A few years ago, when I was living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, I saw a flock of vultures go to work on a wounded deer. The birds have human counterparts. Behold the buzzards of press and politics as they sink their talons into the most decent man in high office today.
"President's Trip Is PR Disaster," read one headline. "Bush Fails as Salesman," said another. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa fluttered in: The Bush mission was a "hat-in-hand horror show."Lee Iacocca, the Chrysler crybaby, leaped to a microphone to rail once more at the Japanese. He was disappointed at the president's inability to wring greater concessions from Tokyo. It is not the auto industry's fault, he said, that Japan sells so many cars in the United States. He was fed up with that kind of talk. The executives who run the American auto industry are not idiots.
Ah, sir, a bystander might observe, the executives may not be idiots, but considering their performance they surely are morons - and overpaid morons at that.
The president's trip was not a disaster. The New York Times buried on Page 26 some comments that escaped the buzzards. James Koontz of New Hampshire, president of a machine tool manufacturing firm, had some sensible things to say:
"I think the trip created recognition that there is a problem. The fact that we focused on the Japanese trade problem may have gotten some of the Japanese transplants to realize that they have to work more with American vendors.
"On the other hand, our problems are not really with the Japanese. They are at home. The major companies and unions have to sit down and agree to make our plants more flexible and productive. The Japanese are 90 percent right in saying our problems are here."
Reginald Lewis, chairman of Beatrice International, a food company, had no criticism of the mission. "I don't think it was the wrong thing to do." Dexter F. Baker, chairman of a petrochemical company in Pennsylvania, was one of the executives who accompanied the president. He said: "Some market-opening initiatives were achieved. I think it was a very positive trip. This wasn't tokenism."
My guess is that the president's visit gave the inscrutable Japanese a great deal to get scrutable about. They should understand clearly that the cries of "failure" will fire up protectionists in Congress. In an election year all kinds of folly are predictable.
If the Japanese want to avoid a trade war that could set off worldwide upheaval, they may yet prove agreeable to reforms of real meaning. Meanwhile, their pledge to buy an additional $10 billion a year in auto parts is not an insignificant promise.
Fly off, you carrion birds! George Bush is the only president we have and he's doing the best he can at a difficult period at home and abroad. Look at the five lightweights who are seeking to replace him. Their names are Brown, Clinton, Harkin, Kerrey and Tsongas. Could any one of them do better? Think it over.