All the president's men George W Bush's new cabinet complies with the rule of bipartisanship, but only just, writes Martin Kettle in Washington Special report: George W Bush's America Friday January 5, 2001 As the Florida election dispute came to a climax last month, there was a lot of loose talk that the closeness of the result would compel George W Bush to govern partly with Democrats and partly on Democratic terms. Most of that talk, it is worth recalling, came from Democrats, not from Republicans. In the event, Mr Bush has now clearly determined to do neither. His choices for his cabinet, completed this week - an impressively quick effort overall - reveal a preponderantly conservative lineup which underlines Mr Bush's confidence in his own policy agenda and his own platform. True, he has fulfilled his commitment to place a Democrat in his cabinet: Norman Mineta, currently the Clinton administration's commerce secretary, will become Mr Bush's transportation secretary. But a limited bipartisanship of this kind is routine these days (Mr Clinton had a Republican secretary of defence). The most important conclusion to draw on the new team is that Mr Bush has not been forced to go beyond convention, or to choose someone against his will. Nor, even more strikingly, has he shown much sign of being eager to drop key elements of his platform. European diplomats in Washington had convinced themselves that Mr Bush and Colin Powell would find a way of pushing the national missile defence project (NMD) into touch to assuage European opinion, perhaps by the appointment of a low-profile defence secretary. However, the appointment of Donald Rumsfeld makes those predictions look naive. Mr Rumsfeld is the chief patron of NMD. He chaired the committee that recommended it to Mr Clinton in 1998. He has been appointed, as Mr Bush has made clear, to build national missile defences. On the home front, the political equivalent of NMD is Mr Bush's $1.6tn tax cut plan. It's the plan his opponents most don't want to see put into action, so it is the programme that the opposition experts have managed to persuade themselves that Mr Bush is hoping to drop. If so, there is not much sign of it. Judging by his comments this week, Mr Bush remains focused on his tax cuts. It's the reason why he has been so ready to fan an air of mild economic crisis - something no Democratic president would ever dare to do. By talking down the economy, Mr Bush hopes to talk up the case for tax cuts to get the economy moving again. He is setting his course in a conservative direction, which is why he will get a fight on some of his more controversial cabinet nominations. Of these, three stand out - those for attorney general, labour secretary and interior secretary - and of these three, one is clearly the lightning rod for most of the forthcoming political storms on Capitol Hill. John Ashcroft's nomination as attorney general is the chosen battleground on which Democrats will try to show their strength in the 50-50 senate. To read the anti-Ashcroft literature that has been bagatelling around the internet these past few days, you would imagine that there is no more obdurate conservative this side of Pat Buchanan. As the liberal columnist Joe Conason puts it, Mr Bush's nomination of Mr Ashcroft "has reopened a debate that ought to have been settled in 1865 ... [the] apparent endorsement of the defeated Southern slavocracy, with all that necessarily implies about his true attitudes toward black Americans and other minorities." We will hear more talk like this when, like all cabinet appointees, the ex-senator for Missouri faces his Senate confirmation hearings. Linda Chavez, the anti-affirmative action, anti-minimum wage nominee to head the Labour Department, which administers affirmative action and the minimum wage, will face a tough time in her hearings. So will Gale Norton, the Coloradan whose support for property rights rather than the creation of nature reserves, and for drilling rights rather than drilling bans in protected lands make her an environmentalist's nightmare as interior secretary. Mr Ashcroft's, though, will be the true connoisseur's contest. Not since the battles in the 1980s over Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the US supreme court have Democrats managed to fire themselves up with such fervour over a major nomination. The hearings will see Mr Ashcroft grilled on everything from abortion (which he opposes in all, but the most narrow circumstances) to dancing (of which he also disapproves). The conservative Mr Ashcroft will survive the ordeal in the end, but it will be at a cost. Yet that is the course that Mr Bush has set. It is undoubtedly a bold one, given the narrowness of the congressional arithmetic and the circumstances of his own election. But bipartisanship? Forget it. Uniting, not dividing? That's for wimps. As the conservative columnist George Will put it this week, Mr Bush's choices "communicate his conviction that the election, though close, awarded him 100% of the presidency, and he intends to use all of it." Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts. Guardian _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
