By CHRIS STIREWALT
Examiner Political Editor
Andrew Sullivan expressed disdain for my column in Thursday’s paper for insufficiently blaming Republicans for big spending of the Bush era.
I wrote that Bush had been guilty of “allowing Democrats to go ape on domestic spending in order to preserve funding for the Iraq war.” as part of my explanation of how American conservatives and Republicans have generally viewed big government as the enemy.
Sullivan responded:
” For some reason, I recall that $32 trillion of future unfunded liabilities was added in the Medicare prescription drug act by forcing Republicans to stay up half the night until they signed on the dotted line. But I guess you have to massage history if you are to maintain the fiction that small government conservatism – barely practised even by Reagan – only died at the hands of the left.
Nah: Rove killed it. And it was premeditated murder.”
Sullivan has moved on mostly to legalizing pot, celebrating Iowa’s gay marriage moves, and lamenting Obama’s “Courage of a Clinton” for declining to rapidly move on allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military.
But I feel feel obliged to acknowledge the portion of his critique that is fair.
Writing in the space provided in a tabloid paper sometimes causes me to truncate larger ideas into a kind of shorthand. It’s a decent trade off for the discipline of not rambling on and boring readers with dissertations on politics. And that’s what we have the Internet for, right?
I ought to have said that Bush surrendered to or attempted to co-opt big government plans normally associated with the Democrats in order to garner sufficient support for his foreign agenda.
When Bush went along with plans to make Homeland Security a unionized behemoth, he was picking his battles, preferring to save his capital for other challenges. Granted, he wanted the behemoth in the first place, but keeping about 200,000 union jobs in the new agency was a nod to Democrats’ demands.
Conversely, when Bush pushed the Medicare prescription drug benefit it was as an effort to deprive Democrats on an election issue. Yes, that was an intentional move to the left on welfare by the president. But I suspect his goal still to preserve his ability to kill more terrorists, but it was a co-opting, not an allowance, so my language in Thursday’s paper was imprecise.
Bush and Karl Rove may have once envisioned a new centrist Republican Party, but the overall thrust of the Bush presidency was based on doing what was necessary to keep fighting our enemies. The idea of permanent majority was certainly subsumed by seeking victory in the GWOT.
The point, though, is that Republicans mostly regard both Bush’s allowances and co-opting as failures or at least departures from party orthodoxy, just as they do Richard Nixon’s.
It would not be out of character for a British Tory to propose a new welfare program, even one as big and expensive as free drugs for seniors, provided that the argument made on its behalf was that it addressed a public need ore efficiently and effectively than an existing or proposed Labour alternative.
Among many Republicans the early period of the Bremmer Regency in Iraq and lost days after Katrina would make the list of complaints about the Bush 43 presidency. But for almost every Republican, his failure to control the size and cost of government is lamented. The main difference is whether Republicans view the expansion as a necessary evil required to continue the primary objective of defeating the Islamists or if it was an unnecessary move that revealed a disregard of core party values. Either way, Bush’s growth of government is not considered a good thing among his party’s rank and file.
That’s a different issue than a deficit. That’s about whether American Republicans still believe that at the core of their political outlook is, as I said in Thursday’s piece, “telling the government to go to hell.”
That’s the question that lies ahead. Certainly the Bush administration broke down barriers to big government, and many, like Arnold, Tim Pawlenty and others, see the way forward as not rolling back big government but making it more effective. That’s the Tory argument and if Obama succeeds in entrenching the socialist breakthroughs he’s seeking, it may be all that remains for the GOP.
But if Obama’s plan for much bigger spending, much more intrusive government and much bigger deficits is repudiated, expect Republicans to go back to finding popular support for making big government a common enemy.
