Posted on 06/15/2003 8:36:50 PM PDT by IoCaster
Bush's ideological facade hides political goal
Sunday, June 15, 2003 - EVERY PRESIDENT for nearly a century has had political operatives in the White House to advise him on how his decisions would play with the public and tell him what the ramifications of policy would be on his re-election prospects. But few Americans are cynical enough to believe that this political gamesmanship is anything other than a means to an end, the end being to effectuate policy. Teddy Roosevelt had trusts to bust and Manifest Destiny to fulfill; FDR a Depression to tame; Richard Nixon a detente to achieve; Ronald Reagan a government to shrink and a Cold War to win; Bill Clinton social programs to save from the conservative hatchet.
And so it has always been -- until now. From the moment of his disputed election in 2000, President Bush has been dramatically reversing the traditional relationship between politics and policy. In his administration, politics seem less a means to policy than policy is a means to politics. Its goal is not to further the conservative revolution as advertised. The presidency's real goal is to disable the Democratic opposition, once and for all.
This has become a presidential mission partly by default. Bush came to the presidency with no commanding ideology, no grand crusade. He was in league with conservatives, but he was no fire-breather. For him, conservatism seemed a convenience -- the path to the GOP nomination. One is hard-pressed to think of a position Bush took during the 2000 campaign, save for his tax cuts, much less a full program.
As is typical with strategists, Karl Rove, Bush's political Svengali, isn't much of an ideologue either. According to Nicholas Lemann's recent profile of him in the New Yorker, as Rove moved up the ladder of Texas GOP politics, he seemed more interested in advancing his career than promoting policy. Rove is an operator. His job is to win elections and build unassailable coalitions so that he doesn't have to worry about winning future elections. The philosophical stuff matters only insofar as he can parlay it into political advantage. As he told Lemann, "I think we're at a point where the two major parties have sort of exhausted their governing agendas." In Rove's view, that means devising some new agenda that will attract votes.
The difference between Rove and former political operatives like Michael Deaver in the Reagan administration and Dick Morris in Clinton's is that he doesn't just advise on the political consequences of policy; he seems to be involved in crafting policy, making him arguably the single most important adviser in the White House. Rove's hand and guiding spirit are everywhere. As John DiIulio, who briefly headed Bush's faith-based initiative, put it in an interview, everything in this administration is political, by which he meant that everything is the product of political calculation and everything is devised specifically for political advantage.
Every administration tilts decisions to reward friends and hurt enemies, though none since the days of Warren G. Harding has been as zealous in delivering largess to supporters and none since Nixon has seemed so ruthless in meting out punishments as this one. (Coming under intense administration criticism for his remarks, DiIulio apologized and expressed deep remorse for his "groundless" charges.)
Still, Rove has had something more up his sleeve than lining up support for his master's re-election. Rove's genius -- and the true genius of this administration -- is that he recognizes that political machinations don't have to be ancillary to policy. If Rove's mission is to ensure Bush's re-election and the formation of a GOP electoral monolith, he wants to devise policies that not only appeal to the party's core voters. They should also disable the Democratic Party from contesting elections. This is government expressly designed for its own self-perpetuation -- government designed to undermine the political process.
Rove's template for his new idea of governance is "tort reform" -- enacting laws that will reduce jury awards for various malfeasances, from product liability to medical malpractice. According to Lemann, this was Rove's earliest legislative crusade in Texas. To this day, Republicans insist that businesses have been unfairly burdened by excessive jury awards, but the political reason this has become a fervent GOP cause is that trial lawyers contribute heavily to the Democratic Party. Choke off their income and you choke off a major source of Democratic money.
Similarly, the president's huge tax cuts have been touted both as an economic stimulus and a way to shrink the federal government by denying it future revenues. The latter goal was also Reagan's when he pushed tax cuts more than 20 years ago. Reagan genuinely believed that government was bad. It was a central tenet of his ideology. But for this nonideological administration, there's an overriding political reason to scale back government: Federal workers and employee unions are among the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party. Forget the economy. Tax cuts hit the Democrats where it hurts: right in the wallet.
The list goes on. Bush's flirtation with school vouchers is called a way to improve education, but vouchers also would politically disempower teachers unions, another source of Democratic funding and support. The regulations issued last week by the Federal Communications Commission, allowing media conglomerates to own more TV stations, are said to foster competition. But they are also a means to empower conservative voices like that of Rupert Murdoch, whose Fox News often seems like an adjunct of the White House. The faith-based initiative -- moving social services from government and community organizations to religious ones -- is portrayed as a way to make delivery of services more efficient. Politically, it would undermine more liberal-oriented community institutions and advocates that aid Democrats.
This turn of policy into politics is no less applicable to foreign affairs. The administration claimed the Iraq war was fought to disarm Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction and to prevent the Iraqi dictator from aiding terrorists. But as a political matter, the war struck the Democratic Party at one of its vulnerabilities: the idea that they're weak on defense.
Thirty years ago, Nixon pursued the same goal, but deployed covert KGB methods in the belief that overtly attacking the basis of the political system was likely to bring opprobrium. Rove can operate in broad daylight partly because what he is doing is perfectly legal, partly because his plan is so bold that he realizes no one in the media is likely to call him on it, and partly because demonizing and destroying Democrats is now a tenet of the party he guides. It has been said of Bush that he intends to finish the Reagan revolution by embedding conservatism so deeply into the governmental fabric that it will take generations to undo it. What he is really finishing, though, is not the Reagan revolution but the Clinton wars, which had far less to do with ideology than with politics. As Rove has engineered it, this is about power, pure and simple. It is about guaranteeing electoral results.
That is why, one suspects, Bush elicits such deep antagonism from the left -- deeper perhaps than any political figure since Nixon, even though he is personally genial and charming. At some level, liberals know what the president and Rove are up to and fear that they will succeed in dismantling an effective two-party system. The left knows that Rove and company aren't keen on debating issues, negotiating, compromising and horse-trading, the usual means of getting things done politically. On the contrary: The administration is intent on foreclosing them.
As much as liberals abhor the conservative agenda, there is something far more frightening to them now -- not that Republicans have an ideological grand plan but that they don't have one. Instead, the GOP plan is policy solely in the service of politics, which should terrify all Democrats.
"There is an old story that is applicable here. Two partners who owned a grocery store bought ten thousand cans of fish at an exceptionally low price. When the fish was delivered, they made a comparison between what they had bought and what their competition was selling. Upon opening a can of their competitor's product, they found the fish was a fresh pink color and tasted good. When they opened cans of their product, they found the fish had deteriorated to a white mush and didn't taste fresh. The question became how to sell their shipment of crummy fish to their customers. They re-labeled the cans "Special High Quality Fish—Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can!" Then they raised the price and they stuck the customers with it. "
Bush's conservatism is absolutely, positively, irrefutably, with no question whatsoever, guaranteed not to turn pink in the can.
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"Foreign aid is little more than us exporting our inflation."
This sounds like one of Ché Guevara's criticisms of AID.
Go ahead, Luis, keep repeating to yourself, over and over again, "Bush is a conservative President. Bush is a conservative President. Bush is a conservative President. Bush is a conservative President. Bush is a conservative President."
If one has enough faith, saying the same thing over and over will, in a magical, mystical way, make it come true.
I think that you would have been inordinately fond of Huey Long or the Perons. The arguments in their support are essentially the same as the ones you make.
Why don't you educate yourself on the nature of our "flexible" currency system, and how we avoid catastrophic inflation in spite the fact that we continue to print paper without backing and come back to me to finish off your education.
Before you go throwing in names like Che Guevara for the sake of the implied connotation, why don't you mount an intelligent argument instead.
Ask yourself a question (write it down and read it to yourself if it's easier that way)...what happened to the value of your money when the Fed printed all those new $20, $50, and $100 dollar bills sometime ago and just threw them into the system?
They increased the amount of curency out here, decreased the value of your dollar.
Now they send currency out of the country in the name of "foreign aid" and lower the amount of currency in our home market, thus avoiding the inflation the excess currency would have eventually caused.
Understanding how things work, and acknowledging that understanding does not carry with it any implication of either support, or condemnation...however, the first step top solving a problem is in understanding the nature of the problem, and the root causes. I am not interested in idiotic ramblimgs about how political ideology should work in a vacuum, I concern myself with how politics are conducted in the real world.
I understand your position...it's easier to bitch about what's going on, than to actually try and do something about what's going on.
What's truly hysterical here, is the idea that a couple of internet keyboard jockeys with no real knowledge of anything that's going on, outside that which they read in the newspapers, have the unbelievable arrogance of claiming they know how to get things done better than the man in the White House.
I am trying to point out how Marxist thought has become mainstream and is considered by some to be conservativism.
Exporting inflation is not, ultimately, a good thing. The problem of fiat money is well discussed here:
This is simply not the case. Bush's tax cuts were far less than Kennedy's, and are dwarfed by Reagan's. And Bush is not cutting spending - on the contrary, it is increasing rapidly.
The left knows that Rove and company aren't keen on debating issues, negotiating, compromising and horse-trading, the usual means of getting things done politically.
Again, I disagree. Bush compromises constantly. It is his way. Often he gets what he wants, but often he compromises himself into a corner, ala education and campaign reform.
I discussed the evils of fiat money at lenght on Radio FreeRepublic during my two hour interview of G. Edward Griffin.
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