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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (47174)	9/5/2004 8:56:15 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 81568

Apparently the Martin Kettle thought Bush did say something at the convention. Interesting. Yet, as the authors of The Right Nation point out, it is not good enough to dismiss Bush as an unthinking and unchanging inheritor of the anti-government traditions embodied by Goldwater and, more recently, by Newt Gingrich. For, along with his revolution in foreign policy, his conservative social agenda and his tax cuts - the things against which the protesters mostly marched in Manhattan - Bush has also been doing something which few, including perhaps Bush himself, would have predicted back in 2000. He has been reinventing big government. ..... Certainly the facts are impressive. No president since Lyndon Johnson has increased discretionary government spending as much. Bush has increased education spending by 75%, has presided over the biggest increase in the Medicare health programme for the elderly since its foundation, and claims to have increased spending on police, fire and ambulance services sixfold. More people now work for the US government than at any other time in history. Does this add up to a coherent new conservatism that could dominate US politics for the next generation and which, in some form or other, may dominate our politics, too? Not even Bush's greatest apologists quite make that claim yet. But if he wins in November they surely will. It certainly all bears study and attention. Bush may not be as clever as Michael Howard, but if Bush keeps on winning elections, then he may have something more durable to offer the Conservatives. We ought at least to do the millions of Bush voters the courtesy of trying to understand why they see so many things so differently. And at the same time we ought to pay Bush the respect of trying to understand what he is doing right, not just in purely vote-winning terms, but possibly even more broadly. Bush-bashing has its place. But this might be a good week for liberals and progressives to start raising their game a bit. guardian.co.uk