Guess Who Didn't Come To The Forum
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX

This Tuesday, while on his much-hyped vacation from Washington, D.C., the President hosted his first ever Economic Forum at Texas’ Baylor University Law School, with topics ranging from corporate responsibility and trade to economic recovery and job creation. Besides missing A roster of participants assembled by invitation only read like the Wall Street Journal’s business pages: CEOs from companies like Harley-Davidson, Charles Schwab, American Express and Cisco Systems were scheduled to be in attendance, in addition to a few blue collar wage earners thrown in to add some sense of balance. “Sense” is the operative word here. Despite the White House’s extending of an invitation to Medicare Plus Choice patients Fred and Bertha Salazar of San Antonio, and Lucinda Harmon, a registered nurse from Salado, Texas, and Robert Johnson, a UPS driver from Waco and Leytrice Henson, a plant manager for Folgers Coffee in Sherman, Texas, the participant list for the president’s “Economic Forum” was regrettably weighed down by the presence of corporate America.

The overwhelming presence of corporate America notwithstanding, the event also failed to be ideologically diverse. And even among those who do not spend their days on golf courses or in boardrooms, there indeed was a shared sentiment among participants, basically that the Bush administration was on the right track and that their economic policy proposals are just what the doctored ordered for our ailing economy. The independent radio show “Democracy Now” reported on Wednesday that nearly every single one of the closing speakers merely mirrored the Bush administration’s opinions on economic policy and the current state of the economy, sometimes going so far as to use Bush language from previous speeches! Karl Rove, one of the president’s advisers, said that he “wasn’t aware” of any White House staff members supplying any of the closing speakers with speech material taken from Bush’s old stuff, but admitted that just because he doesn’t know it happened doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

The president’s Economic Forum was problematic for a number of reasons, its lack of diversity being but one. The Forum also failed to truly address the major issues dividing Washington and America, ranging from Social Security to a looming budget deficit. Participants at the Forum agreed, for example, that the Administration’s $1.5 trillion tax cut be made permanent and, even after Tyco and WorldCom, Enron and Arthur Andersen, that business regulations be streamlined, Jonathan Wiseman wrote in the Washington Post.

Truth be told, President Bush’s Economic Forum was merely an opportunity to grandstand and showboat—a purely political effort to save the president’s skin. The forum featured no dissenting opinion and no true and refreshing dialogue. Indeed, there were even Republicans criticizing the White House strategy: “The whole forum looks as if it was put together solely and exclusively by [Bush’s] political advisers,” said Bruce Bartlett, an economic adviser to the elder Bush and now an economist at the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis in Texas. Surely something is awry if members of the president’s own party think he missed the mark.

White House chief of staff Andrew Card called the forum “ a listening and teaching session for the president,” which sounded promising since the president who asked the Brazil’s leader if “they had black people there too” needs a good bit of both in his life. Perhaps we can have a “Foreign Policy Forum” or an “Affirmative Action Forum” where the president can listen and learn about those issues too. But I would hope those would be worthwhile affairs with enlightening dialogue and true diversity, unlike the day-long photo-op the nation just witnessed.