Posted on 02/02/2004 9:30:29 AM PST by dts32041
?Is George Bush a conservative?? My friend Daniel Casse poses that question on the cover of the current Commentary
Daniel's answer is that Bush is a new kind of conservative: an advocate of choice and accountability in government rather than of reduction of government.
Daniel's article is characteristically perceptive and original, and I don?t want to quibble with it, especially since Daniel has nice things to say about my book The Right Man. Nevertheless, it seems to me very implausible to suggest that President Bush's new programs and policies offer Americans significantly more choices or more accountability today than they enjoyed four years ago. The tax relief programs of 2001 and 2003 are the only unequivocally free-market achievements of the president's first four years. Against them have to be weighed such deviations and disappointments as these: steel tariffs, the free-spending farm-bill, the explosion in federal domestic spending, the abandonment of Social Security and tort reform, and of course the new prescription drug entitlement ? whose costs, as we learned Friday, are now estimated at $534 billion over ten years, 30% more than was predicted when the new entitlement was submitted to Congress last year.
How to understand the discrepancy between Bush's record on taxes and his much less commendable record on spending? I don?t think Daniel is right that Bush has discovered some grand new ideological synthesis. If choice and accountability were the administration?s touchstones, it would never have adopted either steel tariffs or the farm bill. Of course Bush is conservative personally, on most issues anyway. But he is manifestly not governing in a consistently conservative way. To understand that discrepancy, it is more important to understand Bush's situation than his beliefs.
America in 2004 is a less ideologically conservative country than it was in 1984. The partisan map has been trending Democrat for a dozen years: Dick Morris points out that Minnesota is the only state in the Union that has grown more Republican since 1988. Conservatives sometimes forget that George Bush won 500,000 fewer votes than Al Gore in 2000; the Bush political operation can never afford to let that fact slip out of mind.
What has changed since the 1980s? Many things, but here are the four most important:
1) The Democrats have moved rightward on economics. After the defeat of Hillarycare in 1994, Bill Clinton gave up the attempt to enact major new federal programs - and reaped an economic boom and re-election in 1996 as his reward. His example has been noted. Voters just aren't as scared of a Democratic presidency messing up the economy as they were when memories of Jimmy Carter were fresh. That leaves upper-income voters free to vote for the Democrats' lifestyle liberalism.
2) The American family has weakened. One of the most portentous facts in American politics is this: married women vote Republican, single women vote Democratic. And since 1990 the proportion of US women who are now married has dropped by more than two percentage points.
3) Hispanics are voting their interests rather than their values. Hispanics as a group are culturally conservative, but economically needy. Their values suggest that they ought to vote Republican - but their hopes for more government aid are pushing them toward the Democrats.
4) The growing African American middel class, meanwhile, is voting its values rather than their interests. African Americans did well in the 1990s: The median income of married black families is now reaching $50,000 - more than enough to make them net losers from government redistribution. Yet these voters have not rethought their traditional loyalty to the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.
Bush has earned his political success by understanding these trends and adapting to them. Where he can hold onto traditional conservative principles, he does ? as he did on taxes. But where he cannot safely uphold conservative principles, he is not prepared to suffer martyrdom for them. On domestic issues, Bush is not a conviction politician of the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher type. He is a managerial politician of the Eisenhower/Ford type ? a dealmaker, a compromiser, coping with an adverse political climate. If he could be more conservative, he would. If he has to be less conservative, he will be that too. He?s not steering in some new direction. He?s steering to avoid hitting the guardrails on a suddenly very narrow stretch of road.
So let me suggest that Daniel is posing the wrong question. The question is not, "Is Bush a Conservative?" It is, "How conservative can Bush be?" An honest answer to that second question may be a good deal less reassuring than the answer to the first.
I think "postponement" is a more appropriate word than "abandonment."
HUH???????
B.S.
His facts do not support his conclusion. Conservative does not equal Republican.
Sounds pretty misguided to me. There's only one sure way to improve "choice and accountability" in our republic today, and that's by reducing the size of government. Everything else is window-dressing.
Certainly the Republican Party has been getting more liberal since then, but that speaks more to the allure of the power that can come from big government (small government is so boring) than to the popularity of their apostasy.
Pretty simple, really. Just look at the voter registration rolls.
My original home state, Iowa, for example, has changed tremendously in that time period. Republican registrations grew bigtime. Democrats are now less than independents.
I'm currently in TX. This state used to be a RAT stronghold, and is now a GOP stronghold. Most offices, if you want to be elected, you HAVE to be a member of the GOP, or you might as well forget about it.
Even some states that are still Dem are slowly but surely trending GOP...take WV for example: if the trend line there continues, and there is no reason to think it won't, the Mountain State will be Republican in just a few more years.
There are plenty more where that came from. Morris, and therefore Frum, are either lying or ignorant.
However, it should be remembered that Bush never campaigned on a platform of downsizing government. Instead of seeing government as the enemy, he sees it as something which, if managed correctly, will do good.
And what's the BS about only Minnesota becoming more Republican since 1988? Compare Texas in 1988 to today.
I think he learned the following from his father's loss in '92: Don't piss your base off over the main issue that matters most to them, and don't martyr yourself with "good economics" by cutting a deal that compromises that issue.
And everything else is up for compromise; ie. the deficit can be the next guy's problem.. He feels he MUST get reelected, everything else is secondary.
What the hell if Frum smoking?
That's exactly it. Calling himself a "compassionate conservative" does not help him. He's completely surrendering to the leftist notion that "compassion" can be exercised through government spending, and therefore has effectively given up the ideological field to the Left. Once he's established that that's an appropriate goal of government, he will never be able to outdo the libs in pushing for that goal. They will always be ahead of him in the public mind. It was, and continues to be, a horrid mistake on his part.
No kidding.
This article is a gross distortion of reality.
Aside from talking about how "compassionate" he was, Bush's main campaign theme was limited government, not managed government. I'm still waiting to see what his limit is.
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