the former.
Bush, after all, has been completely forthright. He told us what he was going to do, even though some of the things he promised were unpopular. He told us, but he did so with personality, with image, with packaging and with an interesting mix of sincerity and cynicism.
Now Republicans are running an ad that suggests former President John F. Kennedy, if he were alive today, would back the Bush tax cut. The Kennedy family protested the use of the late president's likeness and words. But the implied endorsement of a fallen Democratic hero gives the Bush tax plan a patina of fairness that it desperately needs. The ad's creators say they won't back down, that the former president's words are for the ages.
Never mind that the economic climate was far different in 1963, when Kennedy proposed his tax cut. The top tax rate then was 91 percent; today it is 39 percent. Only a small portion (6 percent) of Kennedy's tax cut went to those making over $300,000 (in today's dollars). The Bush tax cut gives high earners seven times as much. The baby boom was still under way when Kennedy was president, so paying for their retirement had not yet been contemplated. Finally, the national debt was a relatively modest $250 billion compared to today's $3.4 trillion.
Kennedy strongly favored tax cuts, but not at the expense of bold government expenditures. He still had money to fuel ambitious exploration of space. Even under the most generous accounting today, it's hard to imagine a commitment of federal dollars to any government program comparable to Kennedy's support of NASA.
The Bush administration is sensitive to criticism that its tax plan mostly benefits the rich. After the House passed the across-the-board rate cuts that Bush wants, business lobbyists attending a victory rally were told to don hard hats and work clothes so the bill would appear to have the backing of working people. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the memo instructing the lobbyists on how to dress.
GOP analyst Tony Blankley shrugged off the incident. "That's the price we pay for image politics," he said.
Aside from the momentary embarrassment of having their tactic exposed in the morning paper, Republicans are not paying much of a price. Media reports focus on the "discipline" and "focus" of the business community and the Bush White House. Legislative victories are portrayed as an enviable show of muscle. President Bush is commended for being a skillful politician, projecting a nice-guy image without budging his policies from doctrinaire conservative positions.
Democrats have begun to chafe at being bit players in Bush's bipartisan docudrama. Blankley noted the irony of House leaders "browbeating" members to attend the recent "civility" retreat, an annual event launched three years ago. Only a third of the Democrats showed up this time. The rest boycotted the session to protest the way the Bush White House pushed through its tax cut without public hearings or first putting a budget in place.
There are storm clouds on the horizon. Respected voices like Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and Bob Rubin, former Treasury Secretary, warn that the magnitude of the Bush tax cut could risk the prosperity of the last several years. Senate Budget Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., doesn't believe Congress will cut back spending for popular programs to make room for Bush's tax cut, raising the specter once again of Reagan-era deficits.
Bush seems oblivious to the obstacles. In a society obsessed with appearances, he figures if he acts like a winner, he'll be one. It's the packaging, stupid.
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