Republicans long for a new Reagan.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, January 17, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
When Rep. John Shadegg jumped into the race for House majority leader last week, he called himself a "Reaganite" who would bring back the Gipper's vision of limited government. Rep. John Boehner, also running for majority leader, is sounding a similar note, quoting the 40th president extensively in his 37-page proposal on how to get the party back on track.
It's telling that now, five years into the second Bush presidency, conservatives are still looking for the next Ronald Reagan to champion their ideas in Washington. Even as Reagan and the current President Bush have similar presidential records--fighting wars of ideas around the globe and running federal deficits at home--Reaganism is the party's philosophy, with its belief in small government, low taxes, forceful conservatism, a strong military and the view that this country is a shining example for all the world.
Both Messrs. Boehner and Shadegg are promising to bring Reagan back because over the past five years the party appears to have been seduced by the very forces it came to Washington to overturn--rampant spending with expansive new federal entitlements.
Of course, limited government wasn't original to Reagan, and many of his ideas are inherent in President Bush's governing philosophy, such as combating the nation's enemies by spreading freedom around the world. But it was Reagan who branded these ideas into the nation's consciousness by using them to remake one of the two dominant political parties. And it was Reagan who proved to be the change agent in Washington.
In part this was thanks to Reagan's personality. He won political debates, won over allies and won popular support through sheer appeal, even if his policies were not always popular. Indeed, nearly everyone active in conservative politics in the 1980s has a Reagan story to tell that is warm and inviting. Seventeen years after he left office it is still possible to stumble across a "fresh" Reagan anecdote. Yet very few people today have a "Bush story" outside of the policy realm.
One Reagan story that I came across recently involves Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who was first elected in 1980, the year Reagan won the presidency. A few years later, while he was still a junior congressman and a member of the minority, Mr. Hunter sat one of his young sons in an empty conference room on Capitol Hill and gave him paper and pencils to draw with. A short while later, President Reagan unexpectedly stepped into the room and spotted the boy. Rather than quickly move on to his meeting, the president stopped and within a few minutes was making his own drawing--a sketch of a cowboy. Mr. Hunter still has that drawing tucked away in a safe. He proudly displays a copy of it in his office.
Today Mr. Hunter, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is one of the strongest proponents of a key tenet of Reaganism: securing peace by preparing for war with a sound military. He's also a big supporter of President Bush and the war in Iraq. One of his sons is even a U.S. Marine who served a tour in Iraq on the outskirts of Fallujah.
But it's not all personality. One reason the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 did not prove to be the second wave of the Reagan revolution is that the dominant power in American government is the chief executive. And conservatives are still waiting for that second wave today because President Bush hasn't effectively and consistently used one of the most powerful tools of the modern presidency: the bully pulpit.
Reagan did it in his first inaugural address by proclaiming an end to the brand of liberalism that had largely reigned uninterrupted since the Depression: "In this present crisis government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Today government largely remains the problem. Even Osama bin Laden and his followers would be much less of a threat if this country could bring its own bureaucracies to heel. It's encouraging to see the CIA might have launched a covert attack on an al Qaeda "safe house" in Pakistan last week. But competence has long been the exception at the agency, which failed to assess Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities accurately, failed to stop A.Q. Kahn (father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb) from spreading nuclear technology to rogue regimes in North Korea and Libya and failed to uncover the Sept. 11 plot before it was too late. The FBI isn't much better.
These days it's hard to find a well-functioning government bureaucracy, or the political will to solve the nation's problems. Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security all imperil the government's financial well-being. Yet reforming them is proving to be impossible. Likewise, education reform is proving to be too tough a nut for our elected officials to crack.
Will Mr. Boehner, Mr. Shadegg or anyone else for that matter in the House be able to lead a governing revolution that tackles these problems? It's possible for big policy reforms to come from Capitol Hill--see the Welfare Reform Act of 1996--but to really change the political culture, pressure has to come from outside Washington, with a little help from inside the Oval Office.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
opinionjournal.com |
