The Elephant in the Room

[Jobber of the Week 0]

This article appeared today in the Opinion section of the Sunday paper. Since the local paper doesn't put these stories online (and most of them are from other agencies) I don't have a link on their site to it. But the little bar of italic text at the bottom says the guy is a senior editor for the New Republic..

 

The elephant in the room

They're not saying it officially (or switching to support Kerry), but intellectual conservatives can't stand President Bush

 

By Franklin Foer

 

NEW YORK - 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.

 

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. 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, "We'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."

 

The breadth of the unhappiness with Bush is 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. 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.

 

Conservative 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. 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. 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.

 

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."

 

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.

 

In 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.

 

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.

 

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. 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. Unable to muster enthusiasm for their man, conservatives have justified their continued support for the president by resorting to passionate Kerry-hating. Apparently, when you have nothing nice to say about your own guy, it's best to say nothing at all.

 

I've said it before, I'll say it again: You want to see conservative voting make a comeback, make the Republicans play defense. Bush is a spending maniac and people in Congress aren't willing to break with their party's President to do anything about it. That he even talks about reigning in government spending at the convention is a silent admission that he hasn't done anything about it in the past four years.

[bobobrazil1984 0]

well, boo fucking hoo.

That's their candidate. unless they plan on voting for Kerry en masse, their complaints mean exactly DICK (and i dont mean Cheney) to Bush.

 

(they are correct however in the fact that Bush is no conservative, but again, their complaints mean dick)

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Wow, there are Republican that don't like Bush. I'm shocked beyond all belief.

 

Next thing you know there will be Democrats that don't like Kerry, or much of that Party's mainstream leadership...

[Guest MikeSC]

Wow, there are Republican that don't like Bush. I'm shocked beyond all belief.

 

Next thing you know there will be Democrats that don't like Kerry, or much of that Party's mainstream leadership...

It's like the anti-war fringe cases. Who the heck are they going to vote for?

-=Mike

...However, the whole "Most extreme right-wing administration in history" kids might want to read this story...