Chapter 1. Put on a Compassionate Face
How an Idea Got Bush Elected and Got Him into Trouble
President Bush you'll enjoy this he says he needs a month off to unwind. Unwind? When the hell does this guy wind? Come on!
David Letterman, August 20, 2001
Everything depends on whether he is seen as taking charge when there's something to take charge of. But there is a view of Bush that he's a total lightweight. This makes it an easy shot, so it was a risk for him.
Richard E. Neustadt, author of Presidential Power, quoted in The Washington Post, August 29, 2001, on that long Bush vacation
The day before planes piloted by terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside, George W. Bush was, if not a failed president, then a floundering leader who had lost the initiative and faced a miserable autumn. David Frum was serving at the time as a White House speechwriter. Frum admitted in The Right Man, a book as friendly to Bush as its title suggests, that he was planning to leave the White House before the events of 9/11 happened because he did not want to watch as the Bush presidency "unraveled."
Bush was in trouble courtesy of a problem that will always plague his presidency: having persuaded many Americans during his campaign that he was moderate in spirit, he governed from the right. His deep, instinctive conservatism and his impatience with moderate Republicans led to the great debacle of his first months in office, the defection of Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont from the Republican Party. On May 24 -- just four months after Bush took office -- Jeffords flipped control of the Senate to the Democrats. It was the most important political moment of the Bush presidency before 9/11.
The Jeffords switch was, in retrospect, a logical response to how Bush chose to manage his presidency. After the disputed election of 2000, Bush faced the choice of governing as a moderate and healing the wounds left by the Florida debacle, or governing as an uncompromising conservative and bulling his way to a series of ideological victories. He chose the aggressive strategy. It worked reasonably well until Jeffords decided he had had enough. Jeffords's defection was a rebuke not only to Bush's strategy but also to a conservative movement that assumed for many years that it could trash, ridicule, intimidate, and denounce Republican moderates -- and still count on their votes at crucial moments.
The strategy had succeeded for at least a decade, and it ultimately succeeded on Bush's big tax cut when most moderates (including Jeffords) fell into line. Because the moderate Republicans rarely rebelled when it mattered, conservatives could overlook the inconvenient fact that without the progressives from the Northeast and Middle West, the Republican majority in Congress would disappear.
The funny thing is that Jeffords did exactly what conservatives, for years, had told him he should do. Over and over, they denounced him as a crypto-Democrat who had no business wearing the Republican label. Even as Jeffords was preparing to leave, conservative leaders and their supporters were saying, "good riddance."
"Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont is not a moderate," declared National Review in an editorial e-mailed around the land. "He is a liberal." The magazine that guards conservative orthodoxy said the party switch "makes it clear that the Republicans are the conservative party and the Democrats are the liberal party." Jeffords's decision, they said, was "a clarifying one."
Indeed it was. Jeffords realized it made no sense to serve in a Republican majority that had made itself the servant of the Bush program when, as Jeffords put it, "I can see more and more instances where I will disagree with the president on very fundamental issues."
The Jeffords defection was played as a breakdown of Bush's much-praised political operation, and that was true enough. Bush's advisers never saw the defection coming, perhaps because they focused so relentlessly on the right wing of the party. But above all, Jeffords's departure marked the failure of Bush's strategy. Once in office, the president acted as if he had won a mandate despite his loss of the popular vote. He assumed he could win on issue after issue by getting votes from Democratic moderates in states he had carried. The president's apparatus figured that pressure, digs, and threats leaked to conservative journalists would keep moderate Democrats and potentially rebellious Republicans in line.
But Republicans from the states carried by Al Gore knew perfectly well that their own voters were in no mood for anything but a middle-of-the-road program from Bush. Jeffords's decision to walk away could thus be seen as the real American majority, moderately progressive in temperament, striking back.
John Grenier, a leader of Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, said at the time that the central question in Republican politics was: "What are you willing to pay for the South?" Quite a lot, it turned out, and the payoff came in the defection of millions of conservative southern Democrats. They included such Republican senators as Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Phil Gramm of Texas, and Richard Shelby of Alabama, all of whom lost power in the Senate when Jeffords switched.
The steady "southernization" of Republican politics -- Bush was part of that trend -- eventually called forth a reaction in the old Republican bastions of the North. There was a poignant moment when Jeffords announced his switch. He chose to refer to his political ancestors as "Lincoln Republicans." That was a quiet rebel's yell against the new Republican Confederacy.
Jeffords's voluntary departure was, finally, the revenge of Republican moderates and liberals who had been driven from power involuntarily over the years. Distinguished Republicans such as Jacob Javits of New York, Clifford Case of New Jersey, and Thomas Kuchel of California were beaten in Republican primaries. The battle against moderates continued under Bush as conservative groups such as the Club for Growth staged primary challenges against Republican mavericks. The idea was that the offending moderates would be defeated -- or brought into line.
For a moment, at least, Jeffords brought to life an alternative possibility: that if moderates were attacked often enough, they might just pack up and leave. It was a dreadful portent for Bush's efforts to create a new Republican majority.
II
From the beginning of Bush's quest for the presidency, both he and his top political adviser Karl Rove understood the delicacy of the situation they confronted. On the one hand, Bush and Rove were determined not to repeat what they saw as the core mistake of the first Bush presidency: the failure to enunciate a vision that appealed to the conservative base of the Republican Party. But they were also determined not to repeat the mistakes Newt Gingrich made during his Republican Revolution after the 1994 election. "Compassionate conservatism" was born out of this tension. It proved to be a brilliant construction. Conservatives already thought they were compassionate and thus, in principle, would not be offended by the adjective, even if some resented that it was needed at all. But moderates heard something very new -- though that something was far less new than it seemed.
Not repeating his father's errors was an obsession for Bush. When I interviewed George W. Bush for a magazine piece before the 2000 campaign, I asked him about his family's tradition of public service. Bush spoke respectfully of his father -- and quickly got to the political point.
"Obviously it's a proud tradition," George W. said. Then he immediately identified himself with his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush -- and, effectively, against his father. "I believe we have that sense of service, but I believe that we're both driven as well by ideas and philosophy," he said. "That we have come to realize, particularly in our respective roles as governors, how powerful an idea can be. And that it's important to serve but it's also important to achieve results. To set goals, clear and measurable goals, and to lead." As president, Bush was determined to lead to the right.
Yet Bush knew that was not enough. When I asked him what the Republican Party had done wrong since 1994, he had a quick answer. "It hasn't put a compassionate face on our conservative philosophy," he replied. "People think oftentimes that Republicans are mean-spirited folks. Which is not true, but that's what people think." Note that Bush spoke of putting a compassionate face on conservatism. That was not the same as transforming it. On the contrary, Bush seemed to be saying there was nothing wrong with the Republican Party that a different face wouldn't cure -- and he knew whose face he had in mind.
David Frum, the Bush speechwriter, offered this puckish take on Bush's creed: "Bush described himself as a 'compassionate conservative,' " Frum wrote, "which sounded less like a philosophy than a marketing slogan: Love conservatism but hate arguing about abortion? Try our new compassionate conservatism -- great ideological taste, now with less controversy."
But whether compassionate conservatism was primarily a philosophy, a marketing slogan, or merely a dodge, it was the product of prodigious work and careful thinking. Bush did the work, but his assignments often came from Rove, whose relationship with his candidate (and president) cannot simply be defined by the words "political adviser."
When Rove first met Bush, he seems to have realized almost immediately that his own skills as a gut fighter, a visionary, and a self-made intellectual were perfectly complemented by Bush's ease with people and his upper-crust connections. ("Bush is the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with," Rove once said.) What Rove has never said -- publicly at least -- is that Bush badly needed his boy genius, as Bush called him, on absolutely everything related to the substance of politics: policy, strategy, tactics, and, when necessary, a willingness to execute, without much apparent scruple, whatever political attack was necessary.
"Rove was cerebral; Bush never liked going too deeply into the homework," James C. Moore and Wayne Slater write in their important Rove biography, Bush's Brain. "Rove had an encyclopedic mind and a gift for campaign arithmetic; Bush had engaging people skills, a knack for winning over opponents with pure charm. If Rove approached politics as a blood sport, Bush's instinct was to search out compromise and agreement." If ever a relationship deserved to be called co-dependent, this was it.
But Rove was not simply a tough guy. He was also a political visionary. He could play the low road, but it was in pursuit of a grand dream. Compassionate conservatism was one important plank to be used in a much larger project. Rove's dream was to create a dominant Republican majority for the next two decades or more. And he had a model: the success of turn-of-the-century Republican president William McKinley, who became the master of political fund-raising from the corporate world -- exactly what Bush would become. McKinley identified with the rising interests of industrial capital, just as Bush identifies with capital's leaders today. Rove sees in the current moment the same epoch-making potential that existed at the time of the election of 1896, when McKinley produced a new Republican majority that endured, with the interruption of the Woodrow Wilson years, until the Great Depression.
Rove argues that McKinley understood that the issues surrounding the Civil War, which had dominated politics for three decades, were no longer relevant to a large and growing segment of the electorate. McKinley also realized that immigration and industrialization had changed the character of the country. If Republicans did not make a bid for the votes of immigrants and the working class generally, they would lose preeminence. Rove, for whom archival research is a hobby, can cite letters McKinley wrote describing the party's problem and meetings he held with immigrant leaders to bring them around to the Republicans' promise of the "full dinner pail."
Rove's analysis represented a sharp break with the popular conservative assumption that all that was required for a Republican victory was to recreate Ronald Reagan's appeal and to reassemble his coalition. The electorate had changed enormously from the time of Reagan's last election. Baby boomers and younger voters were now at its heart. And in 2000, at least, Reagan's best issues were gone. The Cold War was over and hostility to government programs ebbed.
It was not hard to see how Rove would play out the McKinley parallel. Bush's quest for Latino votes -- a large factor in California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Illinois -- was directly comparable to McKinley's wooing of the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Italians, and the Irish. Similarly, Bush's minuets on social issues such as abortion and affirmative action -- and his more general pledge to a compassionate conservatism -- reflected Rove's sense that creating a durable Republican majority required converting suburban independents and Democrats whose social and moral views are more moderate than conservative.
Rove also liked to quote Napoleon's adage: "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack." Compassionate conservatism might be seen as the "well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive." The "rapid and audacious attack" was situational. In 2002, as we'll see, it used Iraq and homeland security as its weapons.
Rove seemed to have the Republican coalition -- and the hope of a larger one -- built into both his conscious and subconscious minds. He lives and breathes with his potential majority. He always understood, for example, that cultural conservatives would be a linchpin of Bush's constituency, even as he also understood that Republicans would, by conviction and necessity, always be the party of business. "To govern on behalf of the corporate right, they would have to appease the Christian right," write Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl Cannon in their Rove biography, Boy Genius. "The marriage of the Christian conservatives had to be made to work if the party was to work."
Yet Rove also understood the importance of wooing middle-class voters who were not right-wing. He wrote a memo to Republican governor Bill Clements of Texas in the 1980s that perfectly described the strategy he would later pursue for Bush. He did not expect to get votes from liberal constituencies, but he did want to win over moderates who shared some of the liberals' concerns. "The purpose of saying you gave teachers a record pay increase is to reassure suburban voters with kids, not to win the votes of teachers," Rove wrote to Clements. "Similarly, emphasizing your appointments of women and minorities will not win you the support of feminists and the leaders of the minority community; but it will bolster your support among Republican primary voters and urban independents." Welcome to compassionate conservatism before it was cool.
Bush knew perfectly well how cool the idea could be -- and how important it was to his advancement. Even though Bush shared the conservatives' anti-government creed, especially where environmental, labor, and business regulation were concerned, he had learned from Gingrich's failures. The former House Speaker's conservatism had clearly been too combative, too devoted to an anti-government rhetoric that could never, in practice, deliver as small a government as it promised. It was also, perhaps, too honest. Bush found a rhetorical style that, at least in principle, made him a friend, not an enemy, of government.
"In this present crisis, government isn't the solution to our problem. Government is the problem," Ronald Reagan had said. George W. Bush has put his case much more modestly. "Government if necessary," Bush said, "but not necessarily government."
"Too often, my party has confused the need for limited government with a disdain for government itself," Bush declared. He criticized "the destructive mind-set," holding "that if government would only get out of the way, all our problems would be solved."
Here was "a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive." Here, also, was the essence and the paradox of Bushism. By rejecting pure anti-government rhetoric, Bush left himself more room than Reagan had to reduce the size of government. Because Bush was not a government basher, he was given more leeway to limit its scope. Because Bush proclaimed his conservatism as "compassionate," he could pursue conservative goals with more vigor. And after 9/11, because Bush so increased the size of government where defense and homeland security were concerned, his broader anti-government purposes went unnoticed -- even, until the fiscal picture turned bleak in 2004, among most conservatives.
This rhetorical shift led many to credit Bush with having made his party more moderate. "Bush's Moderate Steps Bring Change to GOP," read a Philadelphia Inquirer headline on a story about a Republican National Committee meeting in Austin on January 20, 2002. "He's taken the hard edge off the party," Bill Cobey, the GOP state chairman in North Carolina, told reporter Steven Thomma.
But Bush was no Rockefeller Republican. He was, in many ways, more conservative than Reagan -- and that should have been obvious before he became president. Unlike Bush, Reagan never pushed to repeal the inheritance tax, even if he loathed it. Reagan didn't propose a partial privatization of Social Security, even if he saw Social Security as a socialist program. Reagan praised religion, but never contemplated a faith-based initiative.
Paul Weyrich, the president of the Free Congress Foundation and a veteran leader of the right, had qualms about whether Reagan was conservative enough. He definitely had problems with Bush I. But he loved Bush II. In an open letter to the second President Bush in January 2002, Weyrich praised him as "one of the finest men to have ever served as president." Weyrich was speaking for the conservative base, which had been overwhelmingly sympathetic to Bush from the outset. That's because they knew he was one of them. They understood -- as some moderate voters and many in media did not -- that Bushism (or in deference to his father, should we call it "W-ism"?) offered the best chance for a new conservative ascendancy.
Since at least the end of World War II, American conservatism has confronted a political and philosophical split between libertarians and traditionalists. The libertarians prize the free market above everything and see human liberty as the highest calling. The traditionalists emphasize community over individualism, values over profits, self-discipline over consumerism. "Conservatism is something more than mere solicitude for tidy incomes," wrote the traditionalist thinker Russell Kirk in 1954. "Economic self-interest is ridiculously inadequate to hold an economic system together, and even less adequate to preserve order."
In the 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr., then a young editor, and his ally Frank Meyer sought to meld these two strands of conservatism. They created what came to be known as "fusionism." Donald Devine, a political scientist who served in the Reagan administration, has argued that fusionism saw America as, at heart, a conservative nation that would use the freedom libertarians preached in defense of traditional values. Whether fusionism ever worked philosophically, it worked politically by uniting conservatives behind a common cause: beating the liberals at home and the Communists abroad. This is the consensus that nurtured Ronald Reagan. His victory was a triumph of fusionism.
But Reagan's triumph also brought home fusionism's limits. In practice, traditionalists and libertarians still disagreed on many questions. Moreover, after Reagan won and prospered, the liberal enemy came to seem far less fearsome. And the collapse of the Soviet Union robbed conservatives of the anti-Communist solvent that could heal so many wounds and divisions.
George W. Bush made himself the instrument of a new fusionism. Like libertarians, he made tax cuts a central article of his creed. His devotion to business was reflected in his efforts to roll back environmental and labor regulations from the Clinton era and to open federal lands to energy development. Bush was a corporate conservative, and proud of it. But he called himself a compassionate conservative because he, like the traditionalists, understood that most people do not draw meaning from the marketplace alone. Oddly, as we'll see later, Bush was more alive to the limits of market thinking than were liberals, who feared saying anything that might invite attack from The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
"The invisible hand works many miracles, but it cannot touch the human heart," Bush declared in July 1999. "We are a nation of rugged individuals. But we are also the country of a second chance -- tied together by bonds of friendship and community and solidarity." Soothing words, indeed. Yet it is wrong to see compassionate conservatism as a capitulation to liberalism. On the contrary, it was designed to undermine and replace liberalism.
"Reducing problems to economics is simply materialism," Bush declared in 1999, when he was inaugurated for the second time as governor of Texas. "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."
Or consider these words: "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." The speaker went on: "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."
George W. Bush again? No, Herbert Hoover, in 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression. Hoover was the first compassionate conservative. The similarities are a reminder that Bush was operating very much within his party's conservative tradition.
When Bush took the presidential oath of office on January 20, 2001, his inaugural address was a brilliant distillation of his approach. "In the quiet of the American conscience, we know that deep persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation's promise. And whatever our views of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault." So far, he had everybody around the table with him, from left to right.
Bush went on to say: "Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love. And the proliferation of prisons, however necessary, is no substitute for hope and order in our souls." His language here is very important. The root causes of poverty, he's saying, are personal and moral, not social and economic. Given Bush's record on law and order issues, it was moving for him even to bring up the proliferation of prisons as a problem. Yet consider that not poverty or discrimination but abandonment and abuse were the problems poor children faced. "Hope and order in our souls" is the solution to the problem of criminality, not job opportunities or reducing inequality. Thus did Bush shift the focus of the argument over poverty from the economy, government, and society to individuals and their shortcomings.
In the same speech, Bush declared: "Compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government. And some needs and hurts are so deep that they will only respond to a mentor's touch or a pastor's prayer. Church and charity, synagogue and mosque lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and in our laws." Whatever this was, it was not the New Deal. It was not the Great Society. It was conservatism, and of a rather old and traditional sort.
The tension within Bushism was on display again when he gave his first big speech after his inauguration, an address to a joint session of Congress on February 27, 2001. Bush made clear that he would act as if he had received a mandate from the voters for his big tax cuts. But he would talk as if he knew perfectly well that the country was in no mood for his reprise of Reaganism.
Much of the speech read as if a gremlin from the Democratic National Committee had snuck an Al Gore speech into the TelePrompTer. The grace notes were composed as Clintonian flourishes. What were Bush's priorities? Democratic priorities: "excellent schools, quality health care, a secure retirement, a cleaner environment." For good measure, there was also talk of a patient's bill of rights, a prescription drug benefit for the elderly, and a slew of smaller government programs that would have done Lyndon B. Johnson proud.
As for Clintonism, old Bill couldn't have done better. "Year after year in Washington," Bush declared, "budget debates seem to come down to an old, tired argument: on one side, those who want more government, regardless of the cost; on the other, those who want less government, regardless of the need."
If your enemies are those who are unconcerned about costs and indifferent to needs, you must be in the political center. You could almost hear Clinton's patented attacks on "the brain dead politics of both parties."
But after invoking all the centrist stuff, Bush offered his one, large priority: a tax cut of $1.6 trillion. And even on taxes, Bush actually made a case for the Democrats' middle-class tax cuts, not his own. The president didn't try to sell his plan as a tax cut for the wealthy -- which it was -- because he knew the voters didn't like the idea.
As Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle noted in his rebuttal to Bush, 43 percent of the tax cut went to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. But did Bush haul out a millionaire investment banker or an oil baron to show whom he would be helping? No. Instead, there were Steven and Josefina Ramos from Pennsylvania, respectively a school administrator and a teacher. And he mentioned a hypothetical waitress who would also benefit.
Hiding the wealthy behind waitresses' skirts seemed like good politics. But it was an evasion that would come back to haunt Bush. It would feed the perception -- which grew when the administration's prewar claims about Iraq were shown to be untrue or exaggerated -- that Bush was always willing to say the convenient thing and hide inconvenient truths.
Bush wanted a supply-side tax cut without having to make a supply-side case. Where he had sold his tax cut during the campaign as affordable because the economy was booming, he sold it after he was elected as a response to the downturn. Boom, bust -- whatever.
Copyright © 2004 by E. J. Dionne, Jr.