All said, a nice and illuminating article.
In a word, no. The great mushy American moderate voter bloc does not share the fierce and unyielding patriotism that is the hallmark of the rock-ribbed sturdy capital-C Conservatives of this nation. Bush may not be conservative enough to satisfy that highly partisan sector of the electorate, and in fact, many of them may sit home or back some fringe candidate that has no prayer of gaining any more than a fraction of a percent of the vote total.
What Bush has done is kick out from beneath them, the support the Democrats have had for years for some kind of benefit for Grandma's prescription bills. Sure, this does eat even further into the already shaky fiscal position of the Medicare program, but the thing is, any program the Democrats propose would cause even more rapid collapse of the system. And his head has been in the right place on the program to get the economy back to generating more golden eggs, while incidentally collecting a greater revenue stream with which to fund these expanding government plans.
The illegal immigrant problem is an almost hopeless mess, and the proposal now put up for consideration is an attempt to track and manage this influx. The claim is that the small entrepreneurs with limited payrolls have been feeding this demand for more and more low-wage employees, and without a demand, there would be no market in moving these international wage slaves. The immigrants don't vote, and the Hispanics or Orientals already here certainly are not in favor of further crowding their own place at the table. But the small entrepreneurs DO vote, and that is what is driving this equation.
Is Bush a conservative? No. Should he try to be? Apparently that course of action neither appeals to him, nor does he calculate it would be beneficial in the long run, to himself or the mushy American Moderate lobbies.