More debate at TNR by Chait and Ponneru on "Bush Hatred." We do this here, but they are better at it. :>)
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ONLINE DEBATE
Bush Hatred
by Jonathan Chait & Ramesh Ponnuru
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 09.22.03
[ Editor's Note: This week's debate between TNR Senior Editor Jonathan Chait and National Review Senior Editor Ramesh Ponnuru continues an exchange about "Bush hatred" that they began in the most recent issue of TNR. Click here to read Chait's original article, and here to read Ponnuru's original article. ]
Jonathan,
Thanks for sharing. Not everyone would be brave enough to recount their harrowing descent into madness so vividly. You have to go pretty far into irrational Bush hatred to suggest, as you do in your article, that the Crawford ranch is phony, part of Bush's positioning as a rough-hewn Texan. He certainly seems to enjoy going there. But what do I know? Maybe he's only pretending to like his dog Barney, and kicks him when the door is closed.
You write that Bush is intellectually incurious; that's my impression as well, and it strikes me as a significant fault in a political leader. Bush's interview with Brit Hume, in which the president says that he doesn't read the newspapers, certainly reinforces that notion. I am quite prepared to entertain the idea that Bush is not a nice guy, and that I wouldn't like him if I knew him well. But this stuff is not the substance of our dispute. We disagree primarily on whether it is reasonable to regard Bush as a) a hyper-partisan who breaks the rules to get ahead and b) a radical who deceptively concealed his radicalism in 2000. These are, of course, related questions, insofar as the alleged deception in 2000 can be seen as part of the rule-breaking.
On the first point, you cite a Robert Novak column in which White House staffers are said to have told Republican lawmakers not to be too chummy with Democrats. I have no reason to doubt that some such exchange happened. But in my experience, the complaints about excessive friendliness to the Democrats is more likely to be directed at the White House from Republican congressmen. Bush's partnership with Ted Kennedy on the education bill is a case in point: Bush dragged a reluctant congressional Republican party to go along with it. I have frequently been irritated by the president's usual practice of referring to "the Senate's" obstruction of his judicial nominees, rather than talking about "Senate Democrats," let alone singling them out.
As for the unfairness of Bush's election: It takes hardly any effort to reword your complaint into an equally foolish Republican rant about Clinton. "He triumphed because a number of democratic safeguards failed. The media overwhelmingly bought into [the lie that America was suffering from "the worst economy in 50 years" in 1992]. On top of that, it took the monomania of a third-party spoiler candidate, plus [the leak of an embittered Iran-contra prosecutor] to bring [Clinton past the finish line]." Such a rant would no doubt go on to note that Clinton didn't win a majority of the votes cast--a point just as constitutionally relevant as yours about Bush's not having won a plurality of them.
When I wrote that Bush's plan to cut taxes was "extensively debated" in 2000, I did not mean that the issue was framed as you would like. I meant that voters were sufficiently exposed to the idea that his tax cut was a "risky scheme" whose benefits would go mainly to the rich. The fact that the tax cuts as enacted were of the sort that liberals could describe as a risky scheme to benefit the rich does not mean that voters were betrayed.
You describe Bush as a more conservative president than Reagan. You say that his implicit promise to be less conservative than the Gingrich Republicans has proven hollow. Further: "it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Bush would like to roll back the federal government to something resembling its pre-New Deal state."
It's true that Bush hasn't executed a partial retreat on his tax cut, as Reagan did. But it's also true that Bush's tax cut was modest in size compared to Reagan's. The Gingrich Republicans wanted to abolish four Cabinet departments, cut spending, and kill Americorps. Bush has created a Cabinet department, increased spending--including on education--and pledged to boost funding for Americorps. Reversing the New Deal? This president won't even take on the Tennessee Valley Authority. Or Title IX. Or the National Endowment for the Arts. You're quite right to say that Clinton was willing to offend liberals on some important issues. Bush is willing to offend conservatives on some, too: racial preferences, for example.
Has Bush nominated conservative judges? Sure he has--just as he promised he would during the campaign. He said he wanted "strict constructionists" in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. Anyone who was paying attention knew what that meant.
You seem to be suggesting that Bush should have responded to the close and disputed election results by governing as though he had won only half the presidency and had questionable legitimacy. He should have treated Tom Daschle as a co-president. That was indeed the liberal invitation to Bush in early 2001, which he wisely ignored. The Democrats then abandoned attempts to make the case against Bush's legitimacy the foreground of their campaigns. They did so not, as you imply, because the media had defined such attempts as "out-of-bounds," but because they accurately saw that the public would have no patience for waving the bloody shirt of Florida. (One of your own quotes demonstrates the point.) To the extent journalists did marginalize the legitimacy critique of Bush, they were motivated in part by the (accurate) conviction that this critique was politically idiotic.
You say that the Bush-as-idiot meme was also marginalized. I seem to recall a fair amount of discussion of Dick Cheney as the power behind the throne during the early months of the administration; and there have been later iterations of the idea. In any case, I think it's fair to say that most people have had enough exposure to the notion to judge it for themselves--and reject it.
I agree with you that the truly nasty kind of Bush hatred that my colleague Byron York has recently discussed remains a fringe phenomenon. So does York. Bush hatred may not have reached the level that Clinton hatred did just yet. But give it time. York's prediction was that some of the most virulent material would seep into the mainstream. Since his article was published, Vanity Fair has done a separated-at-birth picture spread of Richard Perle and Joseph Goebbels; Andrew Greeley has accused the administration of big lies in the style of Goebbels; Janeane Garofalo has said on Crossfire that Bush is running the "43rd Reich"; and The New York Times has reported seriously on academics who think that the word "fascism" belongs in discussions of the Bush administration's policies.
I've probably gone on too long, so I'll just pose a question for you. You say that it is "infuriating"--rationally infuriating, so to speak--that your view of Bush has not been given more public expression. But you also concede that the more public expression liberals give that view, the worse it will go for them. How do you propose that this tension be resolved? Venting made you feel better. If what liberals want in 2004 is to feel better, venting is what they should do. It's also a way to get conservatives what they want in 2004. So go ahead. Everyone will be happy.
Ramesh
Monday
Jonathan Chait
09.22.03, 10:30 p.m.
Ramesh,
We agree on a couple things. The main one is whether Bush hatred is a good political strategy for Democrats: It's not. Bush remains personally popular, and most people don't like angry, bitter candidates anyway.
The question that divides us is: Does Bush hatred have a rational basis, or is it an unreasonable prejudice? In other words, does Bush hatred result from the peculiar mentality of the Bush haters--as conservatives have been arguing--or does it result from Bush himself? I argue that it's the latter.
For those readers who either forgot my piece or never read it, let me briefly sum up the reasons why liberals hate Bush so intensely. First of all, he's conservative. Clinton-hating was strange because Clinton was pretty moderate. Liberal hatred of Bush is more in proportion to the radicalism of his ideology. Second, Bush ran for president as a moderate, and liberals (accurately) perceive his public persona as essentially a lie. Third, the country has rallied around Bush on two occasions--after he took office, and after September 11, 2001--in such a way that criticism of his qualifications and legitimacy was essentially driven out of mainstream discourse. Nothing feeds anger and bitterness like the belief that the media is ignoring your views. Conservatives should know this as well as anybody.
You argue that Bush is not really that conservative. Certainly he's not as conservative as the National Review would prefer--but, then, you probably realize that if Bush tried to abolish the Great Society and the New Deal in one fell swoop he'd be out of office pretty fast. That's why conservatives are content to have a Republican president who works incrementally, putting into place policies that make future conservative gains easy. That's exactly what Bush has done. As Grover Norquist has written, Bush has moved step by step toward doing away with progressive taxation completely. One side effect of this, besides making the Republican economic base very happy, is to make government a bad deal for the middle class. Shifting the federal tax burden downward makes middle-class taxpayers less likely to support future government programs, since they will have to pay of it themselves, rather than having a disproportionate burden picked up by the affluent. I think you've made this point yourself before.
Conservatives understand that this is a very big deal. You argue that "few voters, whatever their political persuasion, get passionate about deficits." I agree that it's hard to mobilize a constituency against tax cuts when they're proposed. But liberals have been able to recognize some of the consequences of tax cuts--the Clinton years made many Democrats appreciate the value of a budget surplus. And liberals are morally offended by the notion of giving big tax cuts to the rich, especially when the president is claiming that we're facing a national emergency that requires sacrifice. You don't need to take my word for it, either. Look at the response Howard Dean gets when he promises to repeal the Bush tax cuts, which he (falsely) accuses his opponents of supporting. I think that's pretty strong empirical evidence that liberals do in fact get passionate about tax cuts.
Now, what about Bush's supposed moderation? True, he hasn't proposed much contentious social legislation. But the most important social issues are all fought mainly in the judicial arena. And Bush's judicial appointees are, for the most part, very conservative. Yes, Bush was forced to come out for prescription drug coverage and a patients' bill of rights. But, if you haven't noticed, neither one of those things has happened yet. And yes, Bush betrayed conservative principle by supporting farm subsidies and steel tariffs, but that's not ideological moderation, it's just another example of him catering to a rich, powerful lobbying group.
You deny that Bush governed to the right of how he campaigned in 2000. Let's see. In 2000, the public and the press widely believed that Bush had fundamentally broken with the Republican right and created a new ideological synthesis that had more in common with Bill Clinton than with Newt Gingrich. Both the public and the press had a great deal of trouble discerning any major programmatic differences between the two candidates for president. Why was that the case? Because Bush did everything he could to make them believe there were no major differences.
Bush identified himself as a compassionate conservative, and defined this vision--both explicitly and implicitly--as something more moderate than the conservatism of the GOP Congress. His promise to "change the tone" was central, not incidental, to his campaign. In his speech at the Republican convention, Bush attacked the Clinton administration not for having the wrong policy goals but for being unsuccessful in pursuing them--remember "They have not led. We will," or his repeated assertion during the debates that, unlike Gore, he would "get it done"? Bush's central promise was to accomplish what Clinton failed to do by bringing a new bipartisanship to Washington. As I argue in my article, that's the complete opposite of what he actually did. My favorite example is Robert Novak reporting how the White House is chastising Congressional Republicans "for being too chummy with Democrats." I've seen plenty other examples of that dynamic.
The same pattern holds true when you examine the specifics of Bush's agenda. In his Philadelphia speech, Bush promised, "We will reduce tax rates for everyone, in every bracket. On principle, those in the greatest need should receive the greatest help." This was a lie: He did not reduce tax rates at all for many low-income taxpayers. Those taxpayers near the bottom who did get tax cuts did not get the "greatest" help, either in absolute terms (which is what Bush's language implies), as a percentage of their income, or as a percentage of their federal tax burden. You argue that Bush's policies on taxes were "extensively debated." But that "debate" consisted of his opponent stating factual analyses of his tax cut while Bush defended himself by ad hominem attack ("I think he invented the calculator"), with syrupy blather ("don't judge my heart"), or with phony numbers of his own (say, a distributional analysis that omitted completely his upper-bracket cuts and estate tax repeal). This "debate" was refereed by a press corps that complained that all the numbers were boring, and refrained from pointing out which numbers were true and which were false. So don't try to say the public knew what it was getting. And, yes, I'm still bitter.
Bush devoted an enormous amount of attention to his plan to provide aid to faith-based institutions and a tax credit for charitable giving. But he whittled the tax credit down almost to nothing--so he could cram in more tax cuts for the affluent--and abandoned the faith-based measure entirely. Likewise, Bush promised big boosts in education funding but then refused to actually deliver them. Maybe conservatives saw these promises as minor, but Bush played them up as if they were the core of his agenda. You and I know that Bush's interest in upper-bracket tax cuts is approximately a zillion-jillion times as great as his interest in boosting the education budget, but voters didn't get that, and it wasn't an accident that they didn't. Obviously, all politicians try to portray themselves in the most flattering light. But Bush went beyond that. He misrepresented his political and policy goals in a fundamental way. Liberals may not know every detail of Bush's promises versus his record, but the basic disconnect between the two is plain as day.
You, like most conservatives, claim that liberals see Bush as a hapless rube from the sticks. My experience is that liberals see Bush as a phony--a rich kid who had everything handed to him by his parents' cronies, and who compensates for it by posing as a plan old ranch hand. It's not just that he benefited from nepotism. Jeb Bush and George H.W. Bush both benefited from nepotism, but liberals don't loathe either of them. The reason is that H.W. and Jeb, while benefiting from a big leg up, are reasonably intelligent men who earned something on their own. Neither is manifestly ignorant or pointedly anti-intellectual, and both managed to win office the old-fashioned way, by garnering more votes than their opponent.
Gosh, I've worked myself up into quite a lather here. Hopefully I haven't undermined my claim that us Bush-haters can be reasonable and aren't simply a bunch of revenge-crazed maniacs. I look forward to tearing your response to pieces and HUMILIATING YOU FOR ALL THE MISERY YOUR ELECTION-STEALING CHIMPANZEE PRESIDENT HAS INFLICTED... Whoops, sorry, that was, um, a typo. What I meant is that I look forward to a civil, thought-provoking exchange of ideas.
Jonathan
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