Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (33 page)

For many conservatives, it is this view that would come to define Bush.

In the summer of 2001, Bush was preoccupied with a matter that faded quickly behind more exigent issues. Embryonic stem cell research was an issue that posed a real threat to Rove’s coalition building. The abortion issue was also divisive, but many pro-choice voters did not cast ballots on the issue because they believed that abortion rights were already protected by
Roe v. Wade
. But stem cell research aroused sympathy even among some pro-life voters and legislators because of the possibilities it opened for medical breakthroughs. Nonetheless, the staunchest pro-lifers believed that “harvesting” embryos for research was inherently and profoundly immoral.

After an extensive review of policy, Bush sided with the pro-lifers on this principle: “We do not end some lives for the medical benefit of others.” But he tried to find a middle way that finessed the politics of the issue by declining to ban privately funded stem cell research and announcing that the federal government would fund research involving existing stem cell lines, but no others.
This, Bush said in a nationally televised address from his Texas ranch on August 9, 2001, would allow scientists to “explore the promise and potential of stem cell research without crossing a fundamental moral line by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life.”

The speech did not satisfy supporters of stem cell research, who questioned whether Bush’s fine distinctions had the moral consistency he claimed for them.
Even Gerson, a strong defender of Bush’s position, acknowledged that “the practical effect of the president’s stem-cell policy was limited,” though Gerson insisted that the president had “introduced a large philosophic debate into a political argument” by rejecting “utilitarianism.”

Yet as he was devoting the bulk of his energies that month to the stem cell decision and speech, an ominous portent crossed his desk. On August 6, 2001, the morning’s presidential daily brief from the intelligence agencies included the heading
“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

“The Bushes have always underestimated the depth of the base’s dissatisfaction with their policies.”

Bush’s initial response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was hardly reassuring, and his aides knew it. He got the news while reading
The Pet Goat
to a second-grade class at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. After he finished with the schoolchildren, Bush was rushed to the airport. His plane went first to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for refueling; there he spoke briefly to the nation.
“Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended,” he said. He told Americans that he was “in regular contact with the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the national security team, and my Cabinet” and that they had taken “all the necessary security precautions to continue the functions of your government.” He concluded: “We will show the world that we will pass this test.” Then he was whisked off to a bunker in Nebraska.

Rove acknowledged in his memoir that the president’s initial response was less than satisfactory.
“The president had vital matters on his mind, and his best
wordsmiths, who would have helped him shape more reassuring and stronger messages for use in Florida and Louisiana, were stuck in Washington, huddled in D.C. office buildings, or hunkered down in a bunker under the South Lawn.”

Rove was at pains to note that Bush was unhappy that he was not in Washington, and in his own memoir, Bush makes clear it was he who insisted on returning to the capital.
During a videoconference from Nebraska, Bush wrote, “I put my foot down. I had decided to speak to the nation and there was no way I was going to do it from an underground bunker in Nebraska.”

The speech Bush gave that evening when he finally did get back to Washington did not go much better in the view of one of those “best wordsmiths.”
Gerson saw the address as “unequal to the moment—too much sentiment, not enough resolve, too much forced word play.” One line that came in for critique: “These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” In his book
Heroic Conservatism,
the usually loyal Gerson concluded: “The president looked stiff and small. . . . The first day of the crisis had not been a good day for the president.”

Bush did not find his voice and his footing until September 14. In the morning, he gave a powerful speech that was more of a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral.
“Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history,” he said. “But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” Gerson, conscious of subsequent criticisms of Bush for apocalyptic rhetoric, went out of his way later to note that Bush was not supposed to have claimed that he would rid the world of
all
evil. The text of the speech had referred to “
this
evil,” a narrower promise. Gerson observed that
“the president had misspoken.” Despite the error, it was one of the best speeches of his presidency, but it was a telling error nonetheless.

Later that day came Bush’s signature moment, when he visited Ground Zero in New York City, stood among the ruins of the World Trade Center towers, and spoke through a bullhorn. When the crowd shouted, “We can’t hear you!” Bush shouted back: “I can hear you. And the rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Thus began the heroic phase of Bush’s tenure.

There was genuine statesmanship in one of Bush’s earliest acts after the attacks. Two days after his bullhorn moment, Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and gave one of the remarkable speeches of his presidency. He declared:

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. . . . America counts millions of Muslims among our citizens. . . . Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. . . . Moms who wear head cover must not be intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value. . . . Those who feel like they can intimidate their fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.

The nation’s Muslims, Bush added, “love America just as much as I do.”

Over the years, as we’ll see, large parts of the right began to forget the lessons Bush taught about the dangers of anti-Muslim feeling—particularly after the nation elected a president whose middle name was Hussein, and when a group of Muslims sought to build a community center near Ground Zero. But Bush deserves to be remembered for standing up for the rights of American Muslims when doing so was essential.

It was, indeed, possible to see a “new Bush” after 9/11, as he grew into his new role. Bush seemed to lose some of his partisanship and returned to his “uniter” role. Democrats gave him good reason to do this, rallying to Bush and avoiding questions they might well have asked about why the administration had not seen the attack coming. This would not happen until later. A $40 billion antiterrorism appropriation sped through Congress, as did a resolution authorizing retaliation for the attacks. Republicans even accommodated some Democratic amendments. “They could have rolled over us,” a very partisan Democratic congressional leadership aide told me at the time, appreciating the fact that the Republicans didn’t.

The 9/11 attacks produced one of the most stunning changes in a president’s approval rating in the history of polling. In the Gallup poll taken from
September 7 to September 10, Bush’s approval stood at 51 percent. In the next survey, taken on September 14 and September 15, his approval soared to 86 percent. It would rise to 90 percent a week later and stay between 86 and 89 percent for the rest of the year. Not until March 2002 did it fall into the 70s and not until August and September 2002 would it gradually settle into the 60s. When Bush sent troops into Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, to take on the Taliban and through them al-Qaeda, the country cheered across ideological and partisan lines. Gallup found that
Americans endorsed the war by a margin of 80 percent to 18 percent.

The survey, however, contained important clues that pointed to future divisions. Fully 22 percent of Americans supported the war but were classified by Gallup as “reluctant warriors” because they said they would not have supported the Afghanistan action in the absence of the September 11 attack. This group felt that military force should be used only as a last resort. At the other end of the spectrum, another 22 percent were classified by Gallup as “hawks” because they said they would have favored using force in Afghanistan even absent the September 11 attacks—and, as a broader matter, they felt that the United States should use military force as readily as diplomatic and economic pressure in pursuit of foreign policy goals. The rest supported the Afghanistan action but were not readily classifiable as either hawks or doves.

It’s worth pausing over these numbers because they call into question the widespread view at the time, repeated again and again in the media, that “everything changed” on September 11. Many who believed this were surprised when normal politics based on pre-9/11 political alignments returned so quickly. Some were also taken aback when support for military action, particularly in Iraq, began falling away even before the end of Bush’s first term.

The Gallup numbers make clear that 40 percent of Americans either opposed to the war in Afghanistan or were among those “reluctant warriors.” Even at a moment of national unity, there were clear partisan and ideological differences in attitudes toward the use of force: 49 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of liberals fell into one of these dovish or relatively dovish groups, but only 31 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of conservatives did. And even if conservatives were more hawkish than liberals, only a minority of
them, 28 percent, took the strongly hawkish view as defined by Gallup (compared with 14 percent of liberals).

The reemergence later of anti-interventionist views on the right is easier to understand when one considers that at the height of support for the use of American power, only a little over a fifth of conservatives were enthusiastic about the regular deployment of American forces. The large middle group that supported the Afghanistan action willingly but did not share the ideological certainties of the hawks might be seen as the “swing voters” on the matter of military intervention. They were likely to judge wars by how they were prosecuted and what outcomes they produced. The Bush administration would have been wise at the time to notice that just over a month after 9/11, Americans were not willing to offer even a popular president battling in a broadly unifying cause a blank check. They should have understood that the support he enjoyed was more tentative than it seemed at the moment. It was clear that if a war went badly or came to be seen as disconnected from the battle against terrorism, opinion would shift rapidly.

Some Republicans hoped that Bush would use his new standing and the ad hoc coalition of national unity that had assembled behind him to change the Republican Party.
Representative Tom Davis, who possessed one of the GOP shrewdest political minds, saw the president as having the opportunity “to reshape the image of the party from the top down.” It was possible at the time to imagine that a new version of Eisenhower Republicanism might create the enduring majority that Rove had always envisioned by encompassing broad parts of the middle ground of American opinion rather than simply the center-right.

But other voices saw a different opportunity: to take Bush’s newly won popularity and deploy it to win enactment of as much of the conservative agenda as possible.
Eight days after 9/11, the
Wall Street Journal
urged Bush to use the moment to push through every policy change he had been seeking, since “the bloody attacks have created a unique political moment when Americans of all stars and stripes are uniting behind their president.” The
Journal
wanted to get approval for oil drilling in the Arctic, to speed up tax cuts (even as the country was spending billions more for security), and to push for the confirmation of conservative judges. The
Journal
’s editorial page reached
back, as it often does, to the successful liberal campaign in 1987 to block the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. “Democrats in the Senate,” the editors wrote, “will hesitate to carry our borkings that clearly undercut Mr. Bush’s leadership.” Not only was it untrue that “everything changed” after the attacks. For some, nothing had changed at all—except, perhaps, that the response to the attacks had created new openings for old ideas.

Partisanship on the right quickly emerged in another way: even as Democrats resisted the immediate temptation to ask why Bush had not been more aware of the impending danger, conservatives showed no compunction about blaming the tragedy on . . . Bill Clinton.
“We have no choice but to address the policies and decisions, made at the very highest levels of our government, which helped bring us to this point,” Rush Limbaugh wrote in the
Journal
on October 4. Such a sentence might well have been written about Bush, but for Limbaugh, the issue was that Clinton “didn’t do enough to stop terrorists.” Senator Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican, blamed Clinton for the CIA’s restrictions on the recruitment of informants overseas.
“The Clinton curbs,” he said, “have hindered the work of our human intelligence agents around the world.”

Over time, 9/11 was used as a weapon to discredit the very peace and prosperity that characterized the Clinton years. The conservative Charles Krauthammer coined what would become an enduring phrase on the right, dismissing the Clinton era as a “holiday from history” in a November 2001 article in the
Weekly Standard.
“During the Clinton years,” he wrote, “while the United States engaged in (literally) paperwork, the enemy was planning and arming, burrowing deep into America, preparing for war.”