Missed opportunities growing

Barack Obama had a quick answer to a question about the Bush administration’s greatest environmental misstep.

“At the top of the list has to be the complete refusal to acknowledge climate change,” he said. “There’s no more long-term consequence to that absence than the long-term health of the planet.”

We’ve had a campaign’s worth of focus on the things the Bush administration has done wrong – from attacking Iraq with the wrong assumptions and the wrong resources, to looking indulgently on torture, to three major tax cuts that will have helped to nearly double the national debt in eight years.

But, as Obama points out, there is a whole other range of failure, of things that weren’t addressed at all. There are areas where we may not have been actively making things worse, but just wasted the last eight years.

Which, of course, also makes things worse.

For most of the Bush administration, the whole idea of global warming was dismissed as unsettled science, while the rest of the developed world worked on ways to get serious about greenhouse gases. After the administration finally agreed that there seemed to be an issue here – some people do need to have an ice shelf fall on their heads – the president and others started talking about how the United States shouldn’t do anything without China and India.

There was a time when the United States led in environmental issues, and didn’t try to find excuses for not even following.

“One of the things I want to restore to the federal government is a sense of analysis and science and pragmatism,” said Obama.

“Through administrative fiat, the administration has interpreted regulations in ways that diminish the Clean Air Act and protection of our national parks. Those are things I can reverse without legislation, just a way of interpreting it in the ways that were intended.”

And after Sept. 11, some administrations might have refocused their goals on energy independence.

Since 2000, we haven’t just carefully ignored the weather, and the fact of the once-snowbound Arctic getting a lot less white. We’ve also looked away from the U.S. population getting a lot more gray.

In his 1998 State of the Union speech, President Bill Clinton looked out over projected federal budget surpluses and declared, “Save Social Security first.” Ten years later, the surpluses have vanished, and Baby Boomer retirement is a decade closer.

Last Tuesday, the trustees of Social Security and Medicare delivered their annual report, saying the programs face “enormous challenges.” Now the problem is eight years older, and probably more than eight years worse.

President Bush insisted he wanted to deal with Social Security in his second term, but clung to a proposal that basically disassembled the system and couldn’t get traction even in a Republican Congress.

At the start of this year, the Bush administration declared a new foreign policy goal: an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. The president made his first trip to the region, had a photo opportunity with the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian president and declared that he would be returning and it would be an administration priority.

Unfortunately, this came after seven years of ignoring the issue, and during that time things got, unsurprisingly, considerably worse. Without direct American involvement and pressure, there were no significant discussions between Israelis and Palestinians, what seemed to be some progress at the very end of the Clinton administration was abandoned, and the rejectionist Hamas movement grew stronger among the Palestinians, until it won elections in 2006 and took military control of Gaza last year.

Nothing about the prospects since the president’s January visit looks promising.

Mistakes, and a deterioration of an American position on an issue, aren’t always about things done wrong. Sometimes, they’re about things that just weren’t done at all.

Talking about the opportunity to start rethinking American transit in a world where both temperatures and energy costs are rising, Obama said last week, “I think that’s a missed opportunity.”

There’s a lot of that going around.