“The GOP doesn’t even pay lip service to limited gov’t anymore. Haven’t in over two decades.”
President Bush did when he ran in 2000. He just lied to the American people to get elected. Or maybe since the election was so close, he decided he’d have to change his views to get reelected or to get any of his agenda passed. Either way, he’s not the idealist small government guy he ran as.
GWB ran as a “compassionate conservative”, not a limited gov’t conservative. The last Presidential candidate ran on a small gov’t platform was Reagan.
He never ran as a small government guy. That much was clear as early as 1999 in the run up to the GOP primaries. Check out this from the the introduction of “Leviathan on the Right”
“To understand how conservatism has been turning away from its traditional belief in small government, one has to look no further than President George W. Bush. Indeed, as John DiIulio, the first director of President Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, has pointed out; from the very beginning of his run for the presidency, Bush made clear his differences with small-government conservatives.
His very first campaign speech, on July 22, 1999, articulated what he believed as a “compassionate conservative.” Speaking before inner-city clergymen and women in Indianapolis, “economic growth,” Bush preached, “is not the solution to every problem.” He labeled as “destructive” the idea that government is bad and called explicitly for increasing government support for Medicaid and other federal programs. He also rebutted the notion that government needs only to step aside for families and communities to flourish. In particular he stressed that, when it comes to addressing poverty and urban blight, it “is not enough to call for volunteerism. Without more support—public and private—we are asking” local community-serving groups, both religious and secular, “to make bricks without straw.”
Bush was distancing himself from the wing of the party that came into power in 1994 under the “Contract With America”. At the GOP convention in 2000, his people eliminated planks in the GOP Platform like the one calling for abolishing the Department of Education. In sum, what we see now is what he always was. The problem was that too many conservatives were so eager to regain the White House that they looked the other way and now wake up and feel betrayed.”