Bush's Domestic Policy Gap - The Smallest Domestic Agenda in past 44 Years

President Bush, going into tomorrow night's debate over domestic issues with the Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), will be defending the smallest domestic agenda a first-term president has had in at least 44 years. That's the conclusion of a new Brookings Institution study by Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University's Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service. Light, comparing Bush with his eight most recent predecessors going back to John F. Kennedy, finds that the incumbent ranks last in the number of "major legislative proposals" on his agenda. Bush largely continues a pattern of shrinking domestic agendas, in part because tax cuts have dried up funds for new initiatives. Kennedy and Johnson had 53 major domestic proposals in the 1961-64 term; Nixon had 40 in his first term; Carter, 41; Reagan, 30; George H. W. Bush, 25; Clinton, 33; and the current president, 18. That means Bush's agenda is less than half as extensive as Nixon's from 1969 to 1972 and not quite two-thirds as big as Reagan's in 1981-84. Light calculates that Bush has proposed only five "large new" programs. [more ]