Bush has redefined conservatism. It is now not the process of cutting government and devolving powers; it is the process of installing choice and accountability into government even at the cost of allowing it to grow.
I see that. But I cannot grasp that as being "conservative". It isn't. It is slightly less a federal power grab than Dems would want but it is still advocacy of Federal control of local control.
I am not naive. This is the nature of politics. Bush can't just change things overnight (as some libertarians and Paleo Conservatives seem to think). Baby steps. I support Bush because that is the true conservative thing to do. He has to compromise with the powers that be in bloated DC. Let's just hope that when he wins re-election he appoints judges that will strike down much of the power the Feds have currently! I have faith in Bush on that.
Unless choice and accountability return to the way in which Americans think about the relationship of government to the people, it will never be possible to move this country to smaller government. The Left has convinced large sectors of the American public that it isn't safe for them to make their own choices, that it's much better to have choices made for them by Nanny. Likewise, the Left has encouraged the idea that someone else is responsible for my life, and that if I fail or suffer or even have to change jobs, somebody has done me wrong -- "uncaring" Republicans or "the rich" or "corporate fatcats," yada, yada, yada.
So I see Bush's willingness to live with "big government" while trying to nudge it towards a greater recognition of choice and responsibility as a necessary move to re-educate the American people for liberty. As other posters have pointed out, there's no point blaming Bush -- what's needed is an electorate that wants smaller government, and that we don't have. Or rather, the Reagen Revolution and the 1994 congressional elections both show that Americans are not closed to the idea of smaller government, and can even be attracted by it, but they have only a very limited sense of what "smaller government" might mean.
The 90's welfare reform was a start. We now know that we will not have little children with swollen tummies on every street corner without the federal welfare entitlement. That was the most important conservative accomplishment of the nineties.
The big issue now is Social Security. This country really needs about twenty-thirty years seeing that ordinary people can handle individual retirement accounts and do well with them -- that would do more to make smaller government politically imagineable than any amount of libertarian rhetoric. Social Security is after all the symbolic center of the Left's myth that it isn't safe to make your own choices -- "if you do, you'll be turned out in the streets in your old age and have to go the poorhouse and live on gruel." Demystifying Social Security is a cultural prerequisite in the United States to moving toward smaller government.
I've been reading reports that the Bush people are actually planning to move on SS reform before the election and make it a campaign issue. That is truly bold and truly important.
The other case in point is Bush's commitment to cutting taxes. The fact is that low taxes do not automatically mean less government, since the economic growth encouraged by low taxes may actually increase revenue even when rates of taxation are lowered. But the commitment to low taxes says something that is even more basic than slowing the rate of government growth -- "the money you earn is yours, the government's claim to a portion of it has limits, and you can be trusted to use it in reasonable ways that will serve the common good in the end."
Where I disagree with Barone is the assumption that Bush doesn't care about reducing government. He has said repeatedly that the government is too big and I don't see any reason to doubt is sincerity. He probably isn't as anti-government as some folk on this forum -- his political ancestors are more Henry Clay and Daniel Webster than the radical Jeffersonians. But you don't have to be a Rothbard anarchist to believe that the Federal Government is bloated in ways that harm the country. However, if we accept the premise that one president cannot overturn the last 75 years-development of government in the United States, that there is no other road to smaller government than a long road, Bush's approach seems as reasonable to me as any other.