TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091889/09188900.050

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.6 KB | 74 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 32

The Presidency

The Struggle with Ourselves


By Hugh Sidey


    It was a strange way to start a war. When members of George
Bush's senior staff gathered in the Cabinet Room to watch the
President's drug speech, they took a peek beforehand at the
broadcast of David Frost's down-home interview with the First
Couple. There were George and Barbara Bush at their elegant
Kennebunkport mansion set against the uncrowded beauty of
Maine's shoreline.

    When the President had finished his Oval Office
declaration, there was enthusiastic applause from the Cabinet
Room coterie and champagne all around to toast the performance,
coached by the Machiavelli of modern political media, Roger
Ailes. There was little tension in the atmosphere: no black
limousines cruising through the dark, no all-night vigil in the
Situation Room -- hallmarks of crisis through the years. The
only drug officer around was the man who brought the crack that
Bush brandished on the air.

    The nation has been launched on something brand new and not
fully comprehended or sorted out by the President. The metaphor
"drug war" does not even work very well. War implies an
adversary that can be identified and attacked. It requires a
traditional assault with money and power of some sort.
Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, rebutting Bush, claimed we need
a "D-day," not a "Viet Nam," against drugs, a sign that he is
still having trouble with semantics. Viet Nam failed because of
a D-day mentality. It never should have been fought as it was.
There is every indication this time as well that traditional
approaches simply will not work. They certainly have not for the
past 20 years, during which the war on drugs has been declared
and redeclared. This country is grappling with its soul as well
as with cocaine cartels.

    Pundits, entangled in the pervasive nature of the drug
scourge, were not having much better luck searching for
historical precedents. George Will compared the problem with
civil rights, where legislation led to a change in attitudes.
But how do you change appetites? Milton Friedman hastily pointed
out that prohibition against demon rum in the 1920s was an
abject failure. Back then, however, schools and quiet
neighborhood streets were rarely if ever menaced by
booze-running kids and gangs with automatic weapons and stacks
of cash.

    The scope of the drug problem reminds some of the Great
Depression, when the U.S. faced a crisis of confidence as well
as the tangible burdens of idled shops, busted banks,
homelessness and hunger. But Franklin Roosevelt was given almost
everything he wanted by a Congress that had lost its way along
with most other Americans. The morning after Bush's speech it
was quite plain that Congress would try to dictate the size and
direction of the drug campaign. There was no carte blanche for
the President, instead the prospect of bitter argument within
his own political system.

    By week's end the more thoughtful people around the White
House were talking not about a war but about a siege, even "a
continual call to the American people to resist drugs." Bush
launched his campaign the morning after his talk with a
heartrending stop at D.C. General Hospital's ward for babies
abandoned by addicts. The great weapon may be, as it has been
in the past, the democratic process itself -- the argument, the
criticism, the stops and starts, the big failures and little
successes -- and from it all, finally, the heightened awareness
that changes hearts. Almost nothing else will put such a foe in
its place.