WASHINGTON, April 14 (UPI) -- President George Bush went out of his way to be genial Friday to a politician he had never met, and may never have heard of before the staff gave him the customary fast briefing on Edmund Stoiber, the conservative challenger in the September elections for the presidency.
Bush noted that since he came from Texas, and Stoiber came from Germany's big southern state of Bavaria, they had a lot in common. Both men are religious, conservative on social matters, and Stoiber was one of the first Europeans to come out staunchly in favor of Bush's missile defense plans -- when the left-of-center Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was still grumbling about Star Wars.
Bush's first meeting with Schroeder last year was less than cordial, and much of it was taken up with an argument about the merits of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Schroeder came out of the White House to tell the German press, "I made it clear to the American president that between our two countries exist significant differences, especially on issues about environment and human rights."
When Bush thinks about European politicians at all, which isn't very often, he thinks it might be agreeable to have a clutch of fellow conservatives in power over there. His predecessor Bill Clinton got a lot of political mileage about the way the Europeans were following Clinton's "Third Way," and electing left-of-center governments in 13 of the European Union's 15 countries.
So far, Bush's ideological chums are doing fine. Right-of-center governments now run Austria, Denmark, Italy and Portugal, and Bush would be mildly pleased if France and Germany went the same way. (Blair, as a committed free trader who has led the British Labor Party to accept free markets and low taxes, gets a pass.)
For Bush's ears, Stoiber says the right things about tax cuts, structural reform of Germany's sluggish economy and labor market, and the need to increase defense spending. Stoiber is committed to a policy he calls the triple-40.
That means: first, cutting the German government's share of gross domestic product to 40 percent (from almost 50 percent today). Second, cutting the social wage (the amount employers pay in health and social insurance on top of a wage) to no more than 40 percent of salary -- and that is also running 50 percent and higher, depending on age. Third, it means cutting the top rate of income tax to 40 percent -- and Schroeder has yet to fulfill his promise to cut it to 49 percent.
These kinds of reforms make sense to Bush. (Although we had better call them campaign promises. Stoiber has yet to explain how he can carry out these three measures while also raising defense spending from the current miserably low 1.5 percent of GDP, and also fend off the threats of the European Commission to impose fines if Germany breaks the European Monetary Policy rules and lets is budget deficit climb above 3 percent.)
But ideology isn't everything. Stoiber startled Bush Friday in the Oval Office, and probably worried him, by telling the American president that the danger of Iraq getting a nuclear weapon was secondary to the current crisis in Israel and Palestine. Tactically it may be true, but any politician who has paid even casual attention to Bush's foreign policy since the "axis of evil" speech in January should know that for Bush, Iraq is the big match, and the Israeli crisis is an annoying distraction.
By contrast, what Bush is hearing from Stoiber's opponent, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, is a readiness to help. Schroeder has broken with 50 years of quasi-pacifist tradition and German foreign policy timidity to deploy German troops in the Balkans and Afghanistan and to dispatch German warships to the anti-terrorism patrols off the Horn of Africa. Schroeder also has German 'Fuchs' armored vehicles, specially equipped to test for chemical warfare, deployed in Kuwait, and he has no plans to move them if the Persian Gulf heats up. That's the kind of ally Bush appreciates.
And now Schroeder has said that German soldiers might become necessary at some point to help stabilize the situation in the Middle East. He left it vague about whether this might be a NATO or European peacekeeping force or under United Nations auspices, or whether it might be an unarmed monitoring force. The point was, for Bush, that the left-of-center German chancellor was ready to be part of the solution. And in that context, ideology matters a whole lot less than standing by to help if needed -- even if Schroeder does not hail from the German equivalent of Texas.
