Back in the early 60s, I was a National Review subscriber. I haven't read the publication in years. In the interest of fair & balanced political discourse, The New Republic posted this counterpoint to Jonathan Chait's commendable case for W-hatred. The writer is an editor of the National Review. Coincidentally, NPR ran a piece on a maverick candidate for the Republican nomination for the U. S. Senate in Illinois. The candidate is of Indian descent. According to a leading Indian Republican in Illinois, the Republican Party is closer to Indian values than any alternative. So, it is not surprising that a senior editor at the National Review is descended from immigrants from the Asian subcontinent. I wonder if W can pronounce Pondicherry or Sikh or Tamil? Hindu Republicans? Wow! Only in America! If this be (fair & balanced) ethnography, so be it.
[x New Republic]
The case against Bush hatred.
by Ramesh Ponnuru
Will the Democrats' loathing of President Bush lead them to make a big political mistake? It's a question many observers have raised in response to the rise of Howard Dean's Bush-bashing campaign. But it's misconceived: The Democrats have already made a big mistake because of their hostility toward Bush.
In 2002, Democrats made the Florida gubernatorial race a priority. That decision never made much sense. The incumbent Republican, Jeb Bush, was polling pretty well throughout the two previous years. At only one point did he look vulnerable: in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic primary, when the winner was enjoying statewide attention for having beaten Janet Reno. After that brief period, Bush again took a commanding lead.
But Democrats badly wanted to beat the president's brother and avenge the Florida-recount debacle. Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe called Jeb Bush the party's top target for 2002: "There won't be anything as devastating to President Bush as his brother's losing in Florida." Democratic money poured into the Florida race. But to no avail: In the end, Bush won by 13 points. The money Democrats wasted in Florida would have been better spent on tight Senate races in Missouri, Minnesota, and New Hampshire--or tight governors' races in Alabama and Vermont.
Florida is where Bush hatred started, where the Democrats' disdain for an underachieving frat boy began to morph into something more malevolent. Democrats saw Bush's tactics during the recount as an unprincipled, damn-the-consequences bid for power. Republicans saw Al Gore's tactics the same way and were as outraged by the Florida Supreme Court's actions as the Democrats were by the U.S. Supreme Court's. But the Republicans won and moved on. Many Democrats didn't. For them, a taint of illegitimacy attaches to Bush. This is not unprecedented in U.S. history. Andrew Jackson thought that John Quincy Adams had stolen the presidency from him in a "corrupt bargain" in 1824 and spent four years saying so.
But Bush hatred has taken on a life of its own. It is now a sentiment that unites the Democratic Party, from Iraq hawks to Iraq doves, from moderates to liberals, from policy analysts at the Democratic Leadership Council to readers of The Nation, from union leaders to the people who wear "Impeach Bush" t-shirts. It is also a sentiment that could lead all of them to ruin next year.
Conservatives find the hostility to Bush hard to understand. What is it about him that so upsets liberals? His radical plan to expand Medicare? His crafty plot to leave racial preferences alone if possible and tinker with them at the margins if he must? His Clear Skies Initiative, which will, if its responsible critics are to be believed, result in air pollution declining more slowly than it otherwise would?
Democrats are fond of saying that Bush campaigned as a moderate and has governed as a conservative. Actually, he campaigned as a moderate conservative and has governed as a moderate conservative. (And, since the left's attacks on him have, more than any factor besides the war on terrorism, bonded the right to Bush, they have actually freed him to be more moderate.) In 2001, Democrats kept hoping that some Bush initiative--his pro-life executive orders, his review of arsenic regulations, his tax cut--would be the early stumble that gays in the military was for Bill Clinton. But Clinton got in trouble in 1993 because his initiatives had not been vetted during the campaign: Bush père hadn't challenged him on the military gay ban, and Clinton hadn't talked about raising taxes. In 2000, on the other hand, W.'s policies on abortion, taxes, and the environment were extensively debated.
Bush's priorities as president, with the large and understandable exception of the war on terrorism, were his priorities as a candidate: tax cuts, education, Medicare, tort reform, missile defense. He telegraphed that he would not be a culture warrior or an anti-government crusader, and he hasn't been. Conservatives knew he would do some big things that made us happy while regularly doing smaller things to annoy us. So it has proved.
Liberals should try to remember their own analysis of conservatives' Clinton hatred. Conservatives were said to be unable to stand Clinton's political success, especially since it had been accomplished by co-opting the popular components of the conservative agenda. Conservatives were reduced to complaining that Clinton's welfare reform wasn't true reform. Today, liberals explain their hostility to Bush as a function of his radicalism. But they are really in a situation similar to the one conservatives were in during the '90s. On the patients' bill of rights and on prescription drugs, the Democrats have been reduced to saying that Bush has blurred the issues: His bills aren't the real thing, for reasons too eye-glazing for most people to follow. (It may be no accident that the most reviled presidents of recent decades--Richard Nixon, Clinton, the younger Bush--have been the successful centrists.) It's a frustrating position to be in, especially for people who have convinced themselves the man who is beating them is a moron.
Other Democrats profess to be troubled less by Bush's policies than by his allegedly win-at-any-costs approach to politics. The bill of indictment is by now running rather long. Bush smeared Gore as a liar; stole the presidency in Florida; sanctioned an ad that questioned the patriotism of Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam veteran; and is directing the Texas GOP's unprecedented attempt to alter the redistricting lines for partisan advantage. And, well before the weapons-of-mass-destruction-intelligence controversy, the view that Bush was manipulating foreign policy for domestic political gain was not uncommon, even among moderate Democrats. The fact that Bush himself rarely makes overtly partisan remarks--instead claiming to want to "change the tone" of politics--makes his hardball tactics all the more infuriating.
In my view, there is a convincing retort to every charge. The ad against Cleland, for example, claimed that his position on homeland security legislation made the United States vulnerable to attacks. True or false, that's a legitimate issue. Even if his patriotism really had been implicitly questioned, would it have been so much worse than what happened to Republican Ellen Sauerbrey when she ran for governor of Maryland? She had voted against a sexual harassment law and was attacked on that basis as an opponent of civil rights. The implication of racism was at least as clear as the implication of lack of patriotism in Cleland's case. I don't recall Clinton standing up for Sauerbrey.
I don't think any of these controversies quite explains the anger Bush inspires. Nor, for that matter, do Bush's supposed lies about fiscal policy. Jonathan Chait, Paul Krugman, and a few other journalists have made this case against Bush, but very few voters, whatever their political persuasion, get passionate about deficits.
For some people, the dislike is personal. It's not the unearned privilege Bush was born into (his detractors don't have anything against the Kennedys). It's that Bush seems to lack the kind of extemporaneous verbal intelligence that is rated highly by people who possess it. (Even his staunchest defenders must admit that it would be nice if Bush spoke in complete sentences.) And it's maddening to his opponents that Bush seems to want to win political victories without winning arguments with his critics and to shift course without ever explaining his thinking.
At the end of the day, though, the antipathy toward Bush seems largely cultural. Here, too, the parallel with the Clinton haters suggests itself. Clinton was a liberal boomer elitist to his enemies: a Yale know-it-all. Bush, to his, is a Yale know-nothing. Bush may have no zest for the culture war himself--his signature issue is the warm-and-fuzzy faith-based initiative, not a call to ban abortions--but he can hardly help being one of its objects. The reason Bush does not engage in the culture war, after all, is precisely that the country's cultural division cuts so deeply that it does not pay to do so. Bush is red-state America for his critics. He is narrow-minded, materialistic, provincial, backward, agnostic only about evolution: All the things they wish the country could leave behind. In an age when politics remains a matter of identity and affinity, being against Bush--or for him--is culture war by other means.
The country as a whole still likes Bush. Can the Democrats change that by next November, or will Bush do so himself? The public seems more likely to turn on Bush as a failure than as a liar or menace. It is also possible that strident attacks on Bush will damage his opponent. One danger is that Democrats will be identified with the left-wing fringe that regards Bush as a Nazi and a murderer. But, even if that doesn't happen, every critique the Democrats make of Bush's policies could become tinged with an unappealing hostility toward Bush himself.
Perhaps Democrats could learn from Bush's campaign in 2000. As Democratic pollster Mark Penn recently observed in The Washington Post, the Republican Party did not let its contempt for Clinton--which certainly existed--dictate its strategy. Bush's promise to restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office was certainly a shot at Clinton, but Bush did not run on anti-Clintonism as Bob Dole had, to some extent, in 1996. Accepting the Republican nomination, Bush declared that he had "no stake in the bitter arguments of the last few years." Clinton was not on the ballot in 2000, while Bush will be in 2004, so Democrats will have to be tougher on the incumbent than Bush was then. But the tone he struck in 2000 is still closer to the public mood than the Democrats' anti-Bush stridency.
Penn clearly believes that the Democrats have plenty of time to change their tone. But he is asking a lot. He is asking his party to follow its interests instead of its resentments.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at NATIONAL REVIEW.
Copyright © 2003, The New Republic
