Stock Performance Undercuts Bush's Vision of Ownership Society

[Judi Lynn]

Stock Performance Undercuts Bush's Vision of Ownership Society

March 23 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush has tried to sell Americans on an ``ownership society'' that would create more wealth -- and more Republicans in the process. The stock market hasn't accommodated.

The Standard & Poor's 500 Index -- the benchmark for American equities -- is down 2.8 percent since Bush took office five years and two months ago. That's the worst performance during the same stage of any two-term administration in the past half century except that of Richard M. Nixon.

The market's performance is undermining a central goal of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser. Borrowing from Margaret Thatcher's privatization push in the U.K. in the 1980s, Rove's theory is that if more Americans make their own financial decisions and the last vestiges of a welfare state are dismantled, a culture of ownership will spring up. The ranks of Republican voters, the idea goes, will swell along with it.

``The ownership society looked very attractive on paper,'' said Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. ``But once you flesh out the changes, people become very concerned because they are already fearful that their economic security is slipping away,''
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