SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Reader's Soapbox: Now a word from the disapproving 15 percent
Saturday, February 9, 2002

DAVID P. BARASH
GUEST COLUMNIST

Put me down as one of the DFP, the Disapproving Fifteen Percent. I belong to the too-silent minority who disapprove of George W. Bush's performance as president. We hear a lot these days about Bush's "astronomic," "sky-high" and "unprecedented" approval ratings. It leaves people such as myself feeling a bit like the little boy observing a certain emperor on parade, watching while 85 percent of the population admire his majesty's new clothes. But for us, the emperor is naked.

For those of us in the DFP, the president who was intellectually inadequate and politically illegitimate on Sept. 10 was no less inadequate and illegitimate on Sept. 12.

His policies, somewhere between regrettable and despicable before the terrorist attacks, haven't improved one iota, mostly because they haven't changed.

I understand that many Americans, traumatized by the events of Sept. 11, have wanted (and needed) to see Bush as suddenly heroic and competent. Yet instead of casting him in a new and favorable light, the president's refusal to recognize the new realities that have been italicized by Sept. 11 has gone a long way toward italicizing his failures in office.

For example: Bush's insistence on a Big Oil-friendly energy policy, downright pig-headed and foolish before the terrorist attacks, is even more outmoded and inappropriate in their aftermath. Yet the administration remains actually hostile to energy conservation.

Bush's insistence on going it alone in the international sphere, aggravating and dangerous before the terrorist attacks, shows no sign of having been rethought.

Instead, Bush remains determined to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, has denounced the Kyoto Accords and gives no indication of having learned to ameliorate his unilateralism.

Following Sept. 11 and its recessionary effect on an already limping economy, the administration would also have been well-advised to revise its regressive tax policy, which, in addition to its manifest unfairness, also greatly worsened the budgetary deficit. But the administration has done nothing of the sort.

I grant that U.S. military actions in Afghanistan have been successful thus far and skillfully accomplished. But first it should be noted that they represent a triumph of the U.S. uniformed military services and are only dimly a function of presidential leadership. Furthermore, these have all been tactical successes, based on such battlefield techniques as pilotless drones, accurate bombing, reliance on indigenous opposition forces, etc.

There has been essentially no sign of genuine strategy in our supposed "war" on terrorism, whether political, economic, social or even military.

Just a critical, disapproving voice in the wilderness? Perhaps, at present. But something tells me that even as the applause from the State of the Union address begins to fade, the DFP will begin to grow, as the emperor's nakedness becomes increasingly obvious.

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