Bush has more in common with the Democrats than he does with true
Republicanism. Read why here.

----

George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan
Review of The Impostor.

By Kevin Drum

There was a period stretching roughly from August 2003 through November
2004 when it was nearly impossible to walk through a branch of Barnes &
Noble without tripping over half a dozen stacks of books explaining why
George Bush was the most disastrous president in U.S. history. Al
Franken had a book. Eric Alterman and Mark Green had a book. Arianna
Huffington had a book. So did Molly Ivins, Joe Conason, and David Corn.

I read two or three of these tomes before I got bored and stopped. It
turned out the bill of particulars was pretty much the same from book to
book, and since I already agreed that Bush was an unusually bad
president-in fact, my daily job at The Washington Monthly was frequently
dedicated to illustrating just that point-there hardly seemed much sense
in proving the law of diminishing returns by continuing to read every
new screed that came out.

In any case, America finally held its presidential election in 2004 and
the market for Bush-bashing books promptly ebbed for a time while
shell-shocked liberals tried to figure out just what had hit them. It
was, once again, safe to stroll leisurely through your local bookstore.

Predictably, it didn't take much time for the tide to turn back, and in
early 2006, another Bush-bashing book hit the stands. The charges
leveled against the president were familiar: reckless spending
increases, out-of-control deficits, relentless pandering to business
interests, and a deliberate and willful contempt for policy analysis.
The Bush White House, it argued, judges legislation not by whether it's
conservative or liberal, but solely by whether it will gain the
Republican Party a couple of percentage points of support among some
voting bloc or other. Principle is nothing. Politics is everything. In
other words, more of the same. Except for one thing: The author of
Impostor (Doubleday, $26.00) is Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan-era
official and longtime conservative columnist. In fact, until last
year-when he was fired for writing this book-he was a senior fellow at
the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-wing think
tank dedicated to flat taxes, Social Security privatization, and a host
of other conservative hot buttons.

Put in plain terms, Bartlett's charge is simple. George W. Bush, he says
on page one, is a "pretend conservative." Philosophically, Bush actually
has more in common with liberals than he does with true conservatives.

Now, there's not much question that this is overstated. Bush won't be
getting an invitation to join The New York Times editorial board any
time soon. Among other things, he's appointed hundreds of conservative
judges, cut taxes repeatedly and dramatically, signed into law a ban on
partial-birth abortions, and committed America to its biggest and
costliest war of choice since Vietnam.

And yet, in a narrower but still provocative way, Bartlett makes a
persuasive case. I'm a pretty conventional FDR liberal myself, but
several years ago, I came to the same conclusion Bartlett did: Bush may
be a Republican-boy howdy, is he a Republican-but he's not the
fire-breathing ideologue of liberal legend.

Don't believe it? Consider Bartlett's review of Bush's major domestic
legislative accomplishments. He teamed up with Ted Kennedy to pass the
No Child Left Behind Act, which increased education spending by over $20
billion and legislated a massive new federal intrusion into local
schools. He co-opted Joe Lieberman's proposal to create a gigantic new
federal bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security. He has mostly
abandoned free trade in favor of a hodgepodge of interest-group-pleasing
tariffs. And after initially opposing it, Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley
bill with almost pathetic eagerness in the wake of the Enron debacle,
putting in place a phonebook-sized stack of new business regulations.

Want more? He signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, a b=EAte
noir of conservatives for years. His Medicare prescription-drug bill was
the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society. He
initially put a hold on a wide range of last-minute executive orders
from the Clinton administration, but after a few months of "study"
allowed nearly all of them to stand. And he has increased domestic
discretionary spending at a higher rate than any president since LBJ.

Bartlett even has a bone to pick with the most prominent feature of
Bush's record that's incontestably conservative, his almost religious
dedication to tax cuts. Yes, Bush has cut taxes. Yes, that's generally a
good, conservative thing to do. But as Bartlett correctly points out,
cutting taxes without cutting spending doesn't do the conservative cause
any good. Bush and the modern Republican Party plainly have no interest
in cutting federal spending, and the resulting massive deficits will
eventually force "the largest tax increase in American history"-one that
will be entirely Bush's fault. Some conservative. To be sure, there are
plenty of counterarguments to these charges that Bartlett doesn't
address. NCLB may increase education funding, but it also contains
stealth provisions designed to increase support for school vouchers in
future years. Bush may have signed DHS into existence, but only after
using it as an excuse for a bitterly partisan round of union bashing and
traitor mongering. The Medicare bill may have been an entitlement
increase, but it also contained plenty of business- friendly provisions
that made liberals-and conscientious conservatives-gag. And a tax cut is
a tax cut, even if it's not the precise kind of tax cut Bartlett would
prefer.

Still, open-minded liberals who want to understand the nature of
contemporary American politics should give serious consideration to
Bartlett's argument: Despite five years of seething anger at George
Bush's supposed hardcore conservatism, the fact is that he's not really
a hardcore conservative. So what is Bush, then? This is where things get
a little more confusing. As it turns out, Bartlett has about half the
answer right, but there's more to the story than he seems willing to
acknowledge.

For starters, it's worth conceding that there is more than one
legitimate definition of "conservative." I've long viewed George Bush as
a temperamental conservative, the kind of guy you meet in a bar who
slams down his drink and asks belligerently, "You know what this country
needs?"-and then proceeds to tell you. He's a conservative who is
defined by a visceral loathing of '60s-era "moral decay," not one who's
read the collected works of Russell Kirk and Milton Friedman or who has
been inhaling National Review since he was a teenager. Still, even if
the guy in the bar is indeed one particular type of conservative,
Bartlett makes the reasonable point that a conservative president needs
to have at least a few vague guiding conservative principles, and those
are hard to find in Bush. If you raise spending, increase tariffs, and
create new entitlements without blinking an eye, even belligerence
doesn't make you into a genuine conservative.

This, then, is the half of the answer that Bartlett gets right: Bush, he
says, is not so much a conservative ideologue as he is simply a
politician who has taken tribal partisanship to levels not seen since
the 19th century. Bush is relentless at fighting for what he wants, but
it turns out that what he mainly wants is to increase the Republican
majority and kick some Democratic *****. If that means he's "perfectly
willing to jettison conservative principles at a moment's notice to
achieve that goal"-which he obviously is-well, that's the price you pay
for electoral victory, isn't it?

In other words, Bush is another Richard Nixon, a comparison that
Bartlett spends an entire chapter on.

The first person to draw a parallel between Bush and Nixon was someone
who knew Nixon well: then-New York Times columnist William Safire, who
had been a speechwriter for Nixon. In a July 2003 column, Safire
imagined a conversation with the late president, who spoke approvingly
about Bush's strategy of moving left domestically while keeping the
Republican base preoccupied with an external threat. Nixon had done this
successfully with Vietnam and Bush was doing it with Iraq.

Although the popular perception of Nixon is still that of an
archconservative who infuriated liberals, Bartlett reminds us that on
domestic policy Nixon routinely caved in to public opinion and betrayed
his conservative principles-for example, by creating the EPA, supporting
enormous increases in Social Security, and proposing a
guaranteed-incomes policy. Likewise, Bush spent nearly his entire first
term talking tough but then caving in with barely a whimper to any
interest group that might help him win a few more precious votes in
2004. Tariffs were enacted in order to appeal to steelworkers; the
Medicare bill was designed to buy the votes of the elderly; and
McCain-Feingold was signed in the hope that it would provide a temporary
fundraising advantage for the Republican Party. If all of these actions
were precisely the opposite of what a real conservative would do, so
what? As Nixon might have said, don't you know there's an election
coming up?

As far as all this goes, Bartlett's argument is a good one, and the
Nixon comparison even provides a neat and underappreciated explanation
for why liberals hate Bush so much. After all, it's possible to respect
someone with whom you have a principled disagreement, but not so easy to
respect someone whose only real principle is to crush anybody who gets
in his way. (Bush's alter-ego, Karl Rove, summed up this philosophy
within earshot of journalist Ron Suskind when he yelled to an aide about
someone who had displeased him, "We will ***** him. Do you hear me? We
will ***** him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!") As
with Nixon, it's not really Bush's conservatism that gets liberals
seething. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's precisely his lack of
political principle, combined with a vengeful ruthlessness so dark it's
scary, that makes liberals break out in hives.

But this is where the second half of the story kicks in, and it's a part
of the story that Bartlett avoids. Like many a true believer on both
right and left, he's convinced that Bush's opportunism has all been for
nought. He didn't need to pander to all those special interests. He
could have stayed faithful to the conservative creed and still won
reelection.

In this, Bartlett is almost certainly wrong. Genuine conservatives have
a grim electoral history, after all. Robert Taft lost to Eisenhower,
Barry Goldwater got crushed by LBJ, and Bob Dole was never even a
serious contender against Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich was certain that
conservatism had finally won the day in 1994, but five years later he
left office a defeated man. And does anyone even remember Phil Gramm?

That leaves only Ronald Reagan, and it's true that Reagan campaigned and
won as an unapologetic conservative. Unfortunately, this single example
simply doesn't do the analytic heavy lifting that Bartlett thinks it
does. The reality is that Reagan came along at a unique moment in
history, a time when the country was exhausted from the perceived
liberal excesses of the '60s and '70s and ready for a short breather,
especially one delivered with Reagan's trademark optimism and sunniness.
Reagan was a reaction to an era, not the father of a movement.

What's more, as Bartlett tacitly acknowledges, Reagan in practice wasn't
as conservative as his supporters remember him being. Sure, he famously
cut taxes in 1981, but he raised taxes in nearly every year after
that-including corporate taxes. He took a stab at cutting Social
Security, but backed off after losing seats in the 1982 election and
ended up endorsing a conventional liberal solution that increased
payroll taxes and created a massive trust fund. He reduced the growth of
domestic spending, but he never eliminated the cabinet departments he
had promised to eliminate. In fact, he even added a new one. And he
supported expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an important
anti-poverty measure. The reason that even liberals look back on Reagan
a little more fondly today than they did at the time is that, in the
end, he turned out to be a fairly pragmatic guy. (For more on this, see
"Reagan's Liberal Legacy," by Joshua Green, January/February 2003.)

This is the reality that true-believer conservatives-Bartlett among
them-don't want to believe. For all the trash talking from right-wing
leaders like Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay, the fact is that America is
only a moderately conservative country. And despite the electoral
success of conservatives over the past decade, that hasn't changed much.
Although party affiliations have shifted as Southern conservatives have
migrated to the GOP, Harris polls since the early 1970s show that
Americans self-identify as about 20 percent liberal, 35 percent
conservative, and the rest in between, and those numbers have been
rock-steady for decades. So where's the conservative revolution?

The answer is that it almost certainly never existed. Americans may not
be ready for European-style soft socialism, but poll after poll
demonstrates that they like Social Security and Medicare, they support
iconic liberal programs in areas like environmentalism and worker
safety, and they're pretty tolerant on social issues-and getting more
tolerant over time, not less. George Bush couldn't have bucked these
trends even if he'd wanted to, which is why he campaigned as a
"compassionate conservative" and frequently gave speeches in which
observers could have been forgiven for thinking they were hearing the
reincarnation of FDR. Even at that, though, he only barely won. Hardcore
conservatism simply doesn't sell in America.

What's more, it's never really been the governing philosophy of the
Republican Party anyway. Bartlett usefully points out, for example, that
Bush is "incapable of telling the difference between being pro-business
and being for the free market," and he's right that this is a
distinction that's seldom acknowledged. As Bartlett puts it, "Genuine
supporters of free markets... denounced just as strongly government
policies that subsidize businesses as those that unfairly penalize
them." In other words, they believe in real competition. But Bush's
Medicare bill didn't promote free-market competition; it simply tossed
benefits at pharmaceutical companies. Likewise, his energy bill was
stuffed with giveaways for utilities and oil companies, his
transportation bill was a pork fest that would have made Boss Tweed
blush, and his bankruptcy bill was little more than an out-and-out
payoff to the credit card industry.

This is far from being an aberration. The current incarnation of the GOP
may have taken interest-group pandering to new levels, but Bartlett
fails to acknowledge that the Republican Party has long been more
faithful to the pro-business creed than the pro-market one. Ronald
Reagan's 1986 tax-reform bill may indeed have been a rare instance of
high-minded, bipartisan tax policy-and a surprisingly progressive
one-but the very reason it's so celebrated is because such things are so
rare. After all, didn't Reagan also preside over the savings-and-loan
debacle, surely the largest giveaway of all time to the wealthy business
class that funds the Republican Party?

Like it or not, the pay-to-play machine built by Newt Gingrich, Tom
DeLay and Jack Abramoff-and enthusiastically supported by George Bush-is
the apotheosis of what the Republican Party has always been about, not a
betrayal of its principles. There is no primitive conservatism to go
back to, and no messiah to lead the Republican Party out of its
corporate welfare wilderness.

In the end, this is what Bartlett doesn't-or can't-get. Ideological
activists may be loath to acknowledge this, but the truth is that today
both major political parties are largely stuck. On the left, the problem
is that liberals have achieved the bulk of what they set out to achieve
75 years ago, and the country is pretty happy with it. In the arena of
economic security, they've given us Social Security, unemployment
insurance, Medicare, subsidized public education, welfare, and the
minimum wage. Equal rights? We've got the Civil Rights Act, the Voting
Rights Act, affirmative action, gender discrimination laws, the Violence
Against Women Act, and the ADA. Abortion is legal, forced prayer is gone
from public schools, and criminal defendants are guaranteed a lawyer. In
the area of protection from corporate predation, we've got OSHA, workers
comp, loads of environmental regulations, consumer-protection laws by
the bushel, and capital markets that are more transparent than ever in
history. Sure, there's more to do, but that's not bad. There just aren't
very many big-ticket items left with the potential to generate a lot of
voter excitement.

In the same vein, the problem on the right is that conservatives have
failed miserably whenever they've tried to take a serious chainsaw to
modern liberalism. Cutting taxes is just about all they have left, and
as Bartlett concedes, taxes can't be cut forever. This has mostly
reduced conservatives to nibbling modestly around the edges of the
contemporary liberal edifice while simultaneously passing out enough
goodies to keep their supporters happy and the rubes, if not happy, at
least scared enough to keep voting for them. This means that unlike the
'30s or the '60s, when politics was vitriolic because the stakes were
high and society was undergoing dramatic changes, the source of today's
vitriol is precisely the opposite. As with World War I trench warfare,
it's the result of two evenly matched sides beating each other bloody
year after year but neither being able to claim victory. Bill Clinton
couldn't get national health care passed, but George Bush couldn't gut
Social Security either.

Although the heat of battle often obscures this, the unhappy reality is
that modern American politics is mostly played at the margins. In
practical terms, we're no longer fighting seriously over grand
principle, we're just fighting over who gets the most toys. The fact
that Impostor-perhaps unwittingly-lays this so bare makes it a
worthwhile read not just for its intended conservative audience, but for
liberals as well. If progressives ever want to break our current
political stalemate, they're going to have to open a new front.

Kevin Drum is a contributing writer for The Washington Monthly.
SyVyN11 wrote:

<jimj122680@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1141450420.444965.183370@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

My wife feels as I do. So do my kids, several of my neighbors and
relatives, all hard core Republicans. George Bush is a fraud. He is
NO Republican. He is in the political vein of some loser like Ted
Kennedy.
And Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and several of the other fraud talk
show hosts, are nothing more than full time Bush apologists. The only
host who has it right most of the time is Michael Savage.

care to give your reasons? Cause I think you're a liberal that's tal=

*****!
=20

Bush has more in common with the Democrats than he does with true
Republicanism. Read why here.

Bush has more in common with the Democrats than he does with true
Republicanism. Read why here.
George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan
Review of The Impostor.
By Kevin Drum
The Bush White House, it argued, judges legislation not by whether it's
conservative or liberal, but solely by whether it will gain the
Republican Party a couple of percentage points of support among some
voting bloc or other. Principle is nothing. Politics is everything. In
other words, more of the same. Except for one thing: The author of
Impostor (Doubleday, $26.00) is Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan-era
official and longtime conservative columnist. In fact, until last
year-when he was fired for writing this book-he was a senior fellow at
the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-wing think
tank dedicated to flat taxes, Social Security privatization, and a host
of other conservative hot buttons.

Put in plain terms, Bartlett's charge is simple. George W. Bush, he says
on page one, is a "pretend conservative." Philosophically, Bush actually
has more in common with liberals than he does with true conservatives.

Bush has more in common with the Democrats than he does with true
Republicanism. Read why here.

----

George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan
Review of The Impostor.

By Kevin Drum

There was a period stretching roughly from August 2003 through November
2004 when it was nearly impossible to walk through a branch of Barnes &
Noble without tripping over half a dozen stacks of books explaining why
George Bush was the most disastrous president in U.S. history. Al
Franken had a book. Eric Alterman and Mark Green had a book. Arianna
Huffington had a book. So did Molly Ivins, Joe Conason, and David Corn.

I read two or three of these tomes before I got bored and stopped. It
turned out the bill of particulars was pretty much the same from book to
book, and since I already agreed that Bush was an unusually bad
president—in fact, my daily job at The Washington Monthly was frequently
dedicated to illustrating just that point—there hardly seemed much sense
in proving the law of diminishing returns by continuing to read every
new screed that came out.

In any case, America finally held its presidential election in 2004 and
the market for Bush-bashing books promptly ebbed for a time while
shell-shocked liberals tried to figure out just what had hit them. It
was, once again, safe to stroll leisurely through your local bookstore.

Predictably, it didn't take much time for the tide to turn back, and in
early 2006, another Bush-bashing book hit the stands. The charges
leveled against the president were familiar: reckless spending
increases, out-of-control deficits, relentless pandering to business
interests, and a deliberate and willful contempt for policy analysis.
The Bush White House, it argued, judges legislation not by whether it's
conservative or liberal, but solely by whether it will gain the
Republican Party a couple of percentage points of support among some
voting bloc or other. Principle is nothing. Politics is everything. In
other words, more of the same. Except for one thing: The author of
Impostor (Doubleday, $26.00) is Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan-era
official and longtime conservative columnist. In fact, until last
year—when he was fired for writing this book—he was a senior fellow at
the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-wing think
tank dedicated to flat taxes, Social Security privatization, and a host
of other conservative hot buttons.

Put in plain terms, Bartlett's charge is simple. George W. Bush, he says
on page one, is a “pretend conservative.” Philosophically, Bush actually
has more in common with liberals than he does with true conservatives.

Now, there's not much question that this is overstated. Bush won't be
getting an invitation to join The New York Times editorial board any
time soon. Among other things, he's appointed hundreds of conservative
judges, cut taxes repeatedly and dramatically, signed into law a ban on
partial-birth abortions, and committed America to its biggest and
costliest war of choice since Vietnam.

And yet, in a narrower but still provocative way, Bartlett makes a
persuasive case. I'm a pretty conventional FDR liberal myself, but
several years ago, I came to the same conclusion Bartlett did: Bush may
be a Republican—boy howdy, is he a Republican—but he's not the
fire-breathing ideologue of liberal legend.

Don't believe it? Consider Bartlett's review of Bush's major domestic
legislative accomplishments. He teamed up with Ted Kennedy to pass the
No Child Left Behind Act, which increased education spending by over $20
billion and legislated a massive new federal intrusion into local
schools. He co-opted Joe Lieberman's proposal to create a gigantic new
federal bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security. He has mostly
abandoned free trade in favor of a hodgepodge of interest-group-pleasing
tariffs. And after initially opposing it, Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley
bill with almost pathetic eagerness in the wake of the Enron debacle,
putting in place a phonebook-sized stack of new business regulations.

Want more? He signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill, a bĂŞte
noir of conservatives for years. His Medicare prescription-drug bill was
the biggest new entitlement program since the Great Society. He
initially put a hold on a wide range of last-minute executive orders
from the Clinton administration, but after a few months of “study”
allowed nearly all of them to stand. And he has increased domestic
discretionary spending at a higher rate than any president since LBJ.

Bartlett even has a bone to pick with the most prominent feature of
Bush's record that's incontestably conservative, his almost religious
dedication to tax cuts. Yes, Bush has cut taxes. Yes, that's generally a
good, conservative thing to do. But as Bartlett correctly points out,
cutting taxes without cutting spending doesn't do the conservative cause
any good. Bush and the modern Republican Party plainly have no interest
in cutting federal spending, and the resulting massive deficits will
eventually force “the largest tax increase in American history”—one that
will be entirely Bush's fault. Some conservative. To be sure, there are
plenty of counterarguments to these charges that Bartlett doesn't
address. NCLB may increase education funding, but it also contains
stealth provisions designed to increase support for school vouchers in
future years. Bush may have signed DHS into existence, but only after
using it as an excuse for a bitterly partisan round of union bashing and
traitor mongering. The Medicare bill may have been an entitlement
increase, but it also contained plenty of business- friendly provisions
that made liberals—and conscientious conservatives—gag. And a tax cut is
a tax cut, even if it's not the precise kind of tax cut Bartlett would
prefer.

Still, open-minded liberals who want to understand the nature of
contemporary American politics should give serious consideration to
Bartlett's argument: Despite five years of seething anger at George
Bush's supposed hardcore conservatism, the fact is that he's not really
a hardcore conservative. So what is Bush, then? This is where things get
a little more confusing. As it turns out, Bartlett has about half the
answer right, but there's more to the story than he seems willing to
acknowledge.

For starters, it's worth conceding that there is more than one
legitimate definition of “conservative.” I've long viewed George Bush as
a temperamental conservative, the kind of guy you meet in a bar who
slams down his drink and asks belligerently, “You know what this country
needs?”—and then proceeds to tell you. He's a conservative who is
defined by a visceral loathing of '60s-era “moral decay,” not one who's
read the collected works of Russell Kirk and Milton Friedman or who has
been inhaling National Review since he was a teenager. Still, even if
the guy in the bar is indeed one particular type of conservative,
Bartlett makes the reasonable point that a conservative president needs
to have at least a few vague guiding conservative principles, and those
are hard to find in Bush. If you raise spending, increase tariffs, and
create new entitlements without blinking an eye, even belligerence
doesn't make you into a genuine conservative.

This, then, is the half of the answer that Bartlett gets right: Bush, he
says, is not so much a conservative ideologue as he is simply a
politician who has taken tribal partisanship to levels not seen since
the 19th century. Bush is relentless at fighting for what he wants, but
it turns out that what he mainly wants is to increase the Republican
majority and kick some Democratic *****. If that means he's “perfectly
willing to jettison conservative principles at a moment's notice to
achieve that goal”—which he obviously is—well, that's the price you pay
for electoral victory, isn't it?

In other words, Bush is another Richard Nixon, a comparison that
Bartlett spends an entire chapter on.

The first person to draw a parallel between Bush and Nixon was someone
who knew Nixon well: then-New York Times columnist William Safire, who
had been a speechwriter for Nixon. In a July 2003 column, Safire
imagined a conversation with the late president, who spoke approvingly
about Bush's strategy of moving left domestically while keeping the
Republican base preoccupied with an external threat. Nixon had done this
successfully with Vietnam and Bush was doing it with Iraq.

Although the popular perception of Nixon is still that of an
archconservative who infuriated liberals, Bartlett reminds us that on
domestic policy Nixon routinely caved in to public opinion and betrayed
his conservative principles—for example, by creating the EPA, supporting
enormous increases in Social Security, and proposing a
guaranteed-incomes policy. Likewise, Bush spent nearly his entire first
term talking tough but then caving in with barely a whimper to any
interest group that might help him win a few more precious votes in
2004. Tariffs were enacted in order to appeal to steelworkers; the
Medicare bill was designed to buy the votes of the elderly; and
McCain-Feingold was signed in the hope that it would provide a temporary
fundraising advantage for the Republican Party. If all of these actions
were precisely the opposite of what a real conservative would do, so
what? As Nixon might have said, don't you know there's an election
coming up?

As far as all this goes, Bartlett's argument is a good one, and the
Nixon comparison even provides a neat and underappreciated explanation
for why liberals hate Bush so much. After all, it's possible to respect
someone with whom you have a principled disagreement, but not so easy to
respect someone whose only real principle is to crush anybody who gets
in his way. (Bush's alter-ego, Karl Rove, summed up this philosophy
within earshot of journalist Ron Suskind when he yelled to an aide about
someone who had displeased him, “We will ***** him. Do you hear me? We
will ***** him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!”) As
with Nixon, it's not really Bush's conservatism that gets liberals
seething. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's precisely his lack of
political principle, combined with a vengeful ruthlessness so dark it's
scary, that makes liberals break out in hives.

But this is where the second half of the story kicks in, and it's a part
of the story that Bartlett avoids. Like many a true believer on both
right and left, he's convinced that Bush's opportunism has all been for
nought. He didn't need to pander to all those special interests. He
could have stayed faithful to the conservative creed and still won
reelection.

In this, Bartlett is almost certainly wrong. Genuine conservatives have
a grim electoral history, after all. Robert Taft lost to Eisenhower,
Barry Goldwater got crushed by LBJ, and Bob Dole was never even a
serious contender against Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich was certain that
conservatism had finally won the day in 1994, but five years later he
left office a defeated man. And does anyone even remember Phil Gramm?

That leaves only Ronald Reagan, and it's true that Reagan campaigned and
won as an unapologetic conservative. Unfortunately, this single example
simply doesn't do the analytic heavy lifting that Bartlett thinks it
does. The reality is that Reagan came along at a unique moment in
history, a time when the country was exhausted from the perceived
liberal excesses of the '60s and '70s and ready for a short breather,
especially one delivered with Reagan's trademark optimism and sunniness.
Reagan was a reaction to an era, not the father of a movement.

What's more, as Bartlett tacitly acknowledges, Reagan in practice wasn't
as conservative as his supporters remember him being. Sure, he famously
cut taxes in 1981, but he raised taxes in nearly every year after
that—including corporate taxes. He took a stab at cutting Social
Security, but backed off after losing seats in the 1982 election and
ended up endorsing a conventional liberal solution that increased
payroll taxes and created a massive trust fund. He reduced the growth of
domestic spending, but he never eliminated the cabinet departments he
had promised to eliminate. In fact, he even added a new one. And he
supported expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, an important
anti-poverty measure. The reason that even liberals look back on Reagan
a little more fondly today than they did at the time is that, in the
end, he turned out to be a fairly pragmatic guy. (For more on this, see
"Reagan's Liberal Legacy," by Joshua Green, January/February 2003.)

This is the reality that true-believer conservatives—Bartlett among
them—don't want to believe. For all the trash talking from right-wing
leaders like Grover Norquist and Tom DeLay, the fact is that America is
only a moderately conservative country. And despite the electoral
success of conservatives over the past decade, that hasn't changed much.
Although party affiliations have shifted as Southern conservatives have
migrated to the GOP, Harris polls since the early 1970s show that
Americans self-identify as about 20 percent liberal, 35 percent
conservative, and the rest in between, and those numbers have been
rock-steady for decades. So where's the conservative revolution?

The answer is that it almost certainly never existed. Americans may not
be ready for European-style soft socialism, but poll after poll
demonstrates that they like Social Security and Medicare, they support
iconic liberal programs in areas like environmentalism and worker
safety, and they're pretty tolerant on social issues—and getting more
tolerant over time, not less. George Bush couldn't have bucked these
trends even if he'd wanted to, which is why he campaigned as a
“compassionate conservative” and frequently gave speeches in which
observers could have been forgiven for thinking they were hearing the
reincarnation of FDR. Even at that, though, he only barely won. Hardcore
conservatism simply doesn't sell in America.

What's more, it's never really been the governing philosophy of the
Republican Party anyway. Bartlett usefully points out, for example, that
Bush is “incapable of telling the difference between being pro-business
and being for the free market,” and he's right that this is a
distinction that's seldom acknowledged. As Bartlett puts it, “Genuine
supporters of free markets… denounced just as strongly government
policies that subsidize businesses as those that unfairly penalize
them.” In other words, they believe in real competition. But Bush's
Medicare bill didn't promote free-market competition; it simply tossed
benefits at pharmaceutical companies. Likewise, his energy bill was
stuffed with giveaways for utilities and oil companies, his
transportation bill was a pork fest that would have made Boss Tweed
blush, and his bankruptcy bill was little more than an out-and-out
payoff to the credit card industry.

This is far from being an aberration. The current incarnation of the GOP
may have taken interest-group pandering to new levels, but Bartlett
fails to acknowledge that the Republican Party has long been more
faithful to the pro-business creed than the pro-market one. Ronald
Reagan's 1986 tax-reform bill may indeed have been a rare instance of
high-minded, bipartisan tax policy—and a surprisingly progressive
one—but the very reason it's so celebrated is because such things are so
rare. After all, didn't Reagan also preside over the savings-and-loan
debacle, surely the largest giveaway of all time to the wealthy business
class that funds the Republican Party?

Like it or not, the pay-to-play machine built by Newt Gingrich, Tom
DeLay and Jack Abramoff—and enthusiastically supported by George Bush—is
the apotheosis of what the Republican Party has always been about, not a
betrayal of its principles. There is no primitive conservatism to go
back to, and no messiah to lead the Republican Party out of its
corporate welfare wilderness.

In the end, this is what Bartlett doesn't—or can't—get. Ideological
activists may be loath to acknowledge this, but the truth is that today
both major political parties are largely stuck. On the left, the problem
is that liberals have achieved the bulk of what they set out to achieve
75 years ago, and the country is pretty happy with it. In the arena of
economic security, they've given us Social Security, unemployment
insurance, Medicare, subsidized public education, welfare, and the
minimum wage. Equal rights? We've got the Civil Rights Act, the Voting
Rights Act, affirmative action, gender discrimination laws, the Violence
Against Women Act, and the ADA. Abortion is legal, forced prayer is gone
from public schools, and criminal defendants are guaranteed a lawyer. In
the area of protection from corporate predation, we've got OSHA, workers
comp, loads of environmental regulations, consumer-protection laws by
the bushel, and capital markets that are more transparent than ever in
history. Sure, there's more to do, but that's not bad. There just aren't
very many big-ticket items left with the potential to generate a lot of
voter excitement.

In the same vein, the problem on the right is that conservatives have
failed miserably whenever they've tried to take a serious chainsaw to
modern liberalism. Cutting taxes is just about all they have left, and
as Bartlett concedes, taxes can't be cut forever. This has mostly
reduced conservatives to nibbling modestly around the edges of the
contemporary liberal edifice while simultaneously passing out enough
goodies to keep their supporters happy and the rubes, if not happy, at
least scared enough to keep voting for them. This means that unlike the
'30s or the '60s, when politics was vitriolic because the stakes were
high and society was undergoing dramatic changes, the source of today's
vitriol is precisely the opposite. As with World War I trench warfare,
it's the result of two evenly matched sides beating each other bloody
year after year but neither being able to claim victory. Bill Clinton
couldn't get national health care passed, but George Bush couldn't gut
Social Security either.

Although the heat of battle often obscures this, the unhappy reality is
that modern American politics is mostly played at the margins. In
practical terms, we're no longer fighting seriously over grand
principle, we're just fighting over who gets the most toys. The fact
that Impostor—perhaps unwittingly—lays this so bare makes it a
worthwhile read not just for its intended conservative audience, but for
liberals as well. If progressives ever want to break our current
political stalemate, they're going to have to open a new front.

Kevin Drum is a contributing writer for The Washington Monthly.
SyVyN11 wrote:

<jimj122680@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1141450420.444965.183370@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

My wife feels as I do. So do my kids, several of my neighbors and
relatives, all hard core Republicans. George Bush is a fraud. He is
NO Republican. He is in the political vein of some loser like Ted
Kennedy.
And Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and several of the other fraud talk
show hosts, are nothing more than full time Bush apologists. The only
host who has it right most of the time is Michael Savage.

care to give your reasons? Cause I think you're a liberal that's
talking *****!

On Sat, 04 Mar 2006 08:51:06 GMT, "SyVyN11"
<711robhorine@earthlink.net> wrote:

<jimj122680@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1141450420.444965.183370@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

My wife feels as I do. So do my kids, several of my neighbors and
relatives, all hard core Republicans. George Bush is a fraud. He is
NO Republican. He is in the political vein of some loser like Ted
Kennedy.
And Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and several of the other fraud talk
show hosts, are nothing more than full time Bush apologists. The only
host who has it right most of the time is Michael Savage.

care to give your reasons? Cause I think you're a liberal that's talking
*****!

What if he's not a liberal? I think you're ignoring the fraud of Bush
to blame on the liberal.