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17. A New Century
- University of Washington Press
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17 A NEW CENTURY The presidency of Bush the younger was to be one of “compassionate conservatism ” and incremental domestic reform, led by a former Texas governor who had reached across party lines to govern successfully in his home state. Instead, it will forever be defined by September 11, 2001, and by the intervention in Iraq. Bush’s cornerstone Social Security reform proposal—based on the same partial privatization notion so beloved of the 1980s and 1990s investment community—has come and gone. His proposed Pentagon reform program had to be deferred in favor of crisis actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.His Medicare prescription-drug benefit,seen as a concession to Democrats,is now perceived mainly as one more thing deepening federal deficits, which, despite having apparently been closed by the end of the Clinton years,have exploded since 9/11.Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike have compounded that problem by joining in an irresponsible spending spree that will place the country in the same budget box in 2008 that it was in at the end of the Reagan presidency in 1988.Some $10 trillion in deficits are now projected by 2015. Genuine long-term solutions to Social Security and Medicare financing have not been addressed.Bush’s No Child Left Behind education initiative is meritorious , but has had an uphill slog in a fiercely partisan environment. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 expected the Great Society to be his legacy. George W. Bush no doubt expected his presidency to be a relatively quiet, transitional period of moderate populist change. Both were trapped by and will be marked by questionable foreign interventions. Between Bush’s 2000 election and 2001 inaugural, I moved from Santa Monica back to Seattle, where I always had intended to end up. I had written a long article on the electoral aftermath for a Sunday “Focus” section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Subsequently, after discussions with Roger Oglesby, the P-I’s editor and publisher, I came home in semi-retirement to write a regular editorial-page column for the paper. My beachfront condo was hard to leave,but I settled into a Seattle waterfront high-rise with a sweep259 ing view and within walking distance of the Public Market,downtown shopping , Pioneer Square, and sports stadiums. Writing a column for the P-I involved“coming home”in more ways than one. As a Bellingham High School senior, in 1950–51, I had written a regular P-I Saturday sports column about prep-school sports in northern Puget Sound. It had carried my photo. As I began to write my editorial-page column early in 2001, I was instructed to go to the photo studio for a head shot to be carried in the column. I told my editors that they could simply pick up the old photo from fifty years earlier (which of course they did not). Seattle had changed greatly since my time growing up in the area, and even since my brief return in 1978–80. A region previously dependent primarily on Boeing,Weyerhaeuser,and a few other huge employers had become diverse. New companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Costco, and a wide array of high-tech and biotech firms had broadened the local economic base and made it less vulnerable to cyclical swings.The city’s culture had become vibrant. World-class art, architecture, and performing arts were now embedded in the city’s daily life,as were the popular-music and arts scenes.The Gates Foundation had become a philanthropic powerhouse. The city’s demographics had changed,however,in an even more marked way than in other big cities. The Seattle school board had voluntarily instituted compulsory busing for racial balance in the late 1970s at precisely the time that other communities around the country had given up on it. As kids were bused from their neighborhoods and instruction levels suªered during the transition period,thousands of parents moved with their school-age children to the suburbs or enrolled them in private schools. Students remaining in the public-school system were disproportionately poor or members of minorities. Dropout, truancy, and delinquency rates shot up. In addition, school system mismanagement created a huge funding gap. Public schools that a generation earlier had been at the center of Seattle neighborhood and community life became marginalized.I recalled Seattle’s Memorial Stadium being jammed with students and parents for Friday night high-school football games. By 2001 the games were...