Posted on 04/25/2002 6:09:04 AM PDT by truthandlife
Reports of tensions between George W. Bush and conservatives are appearing in media that are often uncomprehending of, unsympathetic to, and fond of finding conflicts among conservatives.
Some conservatives are caught in a time warp. Bush is, second only to Ronald Reagan and not second by much, the most conservative president in living memory. And Bush is, as successful leaders tend to be, lucky.
Lucky? Three Bush decisions, all contradicting long-standing Bush positions, dismayed conservatives who care deeply about free speech (he signed campaign finance reform legislation), free trade (he imposed steel tariffs that will be ineffectual without being innocuous) and Israel's freedom (he began speaking the way the State Department thinks). Then Al Gore gave a speech.
Suddenly, conservatives remembered.
They remembered what Bush never forgets: that the country is tied, politically. That in 2000 half the country favored Gore. That three consecutive elections have produced merely plurality presidents, that at the end of the 19th century five consecutive elections did that, and that the 2004 election might.
In 2000, Bush sealed the Republican Party's acknowledgment that the government is, because a vast majority insists on it, involved in assuaging the two great fears of life -- illness and old age.
The conservatism that defined itself in reaction against the New Deal -- minimal government conservatism -- is dead. However, Bush has positioned his party as pro-choice where it will matter most to most Americans in coming years -- regarding education (freedom to choose among public and private schools), Social Security (freedom to invest a portion of Social Security taxes in private retirement plans) and medicine (government assistance that fosters freedom to shop for care).
But some conservatives, addicted to disgruntlement, still have the oppositional mentality that characterized conservatism between the coming of Franklin Roosevelt and the departure of Jimmy Carter. In that era, conservatives felt doomed to perpetual disappointment as marginal critics of an uncongenial political culture.
Many older conservatives retain this oppositional mentality because they are older: Habits, especially intellectual ones, die hard. Many younger conservatives have an oppositional mentality for two reasons. It is fun -- it feels heroic -- being an embattled church-militant in an unconverted world. And the conspicuous culture -- the media and campuses -- are hostile.
However, conservatives should stop feeling like victims. The campuses have made themselves risible. And talk radio, the Fox News Channel and Washington's conservative think tanks have made conservatism a more than merely equal participant in political arguments.
Of the three Bush decisions that conservatives rightly abhorred, two -- imposing tariffs and refusing to veto the campaign finance legislation (he has vetoed nothing in 15 months) -- are not likely to establish patterns. Campaign finance reform is finished for now, and Bush cannot have enjoyed the reaction, here or abroad, to his protectionism.
The most important of his three mistakes -- his "evenhandedness" regarding Israel and the terrorist Yasser Arafat -- probably is self-correcting: He knows which delusional advisers mistakenly assured him that if he issued commands to all parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he would be obeyed. And regarding his first 15 months:
Judging by his nominees so far, Bush will splendidly staff the federal judiciary (half of it, if he serves two terms), but not until Republicans control the Senate. They will be more apt to do that if he campaigns on the issue of judicial activism. His tax cuts will do more than Republican congressional majorities would do to limit government activism. His education bill deeply disappointed only those conservatives who mistakenly want education reform driven by Washington. And concerning the most momentous policy problem, conservatives cannot fault either the substance of Bush's decisions on biomedical matters (cloning, stem cells) or the seriousness with which he has arrived at that substance.
Which is why conservatives in the capital should be more like conservatives across the country: on balance, quite pleased.
The two are not synonymous. Republicans should be quite pleased with George W Bush...he has been the ideal GOP representative.
Conservatives, and here I mean the paleo- variety, not the neo-, on the other hand have little to applaud, aside from (and this is significant) the way he and his administration has conducted itself in comparison to his predecessor.
You mean Mr. Wage and Price Controls?
I feel fairly good about Bush, but the above is simply not the case as I understand it. I thought that in his last education bill he abandoned vouchers when it became politically inconvenient.
Bush is not a revolutonary. He will not change the system, he will simply run it as well as he can, more or less from the right.
I'll take sleaze over the PATRIOT ACT/CFR/Immigration/etc. any day. It's sad to even say that.
Bump to that.
Will the Shill is what I've been calling him since '96. He's a dullard, a liberal and a pissant. That makes him exactly what passes as a conservative among republicans. He is marginally more conservative than W, but that isn't saying much.
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