Chapter One
I Know Conservatives, and George W. Bush Is No Conservative
George W. Bush is widely considered to be one of the most
politically conservative presidents in history. His invasion of
Iraq, his huge tax cuts, and his intervention in the Terri Schiavo
case are among the issues where those on the left view him as being
to the right of Attila the Hun. But those on the right have a
different perspective-mostly discussed among themselves or in forums
that fly below the major media’s radar. They know that Bush has
never really been one of them the way Ronald Reagan was. Bush is
more like Richard Nixon-a man who used the right to pursue his
agenda, but was never really part of it. In short, he is an
impostor, a pretend conservative.
I write as a Reaganite, by which I mean someone who believes in the
historical conservative philosophy of small government, federalism,
free trade, and the Constitution as originally understood by the
Founding Fathers. On that basis, Bush clearly is not a Reaganite or
“small c” conservative. Philosophically, he has more in common with
liberals, who see no limits to state power as long as it is used to
advance what they think is right. In the same way, Bush has used
government to pursue a “conservative” agenda as he sees it. But that
is something that runs totally contrary to the restraints and limits
to power inherent in the very nature of traditional conservatism. It
is inconceivable to traditional conservatives that there could ever
be such a thing as “big government conservatism,” a term often used
to describe Bush’s philosophy.
Perhaps the greatest sin of liberals is their belief that it is
possible for them to know everything necessary to manage the economy
and society. To conservatives, such conceit leads directly to
socialism and totalitarianism. At a minimum, it makes for errors
that are hard to correct. By contrast, conservatives like Ronald
Reagan understand that the collective knowledge of people as
expressed in the free market is far greater than any individual,
government bureau, or even the most powerful computer can possibly
have. And in politics, they believe that the will of the people
as expressed through democratic institutions is more likely to
result in correct policies than those devised by Platonic
philosopher kings. Liberals, on the other hand, are fundamentally
distrustful of the wisdom and judgment of the people, preferring
instead the absolutism of the courts to the chaos and uncertainty of
democracy.
Traditional conservatives view the federal government as being
untrustworthy and undependable. They utilize it only for those
necessary functions like national defense that by their nature
cannot be provided at the state and local level or privately. The
idea that government could ever be used actively to promote their
goals in some positive sense is a contradiction in terms to them. It
smacks too much of saying that the ends justify the means, which
conservatives have condemned since at least the French Revolution.
George W. Bush, by contrast, often looks first to government to
solve societal problems without even considering other options. Said
Bush in 2003, “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts,
government has got to move.” A more succinct description of
liberalism would be hard to find.
My main concern is with Bush’s economic policy because that is my
field of expertise. But it doesn’t mean that I am content with the
rest of his program. I am deeply concerned about the Iraq operation,
which has more in common with Woodrow Wilson’s policy of making the
world safe for democracy than with traditional conservative foreign
policy, which is based on defending the American homeland and
avoiding unnecessary political and military entanglements with other
countries-a view best expressed in George Washington’s Farewell
Address.
I am also concerned with Bush’s cavalier attitude toward federalism
and his insistence on absolute, unquestioning loyalty, which stifles
honest criticism and creates a cult of personality around him that I
find disturbing. As former Reagan speechwriter John Podhoretz,
author of a sympathetic book about Bush, has observed, “One of the
remarkable aspects of this White House has been the fanatical
loyalty its people have displayed toward Bush-even talking to
friendly journalists like me, it’s been nearly impossible to get
past the feel-good spin.”
For example, in 2002, the White House directly ordered the firing of
former Republican congressman Mike Parker of Mississippi as head of
the Army Corps of Engineers because he publicly disagreed with the
administration’s budget request for his agency. In 2005, it
ordered the demotion of a Justice Department statistician who merely
put out some data that the White House found inconvenient. This
micromanagement of such low-level personnel is extraordinary in my
experience. Columnist Robert Novak referred to this sort of thing as
the Bush White House’s “authoritarian aura.”
In White Houses filled with high-caliber people, dissent invariably
arises and becomes known. The apparent lack of dissent in this White
House, therefore, is an indication to me of something troubling-an
unwillingness to question policies even behind closed doors, an
anti-intellectual distrust of facts and analysis, and blind
acceptance of whatever decisions have been made by the boss.
The only alternative is something equally bad-fear of telling Bush
something he doesn’t want to hear. When asked whether he ever
disagreed with him, Mark McKinnon, Bush’s chief campaign media
adviser in 2004, said, “I prefer for others to go into the propeller
first.” This is the sort of thing that has gotten many big
corporations like Enron in trouble in recent years, and I fear
similar results from some of Bush’s ill-considered policies,
especially the disastrous unfunded expansion of Medicare.
In thinking about Bush, I keep coming back to Ronald Reagan.
Although derided as an amiable dunce by his enemies, it is clear
from recent research that his knowledge and intellect were far
deeper than they imagined. Articles and speeches drafted in his own
hand leave no doubt that Reagan was exceptionally well read and had
an excellent grasp of both history and current issues, including
highly technical matters and complex statistics. This knowledge
was honed by decades of reading the classics of conservative thought
and having spent much of his life publicly debating those whose
views were diametrically opposed to his.
By contrast, George W. Bush brags about never even reading a daily
newspaper. Having worked in the White House, I know how
cloistered the environment can be and how limited its information
resources are-much of what White House staffers know about what is
going on in the White House actually comes from reporters and news
reports rather than inside knowledge, which is frequently much less
than reporters imagine. It’s distressing to contemplate the
possibility that the president’s opinion about the worthlessness of
outside information sources is widely held within the White House.
Unfortunately, I know from experience that the president sets the
tone and style for everyone in the White House, suggesting that it
is more likely than not that this view does indeed permeate the West
Wing-a suspicion confirmed by the memoirs of those who have worked
in this White House.
Reagan, on the other hand, had a conservative distrust of his own
ability to know all the facts and arguments before making important
decisions. That is one reason why he was so tolerant of leaks from
the White House during his administration. Reagan knew that this was
an important safety valve that allowed dissenting viewpoints to
reach him without being blocked by those with their own agendas.
Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Darman, who controlled the paper flow in
and out of the Oval Office, for example, was often accused of
preventing Reagan from seeing memos that argued against positions
Darman favored.
I was involved in one very small effort to get around Darman myself.
One day early in the Reagan Administration, while I was still
working on Capitol Hill, a midlevel White House staffer whom I knew
called me. He had written a memo to the president that he couldn’t
get through the bureaucracy. Knowing that Reagan was an avid reader
of Human Events, the conservative weekly newspaper, my friend
suggested that I take his memo, put my name on it, and publish it as
an article in Human Events. I did, thereby getting the information
and analysis to the president that my friend thought he needed.
Others in the White House frequently did the same thing by leaking
memos to the Washington Post or the New York Times that appeared as
news stories.
By contrast, the Bush White House is obsessive about secrecy,
viewing leaks of even the most mundane information as the equivalent
of high treason. Ironically, this attitude can be
self-defeating, since “leaks” are a very effective way of getting
one’s message out-as the Clinton White House often demonstrated.
Think of it as giving an exclusive story to a reporter who has no
choice but to accept the leaker’s “spin.” In this way, a leak can
garner more and better press for a White House initiative than more
conventional means like press releases. Leaking, in short, is not a
moral issue, but can be a useful public relations technique.
Conservative Doubts
Traditional conservatives had grave doubts about George W. Bush
since day one. First, he was his father’s son. George H. W. Bush ran
as Reagan’s heir, but did not govern like him. Indeed, the elder
Bush signaled that there would be a sharp break with Reagan-style
conservatism in his inaugural address, when he spoke of being
“kinder” and “gentler.” Conservatives immediately asked themselves,
“Kinder and gentler than whom?” To them, the answer was obvious:
Ronald Reagan. In effect, Bush was accusing his predecessor and the
philosophy he stood for as being the opposite of kind and
gentle-nasty and brutish, perhaps. As columnist George Will later
put it, Bush was determined “to distinguish himself from Reagan by
disparaging Reagan.”
George H. W. Bush’s break with Reagan quickly became apparent in
other ways as well. For instance, he fired virtually every Reagan
political appointee in the federal government just as thoroughly as
if he had been a Democrat. Of course, the Reagan appointees all knew
that they were liable to be replaced at some point, but the
suddenness and thoroughness of the purge caught them all by
surprise-there had been no forewarning before Inauguration Day. It
created a lot of ill will that came back to haunt the elder Bush
when he got into political trouble later on. Most of the Reagan
people sat on their hands rather than come to his aid.
I was spared the purge only because Reagan had appointed Treasury
Secretary Nicholas Brady in the last days of his administration,
knowing that he was a close friend of then-Vice President Bush.
Since Brady stayed on, that spared Treasury the “transition” that
other departments underwent and thus avoided a purge. Within a year
or so, most of the senior political appointees moved on anyway and
Bush had his chance to appoint their successors. The same thing
would have happened in all the other departments, too, thereby
saving Bush a lot of unnecessary antagonism from the Reagan crowd.
It would have helped Bush govern as well, since many of the purged
positions remained vacant for some time for various reasons and were
often filled with less competent and experienced replacements.
Moreover, many of the so-called Bush people turned out to have no
meaningful connection to him and were nothing more than friends of
friends, serving in government just to get a line on their résumés
and not because they had anything to accomplish in terms of policy.
One of the first things I noticed when the new crowd came in in 1989
was that they would very seldom mention Ronald Reagan’s name. When
necessary, they always referred to the “previous administration.”
And it was quite clear that they viewed Reagan’s “hard-line”
conservatism as passé and counterproductive to governing. They, on
the other hand, thought themselves to be much more politically
astute and believed that they would be far more effective by
jettisoning Reagan’s ideological baggage.
The problem was that having abandoned Reagan’s principles, they had
nothing to replace them with except political expediency. This
culminated in the infamous abandonment of the no-new-taxes pledge in
1990. The Bush people thought they were being so clever by simply
posting a notice in the White House pressroom on June 26, 1990,
which said that budget negotiations with congressional Democrats
would take place and include discussion of “tax revenue increases.”
They seem to have thought that no one would notice this fundamental
reversal of Bush’s position on taxes. Needless to say, it was
noticed instantaneously, causing an almost immediate decline in
Bush’s poll ratings.
I was told by one of the key participants in this decision that they
never intended it as a repudiation of the pledge, but merely as an
acknowledgment that in a growing economy taxes automatically
rise. If this is true, it certainly is not evidence of political
sophistication, but rather its opposite. Being the only Reaganite
left in the Treasury Department, apparently I was the only one who
knew how negatively Bush’s concession would be perceived by the
Republican rank and file. Unfortunately, no one asked my opinion
before the decision was made.
I bring all this up because when George W. Bush first came on the
radar screen as a potential presidential candidate, all that most
conservatives knew about him was that he was the son of a president
who had abandoned a successful conservative governing philosophy in
favor of what they saw as squishy moderation, and was appropriately
punished by voters for his sins. So when the younger Bush started
talking about “compassionate conservatism,” therefore, traditional
conservatives immediately were suspicious of another Bush betrayal.
As Richard Miniter wrote in the conservative Manchester Union
Leader, “Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ strikes some as
insulting and signals a return to his father’s ‘kinder and gentler’
conservatism, which led to tax hikes and the loss of the White
House.”
As National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford later put it, compassionate
conservatism is an idea that should have been “strangled in the
cradle.” To even call it an idea is “flattery,” he said. For the
most part, it is little more than “pork wrapped up in schmaltz.”
Right from the beginning, George W. Bush made it clear that he was
not a conservative in the Reagan mold. In a speech in Indianapolis
on July 22, 1999, he called the idea that our problems would be
better solved if government would just get out of the way a
“destructive mind-set.” Government is “wasteful and grasping,” Bush
said, but “we must correct it, not disdain it.” Commenting on
this speech, Cato Institute president Ed Crane said it could have
come straight out of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank
allied with the Democratic Party.
Even in front of explicitly conservative audiences, Bush continued
his theme that government was not the enemy, but just wasn’t being
used for the proper ends. In a speech to the Manhattan Institute on
October 5, 1999, Bush put it this way: “Too often, my party has
confused the need for limited government with disdain for government
itself.” He went on to complain that the government was too weak to
do what was needed. It was “grasping” and “impotent,” he said.
(Continues…)
Doubleday
Copyright © 2006
Bruce Bartlett
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-385-51827-7
Excerpted from Impostor
by Bruce Bartlett
Copyright © 2006 by Bruce Bartlett.
Excerpted by permission.
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