Why Conservatives Hate Bush

Washington Monthly

If I were a Bush administration insider, I'd be scrambling right now to get my book contract. No path leads more surely to critical acclaim these days than the White House confessional. What the insiders are trafficking in, however, isn't the usual gossip about infighting or turf wars but a matter of considerably greater importance: the president's alleged ideological apostasy. President Bush, a fleet of his former enthusiasts now insist, is no conservative.

No complaint against Bush is more popular on the right—or gets a freer pass in the mainstream media—than the notion that he somehow abandoned the philosophy that guides today's Republican Party. And the most recent insiders to turn on Bush for his impurities come from high stations. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who declined to contest Bush's disastrous tax cut plan back in 2001 when he might have derailed it, used his September memoir to blame Bush for failing to cut spending—a cardinal sin among conservatives. Weeks before, the law professor and Bush White House veteran Jack Goldsmith published a memoir disclosing his dismay with the administration's policies on torturing suspected terrorists, even though he could have denounced the president years ago. Before that, another ex-Bush aide, David Kuo of the euphemistically titled "faith-based" office, purported in his book to expose the hollowness of Bush's program for aiding religious institutions that do social work. Was he really expecting that the church-state wall would be demolished, not just eroded?

Greenspan, Goldsmith, and Kuo have, of course, merely joined a long train of right-wing officials, operatives, and journalists who once genuflected before Bush but are now charging him with abandoning the true path. Consider the comments of a few stars of the conservative firmament. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum laments that Bush never adopted a sufficiently robust neoconservative worldview. "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words," he told Vanity Fair in 2006. "And the big shock to me has been that, although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas." This from the author of the 2003 paean The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich these days deplores the "absurdly bloated, undisciplined federal budget." During the 2004 presidential race, interestingly, Gingrich told Fox News that "Abraham Lincoln didn't have a balanced budget. He was fighting a civil war. Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't have a balanced budget. He was fighting the Second World War. We are in a real war." Pundit Ann Coulter complains of "really stupid Americans like George Bush"—the man she labeled a "magnificent wartime leader" in 2004. And radio host Laura Ingraham wondered this summer if Bush is "too stupid" to understand that his base is angry for "turn[ing] his back on them"—an uncharacteristic move, surely, for the "real man" who "stands by his word" whom she rhapsodized about in 2003. And so it goes.

Heartening as it is to hear the growing criticism of Bush from within the GOP ranks, the idea that he's veered from conservatism is hogwash. Bush is the most conservative president we've had since probably Warren G. Harding—and perhaps ever. He has governed, wherever possible, fully in step with the basic conservative principles that defined Ronald Reagan's presidency and have shaped the political right for the last two generations: opposition to New Deal-style social programs; a view of civil liberties as obstacles to dispensing justice; the pursuit of low taxes, especially on businesses and the wealthy; a pro-business stance on regulation; a hawkish, militaristic, nationalistic foreign policy; and a commitment to bringing religion, and specifically Christianity, back into public policy. "Mr. Bush has a philosophy. It is conservative," wrote Peggy Noonan in 2002. Ah, but times change. Last June she complained, "What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them.".........