George Bush: Darling of the Liberals (Lord Haw Haw Alert!)

“President [George W.] Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years.”

---Stephen Slivinski, “The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis, No. 543 (May 3, 2005), p. 1.

Liberal politicians — Howard Dean and John Kerry come immediately to mind — profess disdain for President Bush and his cohorts. * But is this ideologically based contempt justified? Have the actions of the president and his party gone against the liberal grain?

Even to ask such questions may appear bizarre. Yet the record of the past five years shows that they need to be asked — and answered with a resounding “No.” If they care about their liberal agenda, Howard Dean and his friends should be rejoicing, because the president and his party have willingly implemented a very large part of it. Consider:

1) Spending. Total government spending rose by 33% during Bush’s first term. The federal budget as a share of gross domestic product grew from 18.5% on the last day of the Clinton administration to 20.3% at the end of Bush’s first term. 2

2) The “No Child Left Behind Act” of 2001, a 670-page federal assault on local control over public schools. This pet project of the Republican president, made into law with the help of Sen. Ted Kennedy and other Democrats, is the direct descendant (technically a re-authorization) of Lyndon Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a linchpin of the Great Society legislative program.

3) The Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit. Covering millions of mostly elderly Americans, this new entitlement is projected to cost as much as $1.2 trillion over its first ten years. 3 A classic New Deal, Great Society approach to health care, it was originally part of President Clinton’s abortive Health Security Act of 1993. Despite having been proposed by a Democratic president, and rejected even when the Democrats held majorities in both houses of Congress, this new entitlement became law at the urging of President Bush in 2003.

4) The war on drugs. Bush has eagerly continued the bipartisan folly that started in 1914 with the Harrison Act, prohibiting the possession of narcotics for nonmedical purposes. We should note that in 1914 there were an estimated 200,000 users of narcotics in the United States, out of a population of slightly over 90 million. According to information available online from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, in 1998 there were an estimated 3.3 million “hardcore” users of heroin and cocaine. In other words, there has been a more than sixteenfold increase in the number of narcotics users since the beginning of federal regulation, while population during the same period has only tripled. And the sixteenfold increase reflects only those “hardcore” users of heroin and cocaine. Not included in the 3.3 million figure are untold numbers of casual heroin and cocaine users, methamphetamine users, and marijuana smokers.

That the federal government should continue its campaign to curb the national appetite for drugs, despite the obvious failure of this campaign, and its colossal expense to society, is perhaps understandable from a political point of view. Regrettably, however, Bush has pushed the costs even higher. He has escalated the war on drugs by bringing the U.S. military increasingly to the forefront, combating so-called narco-terrorists, ferreting out smugglers, and harassing growers in Colombia and other places. 4 Thus are employed the forces that won the battles of Normandy and Iwo Jima. Is this not a solution worse than the problem, a perversion of government power such as only big-government liberalism could conceive? Like his fellow liberals, the president has no compunction about the use of force to impose morality. Which brings us to:

5) The war in Iraq. As we have come to know, President Bush believes that 9/11 justified a crusade to remake the Arab world in our image. To a classical liberal (or, for that matter, a traditional conservative) the proper response to the terror attacks of 2001 was a military operation designed to smash the terrorists and their supporters in their bases in Afghanistan. The president, to his credit, ordered just such an operation (using local forces and a limited U.S. ground presence — sound tactics that worked). But he followed Afghanistan with Iraq. There he has given us a Vietnam in the desert, a folly to match LBJ’s foray in the jungle.

Even the rhetoric used to justify the cost in blood and money is the same (just substitute weapons of mass destruction for the domino theory). While there is no evidence that a President Al Gore, lacking the Oedipal baggage of George W. Bush, would have taken us more deeply into Iraq than Bill Clinton did, there can be no doubt that the war in Iraq epitomizes the type of war that world-improving liberal Democrats love to start. It is, indeed, a war that one might believe only a Wilsonian Democrat was capable of starting. But it was not Woodrow Wilson or Lyndon Johnson who ordered the march on Baghdad; it was President Bush, who had previously proclaimed his contempt for “nation-building” in foreign places, only to embark on one of this country’s greatest nation-building crusades.

6) NSA spying on American citizens. The mind of a classical liberal recoils at the spectacle of a supposedly strict-constructionist administration asserting its right to spy on Americans without obtaining warrants. To use the government’s intelligence-gathering capability in this way is, in a word, Nixonian. Again, we cannot say that Gore would have done the same after 9/11, but the action itself is typical of modern liberalism. Of the four presidents prior to George W. Bush who are known to have indulged in illegal wiretapping, three (FDR, JFK, and LBJ) were liberal Democrats, while the fourth, Richard Nixon, might just as well have been. 5 Tellingly, no Democrat opposed the Bush policy (beyond a mild, private expression of doubt from Sen. Jay Rockefeller) until the New York Times made the spying program public.

One could continue this list. Whether Bush is playing with our freedoms6 or our money — over $40 billion spent so far on ineffective Star Wars technology, $120 billion proposed for travel to Mars and bases on the moon — he never fails to display his instinctive allegiance to modern liberalism, to his conviction that big (indeed, massive) government has the solution to whatever problems may beset us.

Other people have made the point that the Republican Party under George W. Bush is a party of big government. 7 Their construct holds that Republicans want a different kind of big government from the Democrats. Essentially, this means that Republicans prefer more defense spending and corporate welfare, while Democrats want to expand social programs. But is even this perceived difference between the two parties significant, or for that matter, real? Given the growth in spending and entitlements under the current president (with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress), one cannot help but see the gap between Republicans and Democrats narrowing, almost to the vanishing point. We live today in a country supposedly dominated by conservative (if not quite classically liberal) principles, where the practices of modern, big-government liberalism prevail. Perhaps this should not surprise us. When great issues divide nations, principles actually mean something. They mean something because the energies of individuals are behind them. But when great issues disappear (the collapse of Soviet power, which carried the Cold War with it) or seem to be settled (the general agreement that government will have a large role in American life), those energies dissipate. Then there is nothing left but the cutting of the cake. How will the national product be divided? How will parties and politicians obtain the money necessary to win and keep power?

These are purely practical matters that shelter behind the rhetoric of policy and principle. It is no cause for astonishment that attempts to reform lobbying or the financing of political campaigns fail again and again, that somehow money always finds new channels to its recipients. The exposure of a Jack Abramoff or a Duke Cunningham changes nothing, for now only money matters. Politicians exhaust themselves raising the money they require to win the elections that determine who controls the money that government collects and then distributes, the collection and distribution of money having become government’s principal reason for existence. And those who benefit from government largesse are, naturally, quite willing to return a small portion of the money they receive to the campaign kitty (or the congressman’s pocket) in order to keep the game going. Naive idealists, like Sen. John McCain, believe this vicious cycle can be broken by legislative tinkering. They have, repeatedly, been proven wrong.

Money has always meant power. But today money is all-powerful; ideas and principles are mere window-dressing. This is not cynicism. It is the reality of American politics and government in the early 21st century. The 1994 “Contract With America” election was the last to be fought (even partly) over ideas and principles. Since 1994 it has all been about the money.

Only when the money that government dispenses starts to dry up, and government of necessity shrinks, can there be real change. The prospect of national bankruptcy, visible though still distant, may one day be enough to cause Congress and the executive to reduce, voluntarily and in a significant way, the flow of money that cycles from government to beneficiary, then back again. But given what we have witnessed since 1994, and especially since 2000, it will probably require actual insolvency to bring an end to the game.

As we look back, how meaningless seems the thunderous Republican applause that greeted Bill Clinton’s announcement in 1995 that “the era of big government is over.” Certainly President Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress have shown themselves, through their actions if not always their words, to be very comfortable with the liberal status quo. We can truthfully say that George W. Bush is, or at least ought to be, the darling of the liberals. For he has done their work for them. And the Republican Party has followed him every step of the way.

What Is to Be Done? George W. Bush, the “compassionate conservative” ultimately responsible for most of the errors and follies of the past five years, will soon exit the political scene. We can say with confidence that his policies will one day find their rightful place in the wastebasket of history. But even the most superficial analysis reveals that our problems go deeper than Mr. Bush. We must admit that the root problem is not this president but the American people themselves, together with the political class that they have, with their votes, created.

The people as well as the politicians have been corrupted by the culture of big government bequeathed to them by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. The New Deal-Great Society “consensus” that government is the answer to virtually all our problems remains largely intact, despite the Republican electoral landslides of 1980, 1984, and 1994. It is difficult to see how either people or politicians can be weaned off the debilitating drug that is modern, big-government liberalism. A financial meltdown, brought on by the cavalier fiscal policies of the federal government, will be the most likely instrument of change.

In the meantime, with an optimism that I confess is somewhat forced, I will offer a couple of very modest proposals.

Don’t rush out and vote Republican. The Republicans took the mandates given to them in the 1980s, and again in 1994, and used them, after brief bursts of reform, to reinforce the condition of things as they are. I personally have stopped voting in federal elections. As a wag once said, “Why encourage them?”

Think nationally, act locally. At the state, and above all at the local level, possibilities still exist for direct citizen action. Citizens must be encouraged to start taking back power, beginning with the public schools. It is scandalous, and tragic, how local control over education has been usurped by education bureaucrats in state capitals and Washington, D.C. Parents and taxpayers, not distant government functionaries, should control the education of our children. As new government education mandates grow ever more expensive, one can only hope that an education revolt akin to the tax revolts of the 1970s and ’80s will develop.

This may be no more than tilting at windmills. But it can serve as practice for the day when real power will again be thrust upon the citizenry. Modern, big-government liberalism will someday collapse of its own weight. One hopes that the collapse will be peaceful, like that of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps it will come with a crash, like the conclusion of Humpty Dumpty. In any case, we must be ready to pick up the pieces.

>>>>But what should Bush had done? Called for the immediate dismantlement of Medicare? He would've lost to Gore in a landslide.

LOL

Bush should have never proposed a trillion dollar prescription drug program in the first place. His original 2000 campaign proposal for $158 billion spent over ten years was more then enough. Along with Medicare and SocSec entitlements, we now have a drug entitlement.

When it came to Algore, Bush was right on the money back in the 2000 campaign.

"Gore offers an old and tired approach. He offers a new federal spending program to nearly every voting bloc. He expands entitlements, without reforms to sustain them. 285 new or expanded programs, and $2 trillion more in new spending. Spending without discipline, spending without priorities, and spending without an end. Al Gore’s massive spending would mean slower growth and higher taxes. And it could mean an end to this nation’s prosperity.
--- Gov GW Bush: Speech in Minneapolis, Minnesota Nov 1, 2000

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