We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days when Norman Lear still had hair. They are depicting John Aschroft as if he were George Wallace, Interior nominee Gale Norton as if she were the second coming of James Watt, and Labor nominee Linda Chavez as if she were Phyllis Schlafly with slightly darker skin. We could be in for a series of confrontations in which the two parties don’t just hold different views, but live in different centuries.
Bush really has been able to mold an administration in his own image. He is our first president with an MBA, and it’s clear that he brings an MBA mentality to the job. There are almost no academics at the top of this administration, but there are plenty of administrators, reflecting a Bush belief that intellectuals are people you can hire; executives are people you can trust. Like Bush, this is a conservative administration, but it is not doctrinaire. It has a chief of staff who supported Hillary Clinton’s health care plan, a Treasury secretary who supported higher gas taxes and spurned the supply siders, and a secretary of state who opposed rolling back Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. These are not orthodox conservative positions.
But Bush has been able to achieve something neither his father nor even Ronald Reagan was able to achieve. He has put together a governing conservative team. He and Dick Cheney have skillfully pleased every clique in the GOP class, from the horse country Range Rover drivers who can visit Christie Todd Whitman over at the EPA (Motto: “Making America’s Wilderness Safe for Steeple-chase”) to the pro-life truckers who can park their rigs and visit Tommy Thompson at HHS.
He has also mended an old rift. During the Reagan and Bush years, conservative ideologues battled with Republican pragmatists. The ideologues had great ideas and no clue as to how to game the Washington power structure. The pragmatists were great at playing the system, while lacking principles to guide them. But something has happened to the GOP over the past decade that has been enormously helpful to George Bush. Young people from the ideological wing of the party, like Energy czar Spence Abraham and Labor nominee Linda Chavez, gained administrative experience under Reagan and Bush I. They are much smoother operators than their philosophical predecessors. Meanwhile, the old pragmatists have been Reaganized. Ford hands like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and maybe even Paul O’Neill — who must have learned something at all those American Enterprise Institute retreats — have developed conservative convictions to go with their lifelong conservative instincts.
In short, the Republican elite has evolved over the years, and the Bush administration reflects that. Corporate America now includes many more minorities; so does the Bush cabinet. Conservatism has evolved since Newt Gingrich and is now less strident, less libertarian, and less ambitious; the Bush cabinet reflects that too.
So it’s all the more amazing that over in the land of the lefties — among the activists and the pundits — you find a set of prejudices that have been preserved in amber for three decades or more. For Jesse Jackson, it will always be Selma. For Anthony Lewis at the New York Times, it will always be the ACLU against the forces of McCarthyism. For abortion lobbyist Kate Michelman, it will always be 1973. They really do see a world populated by the stock characters of a decades-old morality play.
As Bush announced his cabinet picks, different groups within the liberal coalition went into well-rehearsed hysterics. The tactics, the mau-mauing, the apocalyptic warnings are all drawn straight from the 1960s, as if we haven’t all heard the same ear-piercing cries thousands of times already. John Ashcroft is a racist! Linda Chavez is an enemy of the working class! Gale Norton once worked with James Watt! Civilization is in danger! Send your donations today! All that is missing is for the liberals to roll out Teddy Kennedy to reprise his Robert Bork speech as the grande finale.
The performances say very little about the nominees, but they say a lot about the Democratic party. Al Gore ran on the theme of the People against the Powerful. If that was a message that really had resonance with Democrats, then they’d be attacking the Bush team for all the comfortable corporate fat cats who dominate it. But at heart, that is not what the liberal coalition is about. The Democratic party is as corporate as the GOP, and liberal donors live in posh suburbs like Princeton and Palo Alto. Among voters who describe themselves as members of the upper class, Al Gore won easily.
What the Democratic party is about, as revealed by the screaming of the past few weeks, is two things: affirmative action and abortion. Comfortable corporate nominees breeze through the confirmation process. But oppose affirmative action or legal abortion and you’d better be ready to have your character assassinated. John Ashcroft and Linda Chavez are going to bear the brunt of the calumny this season.
It’s probably not going to work. Because not everyone is living in the past. Democratic senators know John Ashcroft. They know he isn’t a stock southern sheriff from a Hollywood movie. Paul Wellstone is one of the most liberal members of the Senate. On Christmas Eve he went on CNN and declared, “The ultimate decision is: Is this somebody who is qualified? Is this somebody who you believe is ethical and will work hard? And I think John, you know, can pass that test.” Ashcroft has had similar support from Democrats ranging from Russell Feingold to Dianne Feinstein to Robert Torricelli.
The Democratic senators know that most of the charges against Ashcroft are untrue. He didn’t oppose the confirmation of Judge Ronnie White because he was black, but because in a few amazing decisions, White seemed unwilling to defend the rights of the victims of crime. They know that Ashcroft voted to confirm almost every black judicial nominee sent up by the Clinton administration. They know that John Ashcroft didn’t defend racial profiling, as some of the more enthusiastic liberal pundits are alleging; he convened hearings to expose racial profiling. Those senators will be able to easily verify that the same sorts of smears against Linda Chavez are untrue as well.
Aschroft, Chavez, and company will probably be confirmed because, unlike the activist and pundit wings of their party, most Democratic senators are not living in the past. The larger and more interesting question is how long they will tolerate the archaic tactics and mindsets of those who possess the loudest voices. Surely modern Democratic politicians were horrified by the NAACP’s election season James Byrd television ad, which practically accused George W. Bush of murder and which fit the dictionary definition of race baiting. Surely they are embarrassed every time Jesse Jackson starts accusing people of Nazi tactics. Surely they groan at every one of Kate Michelman’s fits of fake rage. Surely they know that all this hyperventilating threatens to undo one of Bill Clinton’s unquestioned accomplishments. Clinton modernized the image of the Democratic party so that it appealed to mainstream Americans. But parts of the party are in the process of rejecting the implant. The question is when modern Democrats are finally going to speak out against the race baiting and the slander. The confirmation hearings would be a useful place to start.
David Brooks, for the Editors
