Chilly reception awaits Bush after summer break

With Labour Day over, all the open-air swimming pools close and the kids go back to school. It's time to get serious, though no-one told the weather.

And so, with what felt like summer's last fling, a balmy sail on the Potomac, it was time to get back to work.

The President is back from his month-long break in Texas, back, no doubt, to find another international treaty to tear up.

If not, a conference to walk out of. One of those silly UN affairs. Must stand by our Israeli friends, you know.

Congress and the press are back to resume their drip-drip war on Gary Condit whose apologia has satisfied no-one and left the Californian virtually friendless.

And for most of us the prospects of lengthening evenings and the long haul to Christmas are relieved only by the gentle plop through the letter box of those George Bush tax rebates: $38 billion worth of them, enough, he hoped, to give the economy that gentle little fillip it needs so badly.

But the gleeful optimism that in the spring was the basis of Mr Bush's $1.35 trillion 10-year tax cut programme has given way to a more sombre note on both sides of the political spectrum.

The warnings of the Democratic doomsayers that the budget was being squeezed too tight to allow for any downturn have proved right. Not that they are happy about that - the Democrats are just as constrained as the White House by the new spending realities.

They would like to see more money in education, social security and to fund prescription benefits for the elderly.

Mr Bush wants more for agriculture, education too, and to increase defence spending by $18 billion - $8.3 billion of it to pay for his controversial missile defence.

And the Democrats want to increase the minimum wage while Republicans insist that to do so they will need to cut more taxes from the backs of small business to pay for it. The latter also just want more capital tax cuts to stimulate the economy.

The figures just don't add up any more.

The problem is the famous social security "lock-box". Both parties are pledged not to dip in to any surplus in the social security (i.e. pension) system except to pay back the national debt.

But with the country teetering on the edge of recession, the projected tax surplus has disappeared with the summer haze and with it the President's room for manoeuvre in negotiations with Congress on the 13 appropriations bills that must be agreed to allow government to function next year.

That also means that if we do go into recession the politicians will have no means of injecting a little fiscal stimulus into the economy without breaking solemn promises, though unlike his Republican pals in Congress Mr Bush has left himself a small out - his promise was not applicable, he said, in the case of war or recession.

This week, however, he met the Democrat leader in the House, Mr Dick Gephardt, and both agreed to leave social security untouched. For now.

Both parties will desperately struggle to sell themselves as the true-blue standard bearer of fiscal responsibility.

Mr Bush faces an embattled autumn on more than the budget front.

Although he has had some success in the House, getting backing for bills on pet projects like the faith-based initiatives, his energy package, including drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, and patients' rights, the Senate with its wafer thin Democratic majority is going to fight all the way. Then there's the long list of his nominees who still need ratification, and his "compromise" on stem cell research, already under heavy fire for jeopardising the US standing in biotech research.

And on the foreign policy front things are not looking much better with both Russians and Chinese rejecting US blandishments on missile defence and the US involvement in the Middle East peace process going nowhere. This week's splendid pomp and ceremony in the reunion with "Jorge's" amigo, President Vicente Fox, may well have prompted the most positive headlines he will see for a while.

psmyth@irish-times.ie