This President and Us: Insularity from conservations is proving costly
Tyrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Insularity from conservatives is proving costly. BY R. Tyrell Emmett JR. WHEN PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH called us to lunch in the Rose Garden the sun was high in the...
...Yet it is among conservatives that this President will have to work to renew his support...
...BY R. MMETT JR...
...This historic change explains in part, I think, the comparatively leak-proof condition of this White House...
...People who work with the President note what should be obvious to us all...
...The leaks of the Reagan administration were usually the consequence of inter-party rivalry between "pragmatic" Republicans and movement conservatives vying for the president's ear...
...All that we can hope for is the ongoing liberal crack-up and the conservatives' understanding that in politics steadiness on behalf of principle is everything...
...These Bushies, I am told, have taken on more power than they can exercise wisely, and in their protectiveness of their boss they only increase his insularity and the attendant problems that have gone with it...
...The game is for the President to lose...
...Peace in Iraq is key, and developments there and in Egypt, Libya, and Lebanon suggest that peace is spreading...
...The President defends his tax cuts and for the right reason, growth...
...History does not have tectonic plates and it does not shift to accommodate liberal delusions...
...Friedman actually was advising that the President move to the left, effecting "a fundamental recasting of his position and his administration...
...Yet his message is usually lost in the media groans of the Kultursmog...
...Moreover their disarray is terminal...
...Possibly if he had spent more time with them they would have had more trust in him and acted with greater restraint than they have in the aftermath of the Miers nomination...
...The power and the policies are on the right...
...Astonishingly House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has promised to do the same in her district...
...In his second term he is ever more reliant on young middle-level people with backgrounds similar to the Texans he came into town with...
...Our man in Iraq, John Connly Walsh, has moved from optimism to pessimism and back to optimism again, as those who follow him on our website, Spectator.org, know...
...The historic conditions of our time are conservative, as Peter Wallison clarified so cogently in our last issue (see "A Republican Country," TAS, October 2005...
...A former White House aide possessed of impeccable conservative credentials laments the difficulty this White House has had advancing its agenda...
...The president's first line of inquiry was domestic politics...
...Veterans of his first administration are de-parting...
...All three of us warned him not to agree to the Democrats' insistence upon a tax increase...
...A bigger problem will be to close the spending spigot...
...When he cut the deficit interest rates went up, not down...
...Today, despite a huge deficit, interest rates remain low...
...Dionne Jr., Jonah Goldberg, and some otherwise very perceptive writers in the October 1, 2005 Economist, I did not argue in that book that conservatism was in as NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 15 THIS PRESIDENT AND US serious a state of crack-up as liberalism was—and is...
...Yet, as the fellow who first diagnosed the condition, I can tell you that this is nothing new, and as I predicted in that book of mine libertarian conservatism always comes together at election time...
...But most have survived and left the White House as successful presidents...
...Liberals now claim, as Thomas Friedman did on Meet the Press recently, that it became "a far hard right agenda...
...He is insular and he seems to keep to a small band of aides whom he trusts...
...Unhealthy polls one year into a four-year term are not some-thing to obsess over...
...Bush is a bold decision-maker, but he is also a delegator who too often picks the wrong people and seldom fires them...
...he knows too much and was too deeply engaged in the process of selecting a nominee for the Court...
...The former aide attributes this to the desperation of a passing Old Order...
...be that elements of the movement will not turn out to vote...
...Does he think the President is suicidal...
...But the President's insularity has done little to strengthen the conservative movement that elected him...
...The Economist of October 1 was probably close to the truth when it editorialized "Mr...
...Another source active in political campaigns if not in the law says that what troubles him is the "cronyism," picking a Texas lawyer who has worked down that hall from the President for five years in Washington and many years in Austin...
...The former aide notes that the President "talks about the war on terror and the importance of sticking it out in Iraq all the time...
...So what are we left with...
...Not surprisingly associates of both magazines became prominent in the Reagan government...
...We are left with the execution of the war against terrorists, which the President rightly understands will be greatly assisted by his most historic initiative, the war in Iraq, and the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan...
...After making the ignorant assessment of the President's agenda he went on to say, "What's really struck me in the last couple of weeks [late September] is how the whole—the tectonic plates of politics in this country have all shifted to the left...
...see my earlier book, The Liberal Crack-Up...
...For the President to take the lead in such frugality might not be all that difficult...
...Possibly if this President had spent more time simply conversing with conservatives from outside the White House he would have 1 y understood how angrily they would react to the nomination of Harriet Miers...
...Presumably the conservatives will return to their conservative leadership...
...By the 1980s he was also reading The American Spectator, which he was to proclaim his favorite magazine...
...But as I say, this is an insular president...
...The spending caps that Congress adopted this past spring with White House support began to melt in July...
...Here is yet another example of the liberals' obliviousness...
...He is very tough, if occasionally difficult...
...It may be, as the Economist observes, in a state of "crack-up...
...He went into the White House with his own program...
...To both men conservatives were rastaquoueres...
...We wasted our time," one of the Federalist Society's most famous sages tells me: "The whole reason we workedso hard" for the President's election was to ensure a conservative court, ruled by judicial restraint and respect for the law as it is written and for the Constitution...
...Surely the aforementioned Friedman will be seen as a failed prophet and a delusional reporter...
...The response is perfectly understandable and could be very costly to future Re-publican prospects...
...Of course it was merely a continuation of the conservatism that President Reagan implemented without causing either the world war liberals predicted or the depression they also foresaw...
...At a recent Spectator editorial dinner, Kellyanne Conway, the conservative pollster with an eagle eye, says much of this wilting has come from the President's conservative base...
...It is usually the hysterics in the Kultursmog who have been failures, at least in the practice of prophecy...
...NOVEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17...
...In the Senate there is a group of Republicans also showing Pence's good sense in scotching their colleagues' raids on the Treasury...
...You thought I was talking about the present George Bush...
...whom I knew even before I knew his father's predecessor, modern conservatism's culmination, Ronald Reagan...
...By the time the present President Bush began governing the currents of history had swept these so-called pragmatic Republicans away...
...Not at all—my Rose Garden luncheon was with his father...
...We were even outsiders during the Reagan presidency, and Reagan aides such as Mike Deaver and James Baker tried to keep us outsiders despite the Gipper's relationship, often a working relationship, with movement conservatives...
...In fact, the only legislation he presided over then was Republican...
...That makes his adherence to tax cuts, the projection of American force, and what we call the social issues all the more amazing though perhaps indicative of the ascendancy of conservatism...
...They are the Old Order as surely as Hoover Republicans were the Old Order in 1936...
...There were just the four of us...
...I cannot argue with this source...
...That is precisely what happened a few months later in the autumn of 1990...
...Their hearts are set against him...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005 WHEN PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH called us to lunch in the Rose Garden the sun was high in the sky, a breeze rustled the shrubbery, and his dog was pursuing a squirrel, possibly several squirrels—they all look alike to me...
...If, however, the President's resolve is admirable and if his talent for politics is as good as I suspect it is, he does have one failing that is alarming...
...Dave Keene, the chair-man of the American Conservative Union, concurs...
...By 2001 even the liberal Democrats had suffered the erosions of time...
...AmSpec alums are all over the place, a particular favorite of ours being past assistant managing editor Bill McGurn, who is now the President's chief speechwriter...
...What this President must do and I believe will do is return to his base...
...He obviously relishes the great game of politics and follows the strengths and weaknesses of Republicans all over the country...
...George Herbert Walker Bush was not a movement conservative, but he mixed freely with movement conservatives, as did an earlier Republican, President Richard Nixon...
...J F IT IS ANY COMFORT to the President most modern—and successful—presidencies have gone through glum times such as these wherein the addressee at 1600 Pennsylvania has found himself forlorn and rejected...
...They have no policies that have any resonance with an American majority...
...And let me note that contrary to observers as diverse as E.J...
...is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator...
...Late in September they stopped an attempt by their fellow Republicans and Democrats to sneak through a $9 billion infusion of additional funds into state Medicare programs, supposedly as part of relief for Katrina victims but much of it utterly unrelated to the hurricane...
...Free markets, growth economics, social issues, security through the projection of American power, are now the desiderata of the modern Republican Party...
...Hysteria has been the liberals' response to conservative presidencies going back to the Reagan presidency, and that it has endured all these years suggests that it will only subside with their deaths, much as the anti-Roosevelt emotions only subsided with the Roosevelt haters' deaths...
...I have never seen the media so partisan," the aide declares, and with good reason...
...He promised to do this after the laxity of his first four years but has not done very well and the pols' mindless promises following Katrina make his challenge even greater...
...This nomination will not bring back the conservatives who are now giving him an unfavorable rating...
...Yet this George Bush is a late arrival to the conservative movement...
...He was clever at the outset of his presidency to abjure publicly the partisan vitriol of Washington and he ought to reiterate his disrelish of the vitriol that has only gotten more intense...
...The tax increase would impede economic growth, and the Democrats would just go on spending and increasing the deficit...
...P RESIDENT BUSH HAS WON significant victories in Congress—tax cuts, the reform of bankruptcy laws, legislation limiting class action, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, John Roberts as chief justice—and seen his popularity wilt, to 44 percent...
...A low turnout in a time when at the national level the parties are so evenly divided would make for a difficult presidential election, even with the weak field of candidates from which the Democrats will pick their nominee...
...Charlie Black, one of the Bushes' favorite political advisers, was there as was the White House chief of staff...
...Republicans' only worry should R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...It would delay such things as the implementation of Medicare prescription-drug benefits and cut some of the pork, for instance in the recent federal highway authorization...
...It puts me in mind of President Jimmy Carter's Georgians without the Carterites' quaint ideas and anile leader...
...They would only welch on their promise to cut spending...
...There is a nucleus of budget-conscious members in the House of Representatives led by the excellent Congressman Mike Pence of Indiana who has proclaimed "Operation Offset...
...It might not be ardent to support the next Republican nominee...
...He knows the important issues and the need to advance them, but he has had a devilish time doing so...
...The presence of Michael Brown as FEMA director is another...
...Unfortunately the President's insularity is beginning to cost him in terms of competence and in terms of his 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2005legacy...
...In today's White House there are even more movement conservatives...
...and demented...
...To see that the conservatives turn out in force the President will have to revise the tax code, ensuring that past tax cuts remain and that the estate tax is eliminated for good...
...Both houses of Congress are Republican and will probably remain so...
...He has acted forcefully for a federal court in line with judicial restraint...
...It helped that President Reagan's point of view had been shaped from the 1950s by his subscription to Bill Buckley's National Review...
...That the very clever Karl Rove is in this band and that there are no Deavers or Bakers disrupting his White House is reassuring...
...R, Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...That is as clear as a stain on Monica's jumper...
...His balderdash that lower interest rates created the 1990s growth is as untrue as his testimony before the grand jury...
...THE FUROR OVER the President's nomination to the Supreme Court of an obscure lawyer with no commanding record in the practice of law and no record at all as a judge has caused widespread dismay among movement conservatives...
...Yet there is a growing fear of profligacy, as Katrina recedes and the resourcefulness of private citizens puts the catastrophe into perspective...
...Sounding more like the national chairman of the party than the President of the United States, he pelted Charlie with questions about possible political match-ups across the country...
...But his mollifying rhetoric did not mean that he was going to be manipulated by the Democrats...
...Pence has promised to forego earmarks from the authorization benefiting his district...
...Without it the conservative revolution is imperiled...
...One of the rarely noted truths regarding this Bush is that he has a genius for politics...
...Senator John Ensign led these vigilantes but he has six others on his side, among them the relentless opponent of pork, John McCain...
...His antagonists to the left cannot be appeased...
...The President's delay in removing CIA Director George Tenet is an early example...
...As I argued in my 1992 book, The Conservative Crack-Up, they always do...
...Now they are useless...
...In his last years in office the scandal-prone President Bill Clinton had 60 percent popularity ratings and almost no power to move legislation...
...Next the conversation turned to foreign affairs, then to taxes...
Vol. 38 • November 2005 • No. 9
