Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (37 page)

The episode did far more damage to Bush and the Republican Congress than was obvious at the time. It was the most extreme case of Rove’s dual strategy backfiring. Efforts to mollify and mobilize the religious right could not be undertaken in isolation. Middle-of-the-road voters would be turned off by the very moves designed to turn on a powerful minority inside the GOP.

And there was no coming back for Bush after his administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina. The failure of the relief effort hurt Bush on two levels. There was the simple rage and disappointment over the incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, on display in the country’s living rooms day after day in televised reports by correspondents increasingly outraged by the suffering they encountered. But the episode was especially damaging politically because it undercut the primary source of Bush’s political success: his claim that he could protect his fellow Americans. Leadership, strength, and security were Bush’s calling cards. These were lost in the surging waters of New Orleans.

Things got no better as the situation in Iraq worsened. From the perspective of the Bush camp, Gerson (he left the White House in June 2006) saw the growing unpopularity of the Iraq War as playing an indirect role
in strengthening conservative opposition to Bush. The party’s right did not publicly turn against the war, but as Bush “lost altitude” because of it, Gerson said, conservative found other reasons “to go after him,” “to distance themselves,” and “to express frustration.” Many on the right, Gerson believed, “clearly wanted to humiliate the president,” and they gave their dissidence “an ideological context” by arguing that theirs was actually a “revolt against big government conservatism.” This would become a major Tea Party rallying cry.

Gerson pointed to two episodes of early conservative unrest. In 2005, conservatives rose up against Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers, his White House counsel, to the Supreme Court. Some questioned her credentials, but the right’s central objection was to her ideological profile: she didn’t have one. Conservatives worried that she would turn out to be a stealth moderate or even moderately liberal justice in the mode of David Souter, nominated by the first President Bush. Miers withdrew on October 27, 2005, in response to the conservative pressure, just twenty-four days after Bush named her. The right got what it wanted when the president named Samuel Alito to the Court. He became one of its most reliable conservative votes.

In February 2006, conservatives in large numbers joined leading Democrats in rebelling against the sale of a port management company to a state-owned firm in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai Ports World. Critics claimed the deal would weaken U.S. port security. It was eventually scuttled, to Bush’s embarrassment.

The Dubai Ports controversy pointed to the tensions within Bush’s strategy of using the fear of terrorism to advance his political interests. Bush hoped to court Muslim and Arab allies and favored free trade and open international markets. The ports deal fit with both commitments. Yet if “protecting the homeland” against the terrorist threat was the nation’s highest priority, the backlash against Arab ownership of a company responsible for the flow of American shipping was hardly surprising. Democrats embraced opposition to the Dubai Ports deal with a gleeful opportunism. Having been the victims of antiterrorism politics, Democrats were happy to turn the tables on Bush. They were joined by many conservatives who were determined not to cede any ground on the issue that had helped them win elections.

In the fall of 2006, voters handed control of both the House and Senate to
the Democrats. The growing unpopularity of the Iraq War turned the security issue into a reverse wedge against Bush and the Republicans. Resistance in the GOP to immigration reform enraged Latinos, and Republican losses were especially severe among Hispanic evangelicals, the linchpin of Bush’s Latino support and key players in his “multiculturalism of the godly.”

The rebuke to Bush previewed many of the trends that would help elect Barack Obama two years later. The youth rebellion against the Republicans began not in 2008 but in 2006. In the 2002 midterms, Democrats had won a bare 51 percent majority among voters under 30; four years later, they won 61 percent.
Suburbanites, the ultimate swing voters, swung hard: from 41 percent Democratic in 2002 to 51 percent in 2006. And among self-described moderates, the Democratic vote rose from 54 percent to 61 percent. For Bush, the middle was collapsing.

The irony of George W. Bush’s impact on American politics is that in trying to do too much—to mobilize the right at the same time he was trying to build support in the center—he ended up alienating both parts of the center-right alliance he was trying to create. His moderate “big-government” moves—pushing through No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug benefit—angered significant parts of the right, as did his push for immigration reform. Yet his embrace of the conservative social issues alienated moderates. Rising deficits, the result of tax cuts in tandem with war and stepped-up security spending, alienated budget-balancing moderates and conservatives alike. The wars themselves, in Afghanistan but especially in Iraq, distracted Bush from his domestic goals and created a backlash that transcended normal left-right lines.

In his 2014 interview, Frum offered an instructive epitaph to Bush-Rove strategery. He contrasted their efforts with the reforms of the British Labour Party instituted by Tony Blair and the adjustments in the British Conservative Party’s approach inaugurated by David Cameron.

Both Blair and Cameron, Frum argued, made “substantive” changes to their party’s ideologies and policies. Blair jettisoned traditional Labour socialism while Cameron embraced certain ideas associated with progressives, including gay rights and efforts to halt climate change. Bush and Rove, by contrast, “tried to preserve most of conservative policy” and declined to revise
conservatism in any fundamental way. They were looking for “just enough change . . . to rebrand the product, but not so much that you frighten and alienate the members of your traditional constituency.”

Under pressure, both halves of the strategy fell apart.

The Bush years are central to understanding why conservatism took such a hard right term during the Obama years—because of what Bush did, and because of what he failed to do. He had two opportunities to remake conservatism. His initial forays into compassionate conservatism opened the possibility of a broader Republican and conservative coalition, particularly because of their potential to appeal to Latinos and to strengthen the Republicans’ hold on the white working class. A more ambitious compassionate conservatism might also have transformed conservative policy strategies, introducing a somewhat more secular version of European Christian Democracy into the repertoire of the American right. Bush might thus have broadened the focus of religious conservatism to include issues related to social justice. But this would have required a compassionate conservatism that was something more than the simple recognition of the acts of mercy and kindness undertaken by the churches, synagogues, and mosques. It would have demanded that Bush opt unequivocally for the more progovernment versions of the idea reflected in the thinking of Kuo, Gerson, and John DiIulio, the first leader of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, over the Christian libertarianism of Olasky. Making this choice would have required issuing a fundamental challenge to contemporary conservatism, something Bush was unwilling to do.

Of course 9/11 changed Bush’s priorities in fundamental ways, but the post-9/11 period represented his second lost opportunity. Bush’s high approval ratings for months after the attacks reflected something that transcended politics: the desire of a nation traumatized by horror to come together and to give every benefit of the doubt to its commander in chief. Bush grew into the unifying role, and the endurance of his good poll numbers reflected what, early on at least, was his sensitivity to what the new situation
demanded. Bush had a chance to respond to the new spirit of patriotism by issuing a broad call to national service. He could have abandoned tax cutting for the duration, and resisted using security issues as political wedges. And, of course, he could have followed Brent Scowcroft’s advice and avoided the war in Iraq.

Here was the opportunity to create a moderate conservatism in the Eisenhower mold that would have dovetailed with compassionate conservatism. Eisenhower’s ideology is recalled as being far more secular than the conservatism that took hold after the rise of the religious right and is thus typically seen as out of synch with today’s social issues right. But as the historian Kevin Kruse has shown, Eisenhower-style conservatism, like Bush’s, was religiously inflected, and it was during Ike’s time in office (and with his support) that the phrases
“One Nation Under God” and “In God We Trust” became part of the country’s civic liturgy. Any conservatism now would likely stand to the right of where Eisenhower—still a figure of the New Deal era—or Bush’s grandfather stood. Nonetheless, a shaken nation was open to a unifying approach to politics. By the fall of 2002, Bush had made other choices.

In the end, both Bush and Rove decided that maintaining the traditional conservative coalition and activating conservative voters were their most practical political options. They were responding to the conservatism the country had, not a conservatism some might wish we had. The changes in the movement since Goldwater had reduced what Republican politicians perceived to be their margin of maneuver. When it came to short-term politics, Bush and Rove found their calculations justified by the elections of 2002 and 2004. But an opportunity to create a more lasting, if more moderate, conservative majority was lost, and Bush’s complicated ideological dance left conservative activists, liberals, and many in the middle ground dissatisfied and, in many cases, angry.

Chris Chocola and Mick Mulvaney speak for Tea Party and libertarian conservatives in insisting, with passion and conviction, that Bush failed because he advocated big government: large deficits, a prescription drug benefit under Medicare, and the further centralizing of power over the nation’s schools through the No Child Left Behind law. Bush was not averse to new federal spending—for education, part of his deal with Ted Kennedy to get No Child passed, or for his ambitious initiative to help the victims of
AIDS in Africa. Many on the right resented his talk of a compassionate conservatism, seeing the adjective itself, as Barry Goldwater had in a different time, as a putdown implying that normal, unqualified conservatism must somehow be mean and callous. Others on the right never forgave Bush his strong advocacy of immigration reform and his embrace of America’s Latino community.

Trende offered the familiar litany: “Temporary tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, a new Cabinet department, increased federal spending, TARP, and repeated attempts at immigration reform. Basically, despite a historic opportunity to shrink government, almost everything that the GOP establishment achieved during that time moved the needle leftward on domestic policy.”

“The icing on the cake for conservatives,” Trende added, “is that these moves were justified through an argument that they were necessary to continue to win elections and take issues off the table for Democrats. Instead, Bush’s presidency was followed in 2008 by the most liberal Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by sizable Democratic House and Senate majorities.” What conservatives saw as political opportunism was bad enough; that it didn’t work made it unforgiveable.

Since the defeats of Robert Taft, “Mr. Conservative,” in the 1940s and 1950, the narrative of betrayal had deeply embedded itself in the conservative psyche. It was taken up with a vengeance when George W. Bush’s presidency ended with Obama’s election.

George W. Bush’s most enduring betrayal in the eyes of Tea Partiers and free-market purists was the $700 billion bank bailout during the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. Judged with the benefit of historical hindsight, this could be viewed as Bush’s most courageous act, a step that was painful, in many ways unjust, but also necessary to keep the economy from collapsing. It was an enormous affront to Bush’s own stated beliefs, which made it a brave choice and also enraged many Republicans and conservatives. Their rage only grew with time, as fears of an economic meltdown receded.

The fight over the bailout is especially instructive about the complexity of Bush’s political legacy. Conservatives who just four years earlier had hailed Bush as the architect of a new majority for their movement turned hard against his bank rescue. Yet much of the political blame for Bush’s proposal was ultimately shouldered by the Democrats.

In light of the fierce attacks on the bailout from both right and left, it’s important to remember how ambivalent the country was about it at the time. Two polls, conducted at the same time, produced what appeared to be contradictory results that, in fact, accurately captured how torn Americans were about rescuing the institutions that many of them blamed for the crisis.