The Ideological Impostor <Socialist Trash Barf Alert>

Volume 13, Issue 10. June 3, 2002.

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The Ideological Impostor

In the 2000 election, the voters of this country could have been forgiven for sizing up George W. Bush as a cross between a moderate Republican and DLC Democrat. Here are some of the things he said while campaigning:

One could imagine Bobby Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson -- or even Al Gore on a good day -- uttering just those words.

"To seniors in this country," Bush earnestly declared, "you earned your benefits, you made your plans, and President George W. Bush will keep the promise of Social Security -- no changes, no reductions, no way."

"Medicare," he added, "does more than meet the needs of our elderly; it reflects the values of our society. We will set it on firm financial ground, and make prescription drugs available and affordable for every senior who needs them."

In the third presidential debate, Bush told Gore, "You know I support a national patients' bill of rights, Mr. Vice President. And I want all people covered." He called for grants to the states "so that seniors -- poor seniors -- don't have to choose between food and medicine."

He pledged to change the tone in Washington, to govern as a bipartisan the way he had done as governor of Texas. "I know it's going to require a different kind of leader to go to Washington and say to both Republicans and Democrats, 'Let's come together,'" he said.

Bush repeatedly promised to balance the budget and insisted that the nation could afford a tax cut without slipping into deficit. He even criticized a House Republican plan to achieve budget savings by cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit: "I don't think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor," he said.

Turning to the environment, Bush regularly suggested that he would be unusually green for a Republican. "To enhance America's long-term energy security," he said, "we must continue developing renewable energy."

On education, he famously promised to "leave no child behind," borrowing not only liberal ideas about universal inclusion but literally plagiarizing the three-decades-old slogan of the Children's Defense Fund (the fund now prints its slogan with a trademark sign).

All of these declarations were, of course, lies. While all recent presidents have periodically gone back on promises and some have told explicit untruths, what's interesting about this president is that his multiple lies are something very rare in politics: They are ideological lies. Worse still, according to The Washington Post's David Broder, Bush seems determined to make compassionate conservatism the centerpiece of the 2002 campaign -- the actual substance of his presidency notwithstanding.

Hypocrisy, as La Rochefoucauld observed, is the homage that vice pays to virtue. In the case of Bush, campaign lies are the homage that Republican sloganeering paid to the popularity of Democratic ideology.

Imagine instead that Bush had hit the campaign trail promoting a Social Security shift that increased the system's deficits, requiring cuts in benefits and an increase in the retirement age; that he'd promised a tax cut that cost more than twice Social Security's long-term shortfall. Imagine that his patients' rights bill was advertised as authored by the HMO industry -- and as prohibiting patients denied care from suing their insurer; that he'd touted a Medicare plan that would keep ratcheting down payments to hospitals and doctors; that his environmental policy would scrap one protection after another and let industry rewrite the rules; that he'd pledged to demonize Democrats who resisted his policies; that his No Child Left Behind program pledged to freeze funding for Head Start and money for child care -- and to go back on a bipartisan deal to increase federal funds for poor public schools in exchange for high-stakes testing.

Campaigning on that set of views, Bush would have been the minority candidate of a minority party. There would have been no cliffhanger in Florida and no narrow Supreme Court resolution of Bush v. Gore. Yet that set of views has been his actual program.

More interesting still, Bush has mostly gotten away with it. While a careful reader of the quality press might connect the dots and conclude that Bush's presidency is a double fraud -- not only wasn't he really elected, he isn't remotely governing on the program he offered voters -- there's been no widespread outrage.

One simply cannot conjure up a systematic presidential deception of comparable cynicism and scale. Bill Clinton, to be sure, lied about his sexual escapades. He often enraged allies both left and center: The DLC and the labor movement agree on just about nothing but they share Monica Lewinsky's assessment that Clinton is a faithless lover. Clinton tacked right on values issues in the 1992 campaign only to embrace gay rights. He assiduously courted the gay community only to back a lame halfway policy of "don't ask, don't tell." Conversely, he initially postured liberal on economic issues only to abandon both universal health insurance and economic stimulus by public investment. Many blacks were so comfortable with Clinton that they considered him the first African-American president. But for all his marquee appointments of black officials, Clinton could embrace a cruel version of welfare reform and abandon old friends such as Lani Guinier.

Yet there was about Clinton a broad ideological consistency. Though he could infuriate his friends on the particulars, these were tactical reversals within a relatively narrow, consistent ideological whole. Clinton was at heart a centrist -- a moderate with some liberal leanings who governed as a wily pragmatist and who often fought his conservative adversaries to a draw or better. Jimmy Carter was similar. Bush Senior was essentially a moderate Republican who tried to court his party's right wing, but his heart wasn't really in it. Ronald Reagan was a genuine conservative who never pretended to be anything but. To find a deception of comparable scale to Bush's, you have to go all the way back to Lyndon Johnson, who ran in 1964 as the candidate who would keep us from a wider war in Vietnam and then escalated the conflict. On domestic policy, Johnson gave the country the progressive program he promised and more. Indeed, as Robert Caro's latest installment makes clear [Robert Mann, "Masterful," TAP, May 20, 2002], if anyone should feel betrayed by LBJ, it was the Senate's southern bourbons with whom he'd allied himself to become majority leader in the 1950s.

As ideological fraud, then, George W. Bush remains in a class by himself. It's understandable why he does it: Democrats' domestic positions are basically popular. But why does he get away with it? He pulls it off, I think, for several reasons (of which September 11 is fairly far down the list).

First, in his own goofy way he's a political natural, a nice guy. His political style has a chumminess and warm physicality that's disarming. It's easy to detest his policies but not so easy to hate the man. The first time I watched him at close range, he was working a room of Democratic senators (he'd boldly solicited an invitation to a Democratic Caucus retreat and I was an invited speaker). That's when I realized how much his critics had underestimated the man as a politician. Bush was off script and off the record, and he did just fine at the banter. The wisecracks were spontaneous and smart. Indeed, if Clinton alienated because he was too clever by half, Bush endears when it turns out he's not as dumb as you thought. You're waiting for him to stumble and you're charmed when he doesn't.

Second, Bush has absolutely superb handlers and tacticians. His speechwriter, Michael Gerson, is so gifted that he could make a trained monkey sound like Thomas Jefferson. Karl Rove, his political grand strategist, has perfected a game of leaving the Democrats with no popular issues on the table. If Democrats are for Social Security, so is Bush. If they back patients' rights and prescription drugs, so does he. If they embrace kids, he does them one better. Bush then takes away in the fine print everything that he offers in the headlines. Politically, alas, this is mere detail -- so much policy wonkery. The betrayal enrages experts and advocates but can be dealt with by creative obfuscation when it comes to the voters. But what does that say about the voters?

Here we have the third and most alarming factor. This is an era in which voters are unusually quiescent. For two decades, expectations about what government can do have been so lowered -- and here many Democrats are just as culpable as Republicans -- that the broad public doesn't get terribly indignant about betrayals, much less of the ideological kind. The public has come to expect government to jerk people around. When Bush breaches a promise, it only confirms the general suspicion that government can't be trusted anyway. And the fact that the Democratic Party doesn't have a clear opposition ideology makes Bush's task that much easier.

September 11 certainly allowed Bush to change the subject. At the same time, however, voters remain closer to core Democratic views on a broad range of domestic issues. Polls consistently show that voters don't translate Bush's popularity on national-security issues into support for Republican positions on patients' rights, Social Security, and the rest [Ruy Teixeira, "Politics for Democrats," TAP, April 8, 2002]. But politics itself is so debased and devalued that all Bush need do is genuflect to those broad Democratic themes. After all, the guy really does seem to care about poor people, seniors, and kids.

In fairness, voters were well aware that Bush was no liberal -- on some issues, at least. He straightforwardly called for a tax cut, and for vouchers as a remedy to "failing schools." He said he wanted to reduce the incidence of abortion, though he was careful not to support overturning Roe v. Wade. He embraced private retirement accounts as a complement to Social Security for younger workers, but not at the cost of weakening Social Security itself. And he advocated greater use of religious institutions to carry out social services. But he carefully balanced these views with a sweeping embrace of liberal rhetoric and programs on a host of other issues.

Moreover, a lot of Bush's hard-right program has flown beneath the radar. On the issue of reproductive rights, for example, where Bush has always stopped just short of calling for an end to a woman's right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, he's done just about everything else to hobble abortion, family planning, and even the therapeutic use of discarded fertilized embryos. An administration plan to eliminate contraception coverage from federal employees' insurance plans was reversed by Congress.

Or consider No Child Left Behind. Bush's grand scheme for children in low-performing schools had three elements: relentlessly test kids, let some parents opt out of such schools with vouchers, and increase public-school funding. But Bush has repeatedly welshed on the funding. [See Noy Thrupkaew, "A Dollar Short"] Under the newly enacted education law, children as young as eight will be subjected to standardized testing. In inner-city schools, as many as half will fail. These kids will be "left back" as they used to say, but without adequate resources for good remedial education. What then? Will they just keep repeating fourth grade?

Schools carry the burden of society's other deficits. If Bush were serious about leaving no child behind, he would not just throw tests at kids and vouchers at their parents. He would offer kids decent day care while their mothers worked, fully fund Head Start, and get children of low-income families prepared for school with high-quality pre-kindergarten. Decent wages wouldn't hurt, either. He's of course done none of this, and millions of children will be left behind. But with a few eloquent Gerson speeches informed by careful focus groups and some nice photos of himself with poor kids, Bush has seized the rhetorical high ground.

Holding bush accountable for these deceptions will require more than partisan or journalistic truth squads. The detail is hidden in plain view, courtesy of the Web (for one-stop shopping, try our own www.movingideas.org). However, information without political narrative might as well not exist. So the larger challenge is to re-energize not just liberal politics, but politics as such. Today's characteristic politics lends itself perfectly to slogan, symbol, deception, even systematic prevarication.

As political scientists since Maurice Duverger have pointed out, a disengaged politics is necessarily a conservative politics. Without the counterweight of a mobilized citizenry that has the motivation to pay attention and the institutions that can aggregate and express its concerns, the system defaults to its other source of residual power: concentrated wealth. Institutions like the labor movement, which give ordinary people the mechanisms to effect political change and the motivation to take politics seriously, are diminished. It's no accident that labor did so much of the heavy lifting for Gore -- and that it wasn't quite enough. As another political scientist, Kay Lehman Schlozman, has observed, most people of modest means no longer participate vigorously in politics -- not only because they don't believe politics make a difference, but also because the institutions that invite their participation are dwindling.

Media are also culpable: Short-attention-span TV and Internet gossip sites function as though politics were not about how a great democracy makes weighty choices; it's just another form of commerce or entertainment. The media loves the gotcha game, but whopping discrepancies in the Medicare budget or global-warming policy are not good gotcha.

These trends, all of which debase politics, have been building for a long time; their full fruit is George W. Bush. Now the Bush charade is due for a revival in this year's campaign. As long as the citizenry is anesthetized, however, even systematic presidential lying is of little consequence. And a polity in which leaders lie and the public shrugs falls short of a democracy. That's the hard truth.

Copyright © 2002 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Kuttner, "The Ideological Impostor," The American Prospect vol. 13 no. 10, June 3, 2002. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

Here's another liberal half-wit who falls into the trap of underestimating this president.

The only satisfaction I get from reading drivel like this is the knowledge that Mr. Kuttner is going to be miserable for at least the next six years.

The author is so incredibly wrong on just about every issue, it's hard to know where to begin. Just more of the same really, the bitter ravings of a disenfranchised liberal...

Bush gets lost at the end. Probably because the article was never about him to begin with. Kuttner is confused and troubled by Bush's successes so he reaches into his big bag of explanations to stick something together that will satisfy himself and dispel his confusion and discomfort. He never really touches Bush or explains him.

In general, these sorts of articles aren't written to explore and explain something, but to give an answer without really examining what one's talking about. Clinton comes off as "ideologically consistent" and Bush a hypocritical Machiavellian precisely because Kuttner is interested in putting out the ideological answer, not on what makes either person tick or on how politics works.

Here's my letter to the Prospect...

Dear Sir: Bush is only an ideological impostor if your only source of news is the mainstream media. The rest of us knew (and have known) for quite some time that Bush is a Nixonian centrist-to-conservative Republican. You miss much when you believe what CNNABCCBSNBC tell you and never question the filter and the spin with which they saturate their stories. The only impostor here is Kuttner, masquarading as an knowledgable commentator. I hope the Prospect compensates him well to remain out-of-touch and to appear perpetually ignorant. They couldn't pay me to be such a laughingstock, but as P.T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

I got great satisfaction from reading this - esp. after realizing the pain the author must be going through to be able to distort reality to such a degree.

One line from the Princess Bride comes to mind

Inconceivable!

That is what the liberal left must be thinking - I like it.

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