Word: reaganized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...taxes." That read-my-lips pledge from the campaign presented the President with what may prove an insoluble problem: how to meet the Gramm- Rudman target of a $100 billion deficit on his $1.16 trillion budget for fiscal year 1990. The commitment to comity with Congress ruled out the Reagan- era approach of proposing draconian, and politically unrealistic, cuts in domestic spending that would be immediately declared "dead on arrival." The familiar device of using overly optimistic economic assumptions to gild the budget was, of course, part of the Administration arsenal. The President's Office of Management and Budget predicts...
...phrases, no soaring metaphors, just commonplace sentiments about how "we must take a strong America and make it even better." This failure of rhetoric can be excused, for as the President said, now "it's time to govern." But governance requires agonizing choices, and Bush, like his mentor Ronald Reagan, stoutly declined to confront them publicly. The President's program, as he defined it, is all gain and no pain, with scant need to explain the inherent contradictions...
...sharp contrast to Reagan's stiff-necked philosophic rigidity, Bush was eager to touch every point on the ideological spectrum. He honored, with lip service at least, most of his kinder and gentler campaign promises, ranging from a pledge to halt offshore drilling in California to advocacy of extended health care for pregnant women and children. Bush courted environmentalists (by pledging an end to acid rain and toxic dumping) and borrowed lines from Jesse Jackson ("Keep hope alive"), while still echoing themes from the Reagan years ("growth and opportunity" and "family and faith") and bowing at the shrine...
Congressional Democrats remain slightly puzzled about how to react to Bush's strategy of proffering a velvet glove clutching a closed wallet. After years of bitter deadlock with Reagan, they tended to mute their criticism of a President so palpably eager to negotiate. Some, like Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, were amused by the incongruities of the President's new compassionate language. "Bush sounded a lot like Michael Dukakis," she joked. "I hate to use that L word, but it sounded liberal, liberal, liberal...
Buried within the Bush budget is an odd change in policy: the President seems committed to reversing tax reform, the major legislative triumph of Reagan's second term. A reduction in capital-gains levies would erode the reform principle that earned and unearned income should be taxed equally. Bush also retains an unmistakable affection for the kind of special-interest tax breaks that the 1986 legislation was designed to curtail. The President has quietly asked Congress for $2.7 billion annual tax reductions for business, including $400 million for oilmen, who include some of Bush's most faithful supporters. In comparison...