IS THE CENTER SOFT OR HARD?:
Monday, June 14 2004
You may have noticed that this month we're featuring Michael Barone's new book, "Hard America, Soft America, Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation's Future" (Buy a copy here). And by the way, we'll also be featuring an interesting question and answer with Michael Barone later this week.
The reason I bring all of this up is because Pete DuPont references Barone's book today in his Wall Street Journal column. DuPont finishes with an interesting observation:
Spring polls are notoriously inaccurate predictors of fall voting, and Reagan's middle-class voters are in the end unlikely to support Mr. Kerry. But still, Mr. Kerry is soft and doing better than expected. Maybe the American people are just sending the president a message that his hard policies aren't working well enough. But perhaps America will decide to turn soft. A return to the economic and social policies of the 1960s would be a terrible mistake--Reagan was right that liberty is more important than equality--but perhaps that is what the American people are considering.
This is something I've been wondering about for some time now.
Four years ago George W. Bush sold America on the idea of "compassionate conservativism." It was an ideology that sought to infuse some of the "Hard" policies inherent in conservativism (free market competition, etc) into some of the "Softer" areas of domestic policy without coming off as too radical or Draconian.
Instead of an 'in your face' revolutionary conservatism like the 1994 'Contract With America', Bush chose to peddle a "Softer"-edged conservatism that advocated things like school choice and standards testing for public education and reforming Social Security to include a small percentage of private investment accounts. Even Bush's signature issue, tax relief, wasn't viewed as a particularly "Hard" policy at the time given the huge surpluses we faced.
Indeed, looking back on Bush's first term you see that aside from his accomplishments of cutting taxes (which are significant) his record on domestic policy is far "Softer" than many would have anticipated. Bush signed an education bill that was gutted of a provision to include vouchers, slapped protectionist tariffs on steel, engineered passage of a massive new Medicare entitlement program virtually devoid of free-market reforms, and endorsed what amounts to an amnesty program for illegal immigrants.
This time around, however, things are much different. Instead of discussing the marginal hardening or softening of domestic policy we are involved in a big debate over how "Hard" or "Soft" our foreign policy should be.
Specifically, we're nearing a referendum on whether Bush's robust approach to battling terrorists and his aggressive promotion of democracy around the world as an important component of U.S. national security is worth all of the mess that inevitably comes along with it, including the sacrifice of U.S. servicemen and the employing of some tough new tactics against our enemies.
In other words, this year Bush has put "compassionate conservatism" more or less on the shelf. Instead, he's trying to sell the public on the importance of continuing to pursue a "Hard" foreign policy, and John Kerry is countering this by offering a "Softer", more world community-centric foreign policy similar to that of the Clinton administration.
Most Democrats are unified behind Kerry's "Softer" approach to foreign policy. Most Republicans believe in the choices and actions of President Bush and want to see his "Harder" policies continue.
The question of the moment is what that small slice of voters in the middle want, especially those residing in a few key swing states. It looks as if Bush is betting the political center in America is, at its core, more "Hard" than "Soft." We'll see whether he's correct. - T. Bevan 9:26 am
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