Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (28 page)

Compassionate conservatives were also willing to accept the legitimacy of progressive goals and progressive issues—the need to alleviate poverty, combat racism, and expand opportunity—while insisting that their solutions were sounder than those embodied in the liberal welfare state. Teles noted that “compassionate conservatism sought to advance traditionally liberal ends by conservative means” and its partisans often looked to the two core principles of Catholic social thought for guidance: “subsidiarity” and “solidarity.” Subsidiarity embodied “the principle that power should be held by institutions as close to the individual as possible.” Solidarity referred to
“the idea that a society must be measured by how it treats its weakest and neediest members.” Teles noted that compassionate conservatives consciously drew on a notion made popular by Clinton’s New Democrats—that government’s task was to “steer, not row.” It’s a reminder that the period between Clinton’s reelection and the country’s descent into the impeachment imbroglio offered occasional moments of ideological cross-pollination.

As a practical matter, compassionate conservatives divided into two broad groups.

On the one side were those whose primary motivation was a deep and authentic concern for the poor. These members of the tribe combined a profound impatience with conservative indifference to the needy and the cause of social justice with a sharp critique of the failures of traditional welfare programs.

An emblematic figure in this group was David Kuo, a committed Christian who worked as a Capitol Hill staffer and as an aide to both Kemp and William Bennett. (He later worked in the Bush White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and then founded his own antipoverty group.) Writing in 1997, Kuo argued that liberals and conservatives
needed to learn from each other, which in today’s political climate seems a thoroughly radical idea.

Kuo’s lesson to liberals was simple enough: “Faith matters.” Yes, he said, liberals usually understood that faith was “a matter of importance,” and some acknowledged that the “liberal welfare tradition . . . had its roots in religious revival.” Yet liberals who might acknowledge this were still prone to “ignoring” or “being actively hostile to” the role of faith “as a catalyst for radical change in people’s lives.” Liberals needed to embrace the work of private, not-for-profit groups and the success of “social entrepreneurialism.” They also needed to abandon their belief “that true compassion is directly related to federal spending on welfare.”

Conservatives, in turn, needed to accept something very hard for many of them to say outright: “Governmental programs can do—and have done—good.” Kuo pointed to the success of food stamps in alleviating hunger and of Social Security in slashing poverty rates among the elderly. Further, conservatives needed to acknowledge that “[p]overty in America is real.” It was not “just an invention of the left,” Kuo wrote, and not “mostly a matter of sloth and bad bookkeeping.” In words that still resonate, he added: “Conservatives will have more success undoing the welfare state if they abandon arguments that all of America’s poor are either ‘undeserving’ or ‘non-existent.’ ”

The other wing of compassionate conservatism was interested in devolving responsibility for social action to churches and other civil society groups as a way of shrinking the size of government. The more aggressive iteration of this approach was popularized by Newt Gingrich when he championed the writings of
Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor who later became a Bush campaign adviser.

Olasky was, like Kuo and Gerson, deeply religious, but his faith led him to different conclusions about the role of the state. Olasky argued that religious charities had always been, and would always be, more effective in helping the poor than any government program. The upshot, to exaggerate a little: government should drop dead to bring the religious charities to life. He argued in a 1996 book,
Renewing American Compassion,
that in an ideal world, Congress would simply abolish the federal safety net. “It is time
for Congress to increase the pressure by phasing out federal programs,” he wrote, “and pushing states to
develop ways for individuals and community-based institutions to take over poverty-fighting responsibility.” Olasky saw the old conservative doctrine of states’ rights much as liberals did: as a pathway for dismantling the social protections that had been built since the days of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era. But if this likely outcome is why liberals are skeptical of states’ rights arguments, it is precisely why Olasky embraced them. He called for
“placing in the hands of state officials all decisions about welfare and the financing of it and then pressing them to put welfare entirely in the hands of church- and community-based organizations.” A radical formula, really: smash the state in the name of God.

There were overlaps between these two wings of compassionate conservatism, of course. It was possible to be disillusioned with the welfare state because it had failed the poor. Gerson and Kuo certainly felt this way. Both shared the conservative view that “government bureaucracies are blunt and ineffective instruments,” as Gerson put it in his memoir of the Bush years. “ ‘Take a number and wait’ compassion has little to offer men, women and children in spiritual and emotional crisis.”

Nonetheless, their passion for the poor, animated by their Christian faith, led both Kuo and Gerson to become sharp critics of antigovernment conservatives. Tensions between those who wanted to build a new faith- and community-based approach to poverty within government and those who were most deeply committed to getting government out of the way would make compassionate conservatism a problematic guide to governing. Splitting the difference between these two poles was impossible.

On the other hand, the existence of these camps reflected how powerful compassionate conservatism could be as a coalition-building tool. The idea had the potential of bringing together three political strains: religious conservatives generally, who welcomed the emphasis on the power of faith; moderates and moderate conservatives who welcomed an acknowledgment of the need for creative social policy; and an antigovernment right that embraced the movement’s critique of government welfare programs and saw it as a way of reducing or eliminating them.

For a variety of personal and philosophical reasons, some growing out of his own religious faith, George W. Bush was genuinely drawn to
compassionate conservatism. But he and Karl Rove also understood its political power. The movement was taking hold at the very moment when the Republican establishment and the conservative movement alike were ready to turn to him for leadership.

In light of how divisive and unpopular Bush became, it’s important to remember what a gifted politician he could be and how shrewd he was in grappling with the new landscape Clinton had created. Mike Gerson was far from alone in his party in viewing Bush as the GOP’s natural leader at the end of the Clinton era. During his campaign for reelection as governor of Texas in 1998, journalists, conservative intellectuals, and Republican operatives descended on Texas to check out the man whose skills and instincts might get the Republicans back into power. The political cognoscenti gave Bush the sort of rave reviews that had greeted Clinton’s pre-campaign rollout in 1991. Tough, gimlet-eyed political reporters and power brokers came close to gushing about him: He had a new Republican message. He had learned from Clinton, his father, and Ronald Reagan alike. He could talk about religion without scaring people. He sounded oh-so-much better than the crowd in Washington. And in his reelection campaign, he was running 40 points ahead in the polls.

In late October of that year, I was part of the media swarm that visited with Bush on the campaign trail, and got a chance to interview him at length. What I saw—at a winery in the appropriately named town of Grapevine, Texas, and at stop after stop that day—was a natural retail politician who understood his strengths and seemed comfortably aware of his weaknesses. During a reception held among rows of great oak casks, Bush offered bear hugs and kisses, handshakes and shoulder pats. He looked people in the eye. A rambunctious smile lit his face. He clued in quickly to the particular thing that made the person in front of him tick. At the winery, he didn’t talk too long. He seemed more eager to work the crowd, to put an arm on friends, to remember things about their kids. He knew what he did best.

“He’s not looking over your shoulder at the next guy’s name tag,” said Tom
Craddick, a Republican state representative, offering the mirror compliment to the criticism so often directed at Washington operators. Bush conveyed a merry irony about the very political game he took so seriously. He was like Bill Clinton, yet very, very different. Bush didn’t feel your pain; he let you in on the joke.

When I asked people why they liked him, they talked much more about who he was than what he had done as governor. The phrases rolled off their tongues: He was “down to earth,” “not a politicians’ politician,” someone who “brings people together.”

“He’s an inspiration,” Paula Day, a cochair of his campaign in Tarrant County, told me that day. “He represents a positive attitude, an optimistic attitude, that you can do it, you can achieve.” She seemed to be speaking of a motivational specialist, not a politician.

Bush’s stump speech reflected this. He did address what he’d done and what he’d do with a second term in Austin, but this is not what moved his crowds. They most liked his inspirational words and moral talk—yet his sermons did not sound the least bit like those of Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell.

At a juvenile justice center in Dallas that day, he pledged
“to make sure that there are consequences for bad behavior in our state.” To a reporter for a local Spanish-language television station, Bush said—in Spanish—“Love and discipline go hand in hand.”

At a rally at Collin County Community College in Plano, he touted his program to get all children to read and spoke of the one in five Texas kids who couldn’t.
“That means somebody’s got low hopes, low standards, low expectations,” he said. These were serious sins in George W.’s world.

Striking about Bush’s paean to reading was the way he tied his message of personal responsibility to a call for social action while leaving government’s role quite blurry. “There is a responsibility to love your neighbor like you want to be loved yourself,” he told the well-scrubbed Plano crowd. “The best juvenile justice program is to make sure the children of Texas know how to read.”

At the time, I spoke with the man Democrats had chosen to run a race they knew he and they were going to lose. Garry Mauro, the Texas land commissioner, was the first to acknowledge that Bush was “a good politician,”
someone who “knows how to get along with the state Legislature” and “hires good people and listens to them.”

Mauro argued that while Bush was not a man of ideas, he did know where to find them. “He didn’t spend a lot of time doing something innovative or different. He picked up a lot of other people’s ideas and made them his own. That’s a pretty smart thing to do.”

Of late, Bush had spoken of his passion for reading and new efforts to promote literacy. Mauro was a skeptic. “If he thought remedial reading was so important, why didn’t he propose it two years ago?” Mauro asked. His judgment on Bush? “The last thing I would call George Bush is an ideologue,” Mauro said. “I don’t believe George Bush has strong feelings about anything.” Karl Rove was happy at the time to hear people describe Bush as a nonideologue, exactly the kind of candidate who could win the supposedly postideological Clinton era. But a decade later, Bush’s critics on the right would say much the same thing, and not so charitably.

In the buildup to his presidential campaign, Bush was quite brilliant in presenting different sides of himself to different people. Many Texas Democrats I spoke with then called Bush a centrist who agreed with them on many things. “George has been at odds with some of the leading Republican figures in the state,” said one Democratic state legislator who didn’t want his name used, for fear of offending Bush and his fellow Democrats simultaneously. “You talk to him in private, and there are a lot of things that, as a Democrat, you agree with him on. He’s a moderate.”

Yet conservative Bush fans said exactly the opposite: that he was a true conservative who knew how to talk moderate. “More conservative than his father, George W. has a proven record of conservative accomplishment that the media have largely ignored,” Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition, wrote in
National Review
in July 1998.
“A Bush victory in November 2000 would be a conservative triumph, not a moderate one.” Reed’s view may have been colored by the fact that he was then a Bush consultant paid to help win over the religious right. But Reed was echoing what other conservatives were saying.

Among progressives, Bush profited from being a Republican in Texas, where you could be very conservative and still look very middle-of-the-road
compared with your fellow partisans. Liberals were accustomed to conservative tough guys like Tom DeLay, Dick Armey, and Phil Gramm. Compared with them, Bush was a sweetie. State representative Glen Maxey, an openly gay member of the Texas legislature and a Democrat who was one of Bush’s most articulate critics, said a funny thing to me back then: “As a liberal gay activist in the Texas House of Representatives, I say: He’s not as bad as he could be.”