The Procrastinator-in-Chief

Today’s messes are being left for future presidents to clean up.
By Terence Samuel

There were a couple of head-shaking moments this week that forced me to acknowledge the obvious: As bad as things are, they can, and likely will, get worse. The only real connection between these two media events was how much we already knew about what was supposed to be "the news," and the completely unappetizing sheen they draped on the future.

First, the president admitted that he got us into a war which he was not going to get us out of. He acknowledged that when he is back in Crawford enjoying his retirement, clearing brush and shooting quail, American troops will still be in Iraq, fighting and dying for reasons that the majority of Americans have yet to understand, though the president keeps explaining and re-explaining them.

Asked if he foresaw a day when there would be no U.S. troops in Iraq, the president grew visionary, anticipating a time after he has left the White House. "That, of course, is an objective," he said in response to a reporter's question, "and that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."

After that burst of candor, Bush was pressed on whether such an objective was possible during what was left of his administration. He retreated to platitudes. Since everyone knows exactly how much time he has left in office, he reasoned, to envision a complete withdrawal during that period would be setting a timetable, and, as we know, this president does not negotiate with timetables.

“A complete withdrawal?” he asked. “That's a timetable. I can only tell you that I will make decisions on force levels based upon what the commanders on the ground say.”

This should not have been surprising. It has been clear for a long time that Iraq was going to be a long war, but having grown used to the rosy, fact-free storytelling that comes out of the White House, we just don’t expect the truth when the news is bad. Frankly, there was something about Bush's admission that made the long-term reality of the war very concrete. To me, the suggestion that the debacle of Iraq was something to be passed on from administration to administration, without resolution, was more than a little maddening.

There was also something in the president's acknowledgement that made me think that the bad news may be worse than it seems right now. I realize that I have just described the inner life of a cynic, but that flows naturally from the other startling news of the week.

According to Tuesday's edition of The New York Times, all the horrible things you know already about under-educated, unemployed, inner-city black men, is nothing compared to the latest truth. We've known that things were bad for them, their children, and the mothers of those children, but in fact it's actually worse. One jaw-dropping statistic cited in the piece claims that, on some days, there are more young black men in jail than at work.

Again, I guess I should not have been surprised. “Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever, and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.” Whose consituency is this? We are talking about a pool of about 5 million men, most of whom did not graduate from high school, have no prospects for employments, and then father children and head to off to prison. Freedom, to say the least, is not on the march in places like inner-city Cleveland, or North St. Louis, or Chester, Pa. To hear the president tell it, to see the march of freedom you have to go to Baghdad and Basra.

The studies, and there are several of them, say that by the time they are in their mid-30s, 60 percent of black men who dropped out of high school have spent time in prison. That’s a lot of free food and lodging, but it's not exactly nation-building.

The studies are breathless in their urgency, but you have to wonder who is going to carry this banner into battle this election year. Republicans can easily take the president's position on Iraq troop withdrawal as their own on the black men issue: “It'll be up to someone else clean up that mess.”

Democrats on the other hand, confront hypocrisy and cowardice on the matter. Low graduation rates and high incarceration rates among black men are not issues that will move swing voters. It cannot easily be cast as a middle-class pocketbook issue, or as a national-security concern. When the mid-term campaigns heat up in earnest, expect instead a lot a talk about the future of Iraq, and the risk we run as a nation if we don't make the right choices and the right investments to extricate ourselves from that mess.

The extraordinarily sticky issue of fashioning a future for inner-city black men and their children will be lucky to get a mention at all.

It 'll be up to future presidents to ignore them. Again.

Terence Samuel is a political writer in Washington, D.C.