Posted on 02/03/2004 11:40:38 AM PST by Paladin2b
We may be reaching a tipping point in the career and presidency of George W. Bush. This is not because John Kerry is such a formidable candidate. It isn't even because large numbers of voters seem to despise the president. Nor because his reelect numbers are so anemic. The real reason for worry in President Bush's camp is that conservatives have begun to turn on him. Vast increases in domestic spending, liberal immigration proposals, exploding deficits, the expansion of the nanny-state, new entitlements (such as the budget-busting Medicare expansion)--none of this looks, tastes, or smells anything like the conservatism of the 1980s and 1990s. It's far more similar to the Nixon domestic strategy of the 1960s and 1970s: spend, spend, co-opt, co-opt, smear, smear.
Is there a defense of Bush to be made? In National Review, former Bush speechwriter and neoconservative doyen, David Frum, answers that question. I find it unpersuasive. Here's Frum's argument and my interpolations:
"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.
Give David points here. No one even faintly conservative on economics would have supported the steel tariffs. The agricultural spending bill was a paleoliberal's fantasy. Domestic discretionary spending is through the roof--far more budget-busting than former President Clinton's. Tax reform is non-existent. Instead, we have had a more and more complex tax code, with the burden tilted toward the middle class. As for free meds for granny, Bush pushed for only trivial reforms in the Medicare bill and we're now told it will cost us more than a hundred billion more than we were told last year. Who would bet against the cost rising to over a trillion dollars once the program actually gets under way?
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.
A simple question: Why? I'm not sure that president Bush has ever been a believer in real personal freedom. On most social and cultural issues--from drug legalization to marriage rights--Bush has always been an authoritarian-style conservative. He has never consistently or boldly spoken of the need to restrain government as a good in itself. He has governed exactly as one would have expected, if you consider him a Texas adherent of the religious right who happened to grow up in a family committed to public service. Whatever the context, Bush has had choices. And almost every choice he has made has been in the direction of an authoritarian, big-spending conservatism, not a frugal, libertarian one.
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.
This is all true. But the difference between a failed presidency and a successful one is that a successful president doesn't simply succumb to existing trends and beliefs; he challenges them. Everything Bush has done in order to increase his vote share among a Democratic-trending electorate can be summarized by the instinct to send more government goodies to the right groups: tariffs for steel workers, tax breaks for corporations, immigration liberalization for Latinos, and so on. This is not a conservative impulse. It's a paleoliberal one. It hasn't won votes. The Democrats can always claim to offer more. But it has blurred Bush's message.
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.
But Bush has accelerated this trend. Today, fiscally conservative social liberals like me need have far fewer qualms voting for a Democrat. We know that there is no difference on big government between the parties--in fact, that Republicans are now more prone to spend money than Democrats. No president has made this point more clearly than Bush. It's not the tax cuts as such. It's the combination of tax cuts, huge spending increases and a refusal to concede openly, quickly, or convincingly that this amounts to a fiscal problem. The second Bush administration has done exactly what the first Bush administration did: create an opening for Perotism. Part of Howard Dean's appeal, I'd argue, is related to his Perot-like, populist, anti-deficit candidacy.
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.
The solution is not to rival the Democrats in pandering. It is to offer the same values of small government, equal opportunity, and lower taxes to the emerging ethnic voting blocs. The reason Latinos are wary of Republicans is also related to the Republican base's discomfort with immigrants--even legal ones. Bush should not be held responsible for this. He's not in line with his party's paleo-right. But they have made themselves heard these past few weeks--and Hispanics have noticed. What should Bush do? If he had tilted tax cuts more to the middle class, and combined that with a pro-family message, Latinos might have listened. Or if he'd gone further in his temporary worker program and offered a new path to citizenship, he would have been seen as risking something politically to help that minority. But he tried to avoid risk and to pander at the same time. Bad idea.
4) The growing African American middle class, meanwhile, is voting its values rather than its 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.
Unproven. Bush has earned success primarily because of his conduct in the war on terror, and the Democrats' flubbed response by comparison. Bush has tried clumsily to appeal to blacks and Hispanics, just as he tried to reach out to gays. But his base--at times viscerally uncomfortable among blacks, Latinos, and especially gays--limits him. And the more he has to appease his base--by cozying up to the likes of Tom DeLay or Rick Santorum--the more these groups suspect he cannot be trusted. I've seen this up-close with the gay vote. Bush won a million gay votes in 2000. He didn't want to alienate them. But he cannot say the word "gay" in public, or his base would revolt; and he has been forced into backing a constitutional amendment against marriage and civil union rights for gay couples. The result? A collapse in gay support. The problem is Bush's paleo-base, and his inability to challenge or to move beyond 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.
Eisenhower and Ford were modest conservatives. The way Bush has tried to use federal power to advance social causes--marriage counseling, faith-based funding, anti-smoking campaigns, programs to combat obesity--were anathema to them. So were huge deficits, even in wartime. The model Bush more closely follows is Nixon: a man with foreign policy boldness whose domestic policy amounted to huge numbers of federally funded bribes to any number of interest groups, vast new entitlement programs, a huge expansion in the role of the federal government, and a legacy of debt and inflation. I know why Frum omitted the Nixon comparison. But it's an obvious--and damning--one.
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.
Here is where David lets Bush off the hook much too easily. Bush, in fact, had a central and important way to reduce domestic spending: He could have argued that in wartime, we had to streamline government at home in order to afford a necessary war abroad. He could even have relented on some tax reductions--such as the estate tax--for the same reasons. He could have made an argument for general sacrifice, keeping the deficit manageable, while fighting an important war. He chose not to. I emphasize the word "chose." Rather than make the case for war responsibly and coherently, he argued that we could afford everything: guns, butter, margarine, whipped cream, whatever. That was a choice made either out of weakness or delusion or cowardice. But it was a choice. What Bush faces now as his conservative coalition fissures are the simple consequences of that decision.
Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at TNR.
Apt observation. And even in the last reason left to vote for Bush ( control of the judiciary) , its hard to see him nominating a true conservative for the SCOTUS. Its just hard for me to see him doing that.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
He has nominated conservative after conservative to the bench.
I agree. He has had one goal: to be the gay trojan horse in the GOP. I'd say he has had moderate success.
I'M HERE! I'M HERE!
If or when he does nominate a conservative, strict constitutionalist to the SCOTUS, the nominee will get Borked.
At this point, we'd be lucky to get a Scalia or O'Connor through the Senate.
As long as there are 40 Dems (real or virtual) in the Senate, Clarence Thomas is the last conservative you'll ever see on the Supreme Court. Our 5-4 advantage will soon be gone, Dubya or not.
Yes, they would and that's what scares me. The left has these same problems but manage to "organize" around whoever it is and circle the wagons. We need to do the same. Kerry as President? I don't think so. He pandered to Communists in this hemisphere.
I'm voting for Geo. W. Bush, and gladly. Anyone who wants to throw away the possibility of nominating a significant number of Supreme Ct. justices over a piddling increase in NEA funding is, IMO, a "useful idiot" to the left.
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