Bush’s domestic agenda small but bold, study finds

WASHINGTON – President Bush, going into tonight’s debate over domestic issues with the Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, will be defending the smallest domestic agenda a first-term president has had in at least 44 years.

That’s the conclusion of a new Brookings Institution study by Paul Light, a professor at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. Light, comparing Bush with his eight most recent predecessors going back to John F. Kennedy, finds that the incumbent ranks last in the number of “major legislative proposals” on his agenda.

Bush largely continues a pattern of shrinking domestic agendas, in part because tax cuts have dried up funds for initiatives. Kennedy and Johnson had 53 major domestic proposals in the 1961-64 term; Nixon had 40 in his first term; Carter, 41; Reagan, 30; George H. W. Bush, 25; Clinton, 33; and the current president, 18. That means Bush’s agenda is less than half as extensive as Nixon’s from 1969 to 1972 and not quite two-thirds as big as Reagan’s in 1981-84. Light calculates that Bush has proposed only five “large new” programs.

Light grants that Bush’s few domestic agenda items have been “undeniably bold”: tax cuts, education legislation, prescription drugs under Medicare, a homeland security department and proposed Social Security changes. But he says “it is not clear” that the emphasis on terrorism is responsible for the paucity of Bush domestic proposals – even before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush had the fewest first-year, first-time proposals by a “substantial margin.”

Bush’s trademark, as president and Texas governor, has been to emphasize a few key policies rather than a lengthy wish list.