Wow, this is the extreme silly season for the GOP, isn't it? First, they tell us that this ia still a "center right" country after it voted for a black man with the Muslim middle name who is a radical socialist who palled around with terrorists. Now, they tell us that Bush is not a conservative.
No, really. I have proof right here:
Oh, yes. Jonah Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times does the honors.
First, he asks the question we have all been pondering:
Was George W. Bush a conservative president?
Well, no. He was a Democrat. The only other choice left.
For liberals, this is a settled question. Bush is not merely a conservative, he is the conservative. He is the ur-right-winger, the Platonic ideal of all that is truly Republican.
Well, guilty. Also a war criminal. Him and his pal, Cheney.
For some liberals, this is clearly just a tactical pose. Bush is unpopular, so they hope to discredit conservatism by marrying it to Bush, just as Barack Obama succeeded by painting John McCain as a Bush clone. This is the moment, as Obama might say, to permanently block the right-hand fork in the road so the country can only move leftward.
Yup. Married to Bush to conservatism. That was us. Had nothing to do with his presidential campaigns or outlaw regime which started wars and redistributed wealth upward and eradicated regulations and gave us the biggest market bust since the Great Depression. We had to work real hard to make that connection.
The view on the right is very different, and the debate about the Bush years will largely determine the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
The view on the right is very different? All those years of backing him 100 percent meant nothing? Oh, it was just a smokescreen. Very well.
Bush's brand of conservatism was always a controversial innovation on the right. Recall that in 2000 he promised to be a "different kind of Republican," and he kept his word. His partner in passing the No Child Left Behind Act was liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. Bush's prescription drug benefit -- the largest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society -- was hugely controversial on the right. He signed the McCain-Feingold bill to the dismay of many Republicans who'd spent years denouncing campaign-finance "reform" as an assault on freedom of speech. The fight over his immigration plan nearly tore the conservative movement apart.
Oh yeah. I remember when the Republicans almost drummed Bush out of the party many a time. They were SOOO angry with him. Palling around with those terrorists Kennedy and Feingold. Treason! they yelled.
This is not to suggest that Bush was in fact a liberal president.
OH BROTHER! How the hell does he write that line?
Politics is not binary like that. There were conservative triumphs -- and failures -- to the Bush presidency. He appointed two solid conservatives to the Supreme Court. He tried to privatize Social Security, though that failed for sundry reasons.
Wow, a success and a failure. I would have chosen Iraq, Katrina and the Great Depression II. But that's just me.
His much-touted "compassionate conservatism" was rejected by many of us on the right as a slap to traditional conservatives and an intellectual betrayal of Reaganite principles. It was a rhetorical capitulation to Bill Clinton's feel-your-pain political posturing and an embrace of the assumptions that have been the undergirding of liberalism since the New Deal. That is, the measure of one's compassion is directly proportionate to one's support for large and costly government programs.
Compassionate Conservatism! Damn it! That was our downfall! Ignoring the fact of course that it was pure slogan and not one thing he did was compassionate. Oh, he did look down on the Katrina survivors from Air Force One. I forgot.
And Bush admitted as much. In an interview with the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes, Bush explained that he rejected William F. Buckley's brand of anti-government conservatism. Conservatives had to "lead" and to be "activist," he said. In 2003, Bush proclaimed that when "somebody hurts" government has to "move." This wasn't a philosophy of government as much as gooey marketing posing as principle. Ronald Reagan would have spontaneously burst into flames if he'd uttered such sentiments.
Let's see. Goldberg is angry because Bush expounded on compassionate conservatism by saying that when "somebody hurts" that government has to move even though it didn't move for Katrina victims or, say, wounded American soldiers left to lie in filth at Walter Reed Army Hospital. I think Bush was less compassionate that Goldberg makes him out to be. That should make Goldberg happy.
Dissent from Bush was muted for years, in large part because of 9/11 and the Iraq war. Conservatives, right or wrong, rallied to support their president, particularly in the face of shrill partisan attacks from Democrats who seemed more interested in tearing down the commander in chief than winning a war. But the Bush chapter is closing, and the fight to write the next one has begun.
Oh, wait. The neocons were "biting their tongues" here? Anxiously awaiting to criticize their president? Was that what all those lopsided, partisan Congressional votes were all about? And what about those "shill partisan attacks"? Like when the Democrats caved in on the Iraq war? Maybe he was referring to the successful battle to keep Social Security out of the hands of the market speculators? Thank God that "shill partisan attack" succeeded.
In one corner, there are a large number of bright, mostly younger, self-styled reformers with a diverse -- and often contradictory -- set of proposals to win back middle-class voters and restore the GOP's status as "the party of ideas" (as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it).
That must be Sarah Palin. Of course, she is unable to enunciate a sentence, never mind an idea. If she had one.
In another corner are self-proclaimed traditional conservatives and Reaganites, led most notably by Rush Limbaugh, who believe that the party desperately needs to get back to the basics: limited government, low taxes and strong defense.
The basics, may I remind Mr. Goldberg, are fear, smear, racism, crony capitalism and incompetence, no-bid contracts, pre-emptive war and gay sex in airport bathrooms
What is fascinating is that both camps seem implicitly to agree that the real challenge lurks in how to account for the Bush years.
Oh yeah. They are going to have to spend the next eight years or more rewriting that history.
For the young Turks and their older allies -- my National Review colleagues Ramesh Ponnuru, Yuval Levin and David Frum, the Atlantic's Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, New York Times columnist David Brooks et al -- the problem is that Bush botched the GOP's shot at real reform. For the Limbaugh crowd, the issue seems to be that we've already tried this reform stuff -- from both Bush and McCain -- and look where it's gotten us.
Real reform. I think that Bush and company spent eight years screwing up every corner of the the U.S. government. More pollution, dangerous drugs, unending war, bankrupt banks, unrepaired hurricane damage, graft and corrpution. It was the total oppose of reform. A hurricane corruption and incompetence.
Neither camp has adequately explained where Bush figures in their vision for the future of the party. Is reform going to be a debugged compassionate conservatism 2.0 or a Reaganesque revival of conservative problem solving? Does back-to-basics mean breaking with the precedents of the last eight years or building on them?
I think, Jonah, you are setting the stage for where Bush figures in. As much as he was the punching bag for the left in office, he will be the dartboard for warring neocon conservatives afterwards. The thanks Bush is going to get! Talk about Legacy. Bush won't have one in his own party!
The irony is that both camps agree on a lot more than they disagree. The reformers are committed to market principles and reducing the size and role of government, and so are the back-to-basics crowd. The problem is that an elephant named George in the room is blocking each side from seeing what the other is all about. But hopefully not for much longer.
There is so much wrong here. Market principles lead to a market crash that is scaring the pants off of everybody and even its chief architect, Alan Greenspan, admitted as much. And reducing the size and role of government? After you've spent us in to oblivion with tax cuts for the rich, the Iraq war and now the bailout of the economy? How can you ever talk about these things again and have anybody take your party seriously?
The elephant is the room, Mr. Goldberg, is that your party had pretty much the run of the whole U.S. government and screwed it up royally. Foreign policy. Domestic policy, Economic policy. The country laid waste in every direction.
Here's some advice, Mr. Goldberg, since I know you won't take it. Start with truth. Admit that absolute power corrupted absolutely. That market places don't run without regulation because everybody cheats and nobody wins. That stripping the middle class to enrich the wealthy robs from everybody. That being a bully in the world leads to dead Americans, ruined reputation and and empty treasury.
That somewhere, you'll find good, honest people who can debate policy without using fear, smear and racism.
That somehow you'll find some honest-to-goodness morals and a desire to serve the country and not a bunch of lobbyists.
Otherwise, sir, you will operate on the fringes of society clinging to a couple of electoral votes in the Southern States.
Good luck with that, Mr. Goldberg.