SINCE GEORGE BUSH IS not going to be served up many drug "kingpins" (why are these sinister fellows always bowling objects?) for execution at the White House, one wonders how he will fill his days. No doubt, a day spent not raising taxes is a day well spent in Bush's mind; but it does leave time on one's hands. He has mainly told us what things he will not do as president--which, happily for his record of keeping promises, are largely things he cannot do anyway (like furlough state offenders).
It may be hard to keep track of what he is doing (as it has been during his tenure as vice president). George Bush is, after all, the first CIA director (or even operative) to become president--a development far more dubious than the election of a military general. Eisenhower had a clear notion of civil control over the military. But the CIA is meant to circumvent that clarity of subordination.
Bush was not only a spymaster himself. He likes the type. He attracts and nurtures them, as he welcomed Oliver North to his Christmas party after the revelations of North's clandestine activities. President Reagan may spare his successor the job of pardoning North; but how is Bush to discourage aspiring Norths in his administration, assuming he might want to do that after the experience of the Iran-contra actions? He seems to take his grandfatherly acquisition of some "brown ones" to mean that he should care for the contras, a matter even Reagan could not persuade the American people to pursue through legal channels.
The trouble with having an espionage aficionado as president is that espionage, though designed to make society more secure, through knowledge of an enemy's condition, tends to make it feel less secure, by inflating the enemy's intent. A "worst-case scenario" becomes the only safe assumption--which leaves the country always on the edge of direst peril.
Balancing these dangers is the fact that arms control is the one foreign policy achievement of the Reagan years, and that our own economic troubles match the Soviets' motives to slow down the arms race. Bush may have a freer hand to restore detente (a Republican policy, after all), just as Nixon was freer than any Democrat to build good relations with China.
Denying economic reality was an imperative of the election campaign. Dukakis did it, too. But when the heed for reduction of the deficit sinks in, Republicans are more likely to resort to a panicky austerity than to recapitalize America by work projects of the sort Roosevelt used to spend his way out of the Depression.
Supreme Court and federal appointments will no doubt remain at the dreary Reagan level, imperiling affirmative action, though not, I think, legalized abortion. Roe v. Wade may be rewritten as better law; but it is unlikely, in political terms, that the court will return the question of abortion to the states, where Republican legislators do not want to vote against the majority that favors the woman's decision (even when it disapproves of abortion itself).
THE SADDEST ASPECT OF the election was its failure to produce any moral vision for America larger than holding on to the putative status quo, pretending we are "number one" as a superpower. There were two stirring visions offered at the beginning of the campaign. Pat Robertson's, though rather pinched, had at least a concern for some moral foundation to political action. Its practical proposals were absorbed into the Bush campaign's nationalism.
Jesse Jackson's moral vision for uniting the wronged and neglected, regardless of color, was simply dismissed by the Democrats in their fall effort. It cannot be said that any moral vision was defeated in the Democrats' loss. One was not, finally, being offered.
Garry Wills was a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.
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