George Bush, serial pragmatist

Several analysts said public support for the death penalty was
strong enough for Mr. Bush to rest assured that he was on the right side
of the issue. Mr. Gore also supports the death penalty and has been
reticent to challenge Mr. Bush on the brisk rate of executions in
Texas.

--New York Times, Friday, June 23, 2000

The "issue" referenced above is the execution of Gary Graham.
The "right side" referenced is not moral, not even political -- as in
having a political conviction about something. No, George Bush's
decision, backed up by some whiz-bang interpretations of Texas law that
rival judicial disputes over the meaning of the word "is," was purely
pragmatic. For Mr. Bush (and the "reticent" Al Gore) Gary Graham's life
was just something to carve out a position on, one that optimally helped
-- but minimally did not hurt -- his campaign for the presidency.

OK, you say, you knew all that. But did you also know that Bush is
not a "first offender" on these matters? He's actually a serial
pragmatist with a long record. Here's some of his rap sheet. Crime rates
dropped in the state of Texas in 1992 and 1993. George W. Bush was
planning his first run for governor. In spite of those statistics, he
decided to make crime the issue in his 1994 race against Democrat Ann
Richards.

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Richards was no "root cause" liberal when it came to crime. She
supported the death penalty, restricted parole for violent offenders and
oversaw one of the most extensive waves of prison construction in state
history. Gov. Richards welcomed the aggressive Wall Street-traded
private "prison-industrial complex" turning building, staffing,
equipping and filling prisons into a growth sector of the Texas economy.

But in spite of Richards' "tough on crime" record, George W. believed
he could turn the issue to his advantage. In the tradition of his
father's infamous Willie Horton ad campaign in the 1988 presidential
race, Junior created a TV spot in which a man (an actor) abducts a woman
(also an actor) from a parking garage at gunpoint. The next sequence
showed a police officer pulling a blanket over a corpse. The grim
conclusion revealed that under Richards' administration, more than 7,000
offenders had been granted early release. Some exit polls showed that
the ad campaign had put Bush over the top.

George W. had established not just that he was tough on crime but --
more importantly -- that he was tougher than the newly minted
tough-on-crime Democrats. That was key for anyone with national
political aspirations, which Georgie Boy and Dad knew only too well.
Bill Clinton "left" the campaign trail in 1992 to preside over the
execution of a mentally retarded Black man, Rickie Ray Rector. Eleven
months later Clinton was in the White House. Unfortunately (for him),
George (the Elder) was president -- not governor -- during the campaign,
so he couldn't put a black man to death. At least not in the electric
chair. He managed to kill some anyway -- together with some whites --
when he sent our boys off to war in the Persian Gulf to make the world
safe for Kuwait. But it turned out being "tough on Saddam" didn't play
that well.

Bush Jr. knew this history like the back of his hand. He made sure
the prison industry continued to thrive in Texas, fed by a constant
stream of convicts -- mainly non-violent offenders. A survey done in
Texas in 1996 -- halfway into W.'s first term -- showed 77 percent of
prison admissions in Texas were non-violent offenders.

But stuffing the privately managed jail cells wasn't enough for
George. After all, the Democrats were doing that, too. He needed to
spill some blood. So he presided over the execution of 134 prisoners --
more than 60 percent of the 222 put to death since capital punishment
had been restored in Texas in 1982. Mr. Graham was number 135.

The Bush (and Gore and Clinton and ... ) fixation on criminal justice
issues is not without a social basis. America's criminal justice policy,
which placed greater emphasis on rehabilitation than on incarceration
and punishment in the 1960s and 1970s, was discredited in the 1980s and
1990s. Many criminologists and the National Criminal Justice Commission
have argued that the so-called crime wave of the late '70s and early
'80s which evoked public outcry was hugely exaggerated by a
sensationalistic media competing for audience share and by Republican
politicians looking to stomp on liberal Democrats.

But while the crime wave may have been exaggerated, the failure of
the liberal Democratic Party to eradicate one of its root causes --
poverty -- was not. Grasping for solutions to rising social and economic
antagonisms in poor and working class communities, the public -- egged
on by policy makers -- turned to mandatory sentencing, "three strikes
you're out," and the death penalty as solutions.

These approaches have failed as well. Far from acting as a deterrent,
violence in the society has grown. The conditions in the prisons
themselves are nothing short of disastrous, as Mike Wallace recently
documented for the television series "21st Century." These conditions --
which no politician will dare to discuss -- include shocking rates of
homicides and violence inside the prisons and growing connections
between incarcerated felons and crime organizations on the outside.
Television and tabloid coverage of violent crime attract huge ratings,
but at the same time make the public more aware that the "get tough"
approach may get some people elected, but has not resolved or even
contained the spread of anti-social behavior.

When Republican Illinois Governor George Ryan called for a state
moratorium on executions because he did not have confidence in the
judicial process and worried that innocent prisoners might be put to
death, it unleashed a wave of public opposition to the death penalty
from across the political spectrum. "Tough on Crime-ism" is now suspect.
The judicial system is no longer wholly trustworthy. The fact that
America is the only developed country that permits capital punishment is
a source of shame. And the highly charged environment which fueled and
was fueled by opportunistic politicians is being called into question.

Will the sickening execution of Mr. Graham impact on the outcome of
the presidential race in November? Probably not. Bush and Gore's
positions on the case are virtually indistinguishable. And they will
remain so, unless somebody has a pollster who can persuade one or the
other that they can eke out a one-and-a-half-point net advantage by
"regretting" or "criticizing" the decision. That's how public policy is
made nowadays. That's who makes it. Our lives are in their hands.