George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

spring Sunday afternoon of May 6, Bush used the occasion of a White House lecture on
his ego ideal, Theodore Roosevelt, to hold a discreet meeting with Democratric
Congressional leaders for the purpose of quietly deep-sixing the no new taxes litany.
Bush was extremely surreptitious in the jettisoning of his favorite throw-away line, but
the word leaked out in Monday's newspapers that the White House, in the person of
hatchet-man Sununu, was willing to go to a budget summit with "no preconditions."
Responding to questions on Monday, Bush's publicity man Fitzwater explained that Bush
wanted budget negotiations "unfettered with conclusions about positions taken in the
past." That sounded like new taxes.
Bush had been compelled to act by a rising chorus of panicked screaming from the City
of London and Wall Street, who had been demanding a serious austerity campaign ever
since Bush had arrived at the White House. After the failure of the $13 billion Bank of
New England in January, Wall Street corporatist financier Felix Rohaytn had
commented: "I have never been so uneasy about the outlook in 40 years. Everywhere you
look, you see red lights blinking. I see something beyond recession, but short of
depression." [fn 17] At the point that Bush became a tax apostate, estimates were that the
budget defecit for fiscal 1990 would top $200 billion and after that disappear into the
wild blue yonder. The IMF-BIS bankers wanted Bush to extract more of that wealth from
the blood and bones of the American people, and George would now go through the
motions of compliance.
The political blowback was severe. Ed Rollins, the co-chairman of the National
Republican Congressional Committee, was a Reagan Democrat who had decided to stick
with the GOP, and he had developed a plan, which turned out to be a chimera, about how
the Republicans could gain some ground in the Congress. As a professional political
operative, Rollins was acutely sensitive to the fact that Bush's betrayal of his "no new
taxes pledge" would remove the one thing that George and his party supposedly stood
for. "The biggest difference between Republicans and Democrats in the public perception
is that Republicans don't want to raise taxes," complained Rollins. "Obviously, this
makes that go right out the door. Politically, I think it's a disaster." [fn 18] With that,
Rollins was locked in a feud with Bush that would play out all the way to the end of the
year.
But Democrats were also unhappy, since "no preconditions" was an evasive euphemism,
and they wanted Bush to take the full opprobrium of calling for "new taxes." The White
House remained duplicitious and evasive. In mid-May, pourparlers were held in the
White House on a comprehensive defecit-reduction agreement. The Democrats demanded
that Bush go on national television to motivate drastic, merciless austerity all along the
line, with tax increases to be combined with the gouging of domestic and social
programs. Bush demurred. All during June, the haggling about who would take the public
rap went forward. On June 26, during a White House breakfast meeting with Bush,
Sununu, Darman, and Congressional leaders, Congressman Foley threatened to walk out
of the talks unless Bush went public with a call for tax hikes. For a moment, the dollar,
the Treasury bill market, and the entire insane house of cards of Anglo-American finance
hung suspended by a thread. If the talks blew up, a worldwide financial panic might