Few dissenting voices to be found at Bush's economic love-in

Anyone seeking some echo of the fractious debate about what should be done with the US economy would have been hard pressed to find it in Waco yesterday.

President George W. Bush's economic forum, billed as a chance for the administration to listen to ordinary Americans, did not seem to tell it much its members did not believe already.

From its announcement a few weeks ago, the meeting, conveniently located near Mr Bush's ranch in Crawford, was derided as a made-for-TV publicity stunt. Congressional Democrats, who were not invited, pounded at the president for loading the invitation list with Republican donors and supporters.

The Democrat Bill Clinton held his version of an "economic summit" in Little Rock in December 1992, just before he became president. It was a 19-hour wonkathon with the earnest and exhaustive debates that became a feature of his administration, with the president-elect's command of the minutiae of policy on extended display.

Yesterday's event was less impassioned. The eight working sessions lasted exactly 90 minutes, with Mr Bush making 15-minute stops.

Mr Scott McLellan, a White House spokesman, responding to criticism about the brevity, was reduced to laying each concurrent session on end to calculate that "we're going to have at least 14 hours of detailed policy discussions".

In the event, no amount of time would have seemed likely to provide much creative tension. At the working session on economic recovery and job creation yesterday, chaired by Treasury secretary Mr Paul O'Neill, it was hard to find a dissenting voice from the administration's mantra: make tax cuts permanent; make it harder to sue corporations; subsidise terrorism insurance.

Speaker after speaker backed the administration's position.

The only different notes, which were complementary rather than dissonant, came from what a cynical observer might have suspected was special pleading.

Mr Douglas McCarron, president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, a union leader assiduously courted by the White House, was of the view that fiscal responsibility was easily compatible with lots of new federal spending on construction projects, which, he opined, would create thousands of jobs.

Mr Gary Garczynski, president of the National Capital Land and Development Company, put forward the not-entirely-unexpected view that the solution to economic weakness involved making more land available for development.

The list of invitees gave some clue to the overwhelming tone. Corporate executives present were generally of the type of Mr John Dillon, chairman and CEO of International Paper, which gave 95 per cent of its $400,000 of political contributions in the current electoral cycle to the Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the watchdog organisation. - (Financial Times Service)