Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (30 page)

Again: drugs and alcohol. Perhaps it was too much to expect a pro-business Republican to offer an answer that might include references to market failures, capitalism’s injustices, racism, or joblessness. But Bush’s answer underscored why compassionate conservatism was such a useful idea to the right.

A focus on personal shortcomings pointed to the need for individual conversion and self-help. A focus on conversion and self-help led to an emphasis on faith and charity, not government or justice. Kuo was right, of course, that it was possible to care about both sets of concerns. Gerson was right that Bush was not a radical libertarian who proposed the wholesale dismantling of the state, and Bush would make other nods to his progovernment side as the campaign proceeded. Nonetheless, the deeply conservative implications of compassionate conservatism as Bush described it were impossible to miss. Structural changes in the economy or the health system or in the relationship between workers and employers were not on the Bush agenda.

What conservatives seemed to understand is that Bush’s compassion was rooted in the very old Republican doctrine that voluntary action is better than government action.

Here is what Bush said in his inaugural address after he was reelected as governor:
“Reducing problems to economics is simply materialism,” he declared. “The real answer is found in the hearts of decent, caring people who have heard the call to love their neighbors as they would like to be loved themselves. We must rally the armies of compassion in every community of this state. We must encourage them to love, to nurture, to mentor, to help and thus to offer hope to those who have none.”

Now consider another speech: “Our national resources are not only material
supplies and material wealth but a spiritual and moral wealth in kindliness, in compassion, in a sense of obligation of neighbor to neighbor, and a realization of responsibility by industry, by business and by the community for its social security and its social welfare. . . . We can take courage and pride in the effective work of thousands of voluntary organizations for the provision of employment, for the relief of distress, that have sprung up over the entire nation.”

The words are Herbert Hoover’s, spoken in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression. When Bush insisted that he truly was a conservative, he had a good case to make and a powerful pedigree to invoke.

A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma: Churchill’s description of Russia in 1939 seemed quite apt to the way Bush presented himself as he prepared his presidential campaign. In 1999, I wrote a magazine piece for the
Washington Post
based on my interview with Bush and some of the reporting reflected here. I concluded that based on who Bush said he was—and on the contradictory ways others described him—it was impossible to know how he intended to govern. It was possible that he would prove to be the man who brought his party back to a modulated view of government that his grandfather would understand. Yet it was equally possible that he would parade into office under the banner of compassion and turn out to be one of the most conservative presidents in recent history.

There was also this: Bush had absolutely no interest in resolving the matter until the presidential campaign was over.

It was an enviable place for a candidate to be at the outset of a presidential campaign.

“All the ingredients are in place for this epic disaster in 2008.”

The word “strategery” began its life on
Saturday Night Live
on October 7, 2000, a month before the election. The brainchild of veteran
SNL
writer Jim Downey, the word was used by Will Ferrell to parody Bush’s on-again, off-again war with the English language and his tendency to garble old sayings and mispronounce words. Noting that people regularly “misunderestimated” him is a Bush classic.

Rather than bristle or complain, the Bush team embraced and ran with the concept. They secured the White House, after all, so whatever “strategery” was, it had worked. Bush aides came to speak of a White House Office of Strategery and regularly used the word with tongue-in-cheek pride.

Parsing the difference between normal strategy and “strategery” became a party game among political junkies and management experts.
Dan Simon, writing in
Forbe
s, distinguished between “strategy,” a carefully planned, long-term approach, and “strategery,” which entailed seat-of-the-pants gambits,
often designed under pressure. “If you’re writing it on a plane, train or the back of a car,” Simon explained, “it’s strategery.”

Strategery, constant improvisation, is precisely what Bush and Karl Rove were required to do over a decade during which they tried to build a narrow but enduring conservative majority in rapidly changing circumstances and in an overall climate that was pushing against conservatism.

Sometimes nimble and sometimes clumsy, they sought to stay ahead of events, pursuing different approaches at different moments—often, until 2006, with real success. Bush’s complex dance with the right and the middle that began with his 1998 reelection campaign for governor won him the 2000 Republican nomination. His 2004 reelection with a popular vote majority—the only majority Republicans managed between 1992 and 2012—was the high point. But the costs were high. Bush simultaneously created long-term problems inside the conservative coalition and alienated a large part of the political center that Rove had hoped to move rightward.

Understanding the Bush years in all their complexity is essential to grasping why conservatism and the Republican Party radicalized in the Obama years. The second President Bush’s political project began as an effort to come to terms with Clintonism and to seize enough of the political center to offer Republicans a chance at long-term dominance. Yet Bush found himself dependent on the party’s conservative base at crucial moments, notably when John McCain endangered his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. And after 2000, Karl Rove came to see the limits of an appeal to voters in the political center: there were fewer of them than he originally thought. He returned to older Republican strategies involving polarization and the use of hard conservative issues to increase turnout among loyalists. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, Bush expanded the repertoire of base-mobilizing issues to include appeals built around the war on terror. In doing so, he retooled charges of Democratic “softness” toward a foreign adversary that were a trademark of Richard Nixon’s career and were a key to his 1972 landslide victory over George McGovern. If Bush began his national career with an eye toward moderating conservatism, he was forced by the logic of the contemporary right to a strategy of polarization.

In the end, Bush’s strategery created the worst of all worlds: His
polarizing strategies infuriated Democrats and liberals while his moves toward moderation alienated the right. Progressives saw a socially conservative president who cut taxes on the rich, pushed the country to war on false pretenses, and bogged it down in Iraq. Conservatives saw a “big-government” Republican who turned surpluses into deficits, was far too “multicultural,” far too open to immigration reform, and far too eager to federalize education policy. When the catastrophic economic collapse came in 2008, both sides took it as a ratification of their respective negative verdicts on Bush’s stewardship.

The events of 9/11 also meant that Bush’s presidency did not, in the end, resemble the one he originally had in mind. He had hoped that, like Clinton, he would enjoy a sojourn overseeing peaceful and prosperous times. His time in office came to be defined instead by the attacks of September 11, 2001, his subsequent decision to invade Iraq, and economic mayhem.

Critical to Rove’s planning for the 2000 election was his acceptance of the successes of Clintonism and the failures of the 1994 Republican revolution. His approach was based on a realistic assessment of the advances Democrats had made and the continuing weaknesses of conservatism as a brand. He knew it was not 1980 anymore.

Bush and Rove also knew that Clinton’s image as an amiable compromiser who would do what it took to get things done played well against the Republican Congress, and Gingrich in particular. Clinton seemed devoted to uniting the country. His Republican opponents seemed determined to divide it, and impeachment served as Exhibit A of their indifference to national concord. Bush’s refrain heard during his reelection campaign about being a “uniter not a divider” became a maxim of his presidential quest, a clear signal that he was not like those annoying congressional Republicans whom so many voters disliked.

At the same time, Rove saw the Clinton scandal as a useful foil. It was the one aspect of Clinton’s tenure that upset swing voters, even if they had opposed impeachment. Regular, subtle reminders of the Lewinsky affair appealed to a Republican base, particularly the religious conservatives who continued
to loathe Clinton.
Without mentioning the forty-second president, Bush regularly promised to “restore honor and dignity to the White House.” Bush could remind the religious conservatives of Clinton’s sins as a reason for voting Republican again without harping on issues such as abortion or gay rights. Bush broadly agreed with the social conservatives, particularly in their views on the right to life. But he didn’t make his opposition to abortion a central part of his campaign because he had no intention of losing those suburban women whose votes he was courting so ardently.

Having it both ways on Clinton became a Bush trademark as he separated himself from the divisive impeachers while taking full advantage of the country’s sour response to the Clinton affair itself. And the approach had a side benefit: only at the very end of the 2000 campaign did Al Gore finally find a way to embrace Clinton’s successes while distancing himself from Clinton’s personal behavior.

The problem posed by the scandal (and Bush’s use of it) was “almost paralyzing”
to Gore, wrote John Harris, Clinton’s biographer. Gore “oddly came to believe that to embrace any part of the Clinton record was to embrace all of it.” If Gore’s ambivalence arose from an entirely understandable—if, in a political context, dysfunctional—anger over what Clinton had done, he was also responding to a comparable ambivalence in parts of the public that Bush took advantage of.

Yet Rove also sought to apply affirmative lessons he learned from Clinton on the need to broaden a party’s appeal, something that was already obvious in Bush’s reelection campaign and the compassionate, unifying image he so carefully cultivated before he announced for president. Bush’s strong support for immigration reform, a cause also endorsed by the pro-business right, was the most successful aspect of the effort. Bush bolstered his formal position on the issue with warm words about immigrants themselves.
“Not only do immigrants help build our economy,” Bush said at one point, “they invigorate our soul.” Bush won upwards of 40 percent of the Latino vote in both 2000 and 2004. The political costs of his support for immigration reform on the right end of the party would emerge only after he had been safely reelected.

The emphasis on compassionate conservatism was part of this larger endeavor, and Bush was occasionally willing to take Republicans in Congress
to task for being insufficiently mindful of the poor. In late September 1999, for example, Bush criticized a GOP proposal to restructure and cut the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which subsidizes the incomes of the working poor.
Bush echoed, word for word, a critique of Republican budgeters on which Democrats thought they owned the copyright. “I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” Bush said.

Such forays into the political center won Bush early and favorable notice from journalists. A few days after his comments on the EITC,
Dan Balz, the
Washington Post
’s top political reporter, described Bush as having “stolen a page from President Clinton’s political playbook” by “distancing himself from the unpopular congressional wing of the Republican Party in the same way Clinton played off congressional Democrats.” Two could play the triangulation game.

Yet Balz shrewdly noticed something else: the “reality” that “Bush has not strayed dramatically from conservative orthodoxy—from abortion to guns to tax cuts to school vouchers.” Bush seemed to be making small nods to the center (the EITC proposal he opposed amounted to only $8 billion in budget reductions) while making the hard commitments the right demanded. The tensions and contradictions that were obvious in 1998 did not go away.

As Rove explained the strategy to
Washington Post
reporter Thomas B. Edsall, the more divisive approaches used by Nixon and even Bush’s father in 1988 were “old paradigm,” and in the new millennium, “voters are more attracted . . . by a positive agenda than by wedge issues.”

The heavy stress Bush put on education in the 2000 campaign is an example of Rove’s audacity in trying to seize an issue from the Democrats. Since Bush had attempted to reform the way Texas financed its public schools, he came to the question with some credibility, even if his reform effort had been defeated. In having Bush talk regularly about schools, Rove was very clear about the target voters he had in mind.
Education, he wrote
in his memoir, “was a major concern with suburban independents, especially women, and soft Republicans.” By ceding the issue to Democrats, Rove argued, Republicans threw away votes that could be theirs. He noted that
voters who considered education their top voting issue in 1996 had supported Clinton over Dole by 62 points, 78 percent to 16 percent. It was thus a matter of great pride to Rove that “[a]fter
Bush talked about education endlessly during his 2000 presidential campaign, he received 44 percent of the vote from those for whom education was their top issue.” Bush reduced the 62-point Democratic advantage on education to just 4 points.