Why Many Smart Conservatives Hate Bush:
The Grumblers
by Franklin Foer
Post date: 09.02.04 - NYC
On the first morning of convention week, a raft of high-roller donors and the politicians who take their money congregated at a fusty Gilded Age club in Midtown. In contrast to much of the week's frivolity and agitprop, the purpose of this gathering was substantive discussion: a seminar on the Bush economy hosted by the Club for Growth, a group that funds the candidates most devoted to the gospel of conservative economics. Because the Club fielded a panel of writers venerated by the right--Paul Gigot, the editor of the The Wall Street Journal editorial page; Larry Kudlow, a Reagan administration official turned cable talk-show host; and Arthur Laffer, the academic who developed much of supply-side doctrine--the audience began the morning in an enthusiastic mood, ready to clap and yelp.
Supply-siders are known for their Pollyannaish predictions about the power of tax cuts. And, for most of the morning, the panelists played to type, waxing lyrical about the beauty of Bush's rate-slashing spree. But, as the session ground to a close, it took an unexpectedly dour turn. A senior from Fordham University wearing an untucked white shirt stood to challenge the panel. "Bush spends like Carter and panders like Clinton. It feels like we've had the third term of a Clinton presidency," he said, decrying the dramatic growth of government on the president's watch. "Is there any betrayal that we wouldn't support?" With so many party loyalists in the room, you might have expected such comments to elicit boos. Instead, there was scattered applause. One man shouted, "Yes!" Stephen Moore, the president of the Club for Growth and the morning's moderator, solemnly turned to the speakers. "Why don't we address this? It's a serious question."
It wasn't just a stray moment of discontent. For all the encomiums GOP speakers have been showering on George W. Bush from the podium at Madison Square Garden, conservatives--especially conservative intellectuals--have a far less rosy view of the president. Last month, Andrew Ferguson wrote in The Weekly Standard, "[W]e'll let slip a thinly disguised secret--Republicans are supporting a candidate that relatively few of them find personally or politically appealing." Or, as conservative columnist Bruce Bartlett told me, "People are careful about how they say it and to who they say it, but, if you're together with more than a couple of conservatives, the issue of would we be better or worse off with Kerry comes up--and it's seriously discussed."
In part, this unhappiness reflects the temperament of ideological true believers, whose expectations few politicians can meet. (The left was similarly, if not as vehemently, exasperated by Clinton's New Democrat agenda during his first term.) And, in the end, their griping won't lead many conservatives to jump ship. Even among the president's loudest critics, frustration with Bush is far exceeded by fear and loathing of Kerry. But the breadth of the unhappiness with Bush is nonetheless striking. Although it began on conservatism's isolationist fringe, it has moved to the movement's mainstream and now emanates from every segment of the right's coalition, from neoconservatives to libertarians, with the exception of social conservatives (see Clay Risen, "Tanked"). And conservative discontent isn't just the result of policy disagreements with Bush. It is based on a stylistic and personal critique of the president that can sound a lot like the critique leveled by the left.
onservative criticism of Bush falls into several categories, the most significant of which concerns the president's economic policies. "There's a sense that he is not a real Ronald Reagan anti-government conservative," says Moore, who, with Bartlett, is one of Bush's loudest economic critics. Granted, when conservatives signed up for Bush's 2000 campaign and its "compassionate" agenda, they understood that their man wasn't going to eviscerate the welfare state. (After the Newt Gingrich debacle, most Republicans conceded that they couldn't sell raw anti-statist ideology in a national election.) But they didn't expect so many flat-out betrayals: tariffs on steel and lumber, federal regulations on corporate accounting, the creation of a new Cabinet department (Homeland Security) and no elimination of existing ones, and a failure to veto any of Congress's deficit-ballooning spending bills. Last year, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru wrote, "More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than it did under Clinton." At the convention, I kept hearing economic conservatives denouncing a line in the party platform extolling a boost in education spending. "Weren't we supposed to be against that?" kvetched one.
A second set of complaints has to do with the war. Some conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and his fellow isolationists at The American Conservative, opposed it from the start. Their arguments, however, never gained much traction in the conservative mainstream. With the administration's failure to extinguish the Iraqi insurgency, however, that has begun to change. A growing camp, including pundits George F. Will and Tucker Carlson, have joined the antiwar right. Their conversion can be traced to the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But they have also bluntly expressed qualms about the administration's goal of planting democracy in the Middle East, a goal they say disregards conservatism's traditional skepticism about government's ability to transform culture. Although you wouldn't know it from the op-ed pages, frustration with the war has spread far and wide within the movement. Paul Weyrich, the head of the Free Congress Foundation, told me, "The one message that rings true that Kerry has been pushing is when he says that we could not have been a better recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. I've had that repeated to me over and over again, not by people who are Kerry supporters by any means.... Phyllis Schlafly [one of the founders of the modern right] surprised me. I was talking to her casually, and she went into a virtual diatribe against the neoconservatives. 'Why do we have these people controlling our foreign policy? Bush has strayed from what he promised.' ... I was shocked by the vehemence by which she expressed this."
The frustration with Bush doesn't just come from a growing antiwar right. It comes from the pro-war right, too. Given America's evident difficulties in Iraq, boosters of the war can either fundamentally reconsider the principles that led them to predict relatively painless success, or they can blame the administration's ham-fisted postwar policy. Many have chosen the latter. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in June, the Council on Foreign Relations's Max Boot wrote, "When President Bush's foreign policy players came into office, the widespread assumption was that they would be cautious but competent. Sort of like the last Bush administration. Instead they've been great at enunciating bold policies--such as preempting terrorism--and terrible at executing them." The most extreme example of this discontent with the administration's postwar execution is Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. After championing the virtues of invasion and empire, he wrote an op-ed last week in The Wall Street Journal suggesting conservatives would be better off with a Kerry victory.
n recent months, these complaints have metastasized into an extremely dim view of Bush the man and his management style. Conservative critics accuse him of harboring an unhealthy obsession with electoral considerations. Moore says, "Bush and [Karl] Rove are very political. Bush throws a big sop to the left and then does something for the right. They'd sell out to the left on education and then play hardball on the tax bill." And what makes Bush's concessions to the left even more irksome is that they have yielded so few political benefits. None of his so-called "big-government" initiatives--from campaign finance reform to the prescription-drug benefit to No Child Left Behind--have significantly tilted poll numbers in the Republican direction. Ponnuru wrote in National Review last spring, "As they survey the public reaction, many congressmen who voted for the education and Medicare bills are regretting their votes. Nobody who voted against them regrets his. The reforms have lost Bush conservative support without gaining him compensatory support from the center."
Malcontents also complain that the ruthlessness Bush displays toward his political foes on the left extends to his treatment of conservatives who voice dissent, echoing the image presented by Ron Suskind in his book The Price of Loyalty. "Someone who says something off-message, they're blackballed. It's like high school," says Bartlett, who admits that he has suffered this fate himself. In private, conservative critics complain about the silencing of Greg Mankiw, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, following his principled defense of outsourcing. And, in gory detail, they relive the firing of Lawrence Lindsey, the president's top economic adviser, after he had the temerity to provide an honest, if impolitic, estimate of Iraq war costs.
And, for all the representatives Rove sends to the weekly conservative meetings held by Grover Norquist and Paul Weyrich, at which the movement coordinates strategy, the president doesn't schmooze conservative intellectuals and leaders nearly as skillfully as Reagan did. Indeed, though Reagan by no means gave conservatives everything they wanted--social conservatives, for instance, left his administration pretty much empty-handed--he maintained the right's support by throwing it rhetorical bones and publicly identifying himself with its leaders. What's more, Reagan could always blame the Democratic-controlled Congress for stymieing his conservative agenda. Bush can't fall back on this excuse, nor does he have Reagan's personal touch. Conservatives say he doesn't write them congratulatory notes for supportive op-eds, and his top aides rarely consult them. One of Bush's defenders says, "He's done less entertaining in the White House and done more traveling in the country than any president since the war. If some conservatives have opposed Bush ... well, they have never been to dinner at the White House."
To an extent, conservatives have only themselves to blame for their disappointment. There's a tendency within the movement to mythologize its leaders. Reagan, of course, benefited from this hero-worship more than anyone. One Bush critic told me, in a bout of self-flagellation, "Conservatives don't want a transactional relationship with their leaders. They want to be inspired by them, and this leads to romanticism and an abandonment of clearheaded analysis." Even before September 11, conservatives mounted Bush on the same pedestal as Reagan. After the terrorist attacks, his standing rose even higher, with books like David Frum's The Right Man and John Podhoretz's Bush Country making the case for his historic importance. It would be difficult for nearly any politician to fulfill such impossibly high expectations.
So what's the practical effect of this discontent? It's by no means transcendent or all-consuming. Only a few conservatives, like Niall Ferguson and Carlson, have suggested they won't vote for Bush. Still, frustration with Bush has shaped the campaign. Unable to muster enthusiasm for their man, conservatives have justified their continued support for the president by resorting to passionate Kerry-hating. At the Club for Growth confab, the mere mention of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth garnered resounding cheers and applause. Delegates walked around Madison Square Garden with Purple Heart Band-Aids on their cheeks, mocking Kerry's war injuries. But there's no document more telling than National Review's "Republican Convention Special." Instead of defending the president, the magazine used the occasion to put out its "All-Kerry Issue." For ten solid pieces, writers took turns hammering the Democratic nominee. Apparently, when you have nothing nice to say about your own guy, it's best to say nothing at all.
www.tnr.com |
