Bill Kristol has an interesting, but to me an ahistorical piece in the latest Weekly Standard on how the Bush administration must somehow “return” to its first-term partisan roots:
…contrary to the media myth that Bush has been uncompromising and ideological, the strategy that the president has pursued for most of 2005 has been an attempt at accommodation. It has reflected a hope that he could move beyond the polarization of the 2004 campaign and appeal to the middle. It’s understandable that Bush would be tempted by such a strategy: Who wants to go down in history as a polarizing president? But the strategy has been a mistake.
“…for most of 2005”? I have to ask–on what planet was he during the first Bush term? Bush has been kissing up to the mushy middle since his first presidential campaign, when he proclaimed himself a “compassionate” (read, big-government) conservative. He led a politically-correct war on “terror,” in which he refused, until recently, to even recognize it as a war against radical Islamists. He has retained Norm Mineta at the Department of Transportation, who continues to fight sensible airline security policy, waging guerilla bureaucratic warfare against armed pilots, refusing to profile, and perpetuating idiotic confiscations of nose-hair trimmers. He tried to buy the union vote with the steel tariffs, in defiance of free-market principles and against the interests of manufacturers of items with steel content, and the consumers who purchase them. His administration has been weak on the Second Amendment, and even weaker on the First, with his signing of a campaign-finance bill that he said prior to the act was unconstutional, thus being derelict in his duty to defend the Constitution, all to placate the so-called “moderates” and McCain wing of both the Republican and Democrat parties.
Between the 2000 election and the 2004 election, Rove became the master of polarization politics. And now, with this year’s ill-fated experiment in trying to govern from the middle surely over, polarization along ideological and party lines is a fact of life. Ethics classes won’t ameliorate Democratic hostility to Bush. Nor will firing Rove.
Nor will keeping a politically correct transportation secretary, or saying that “when someone hurts, the government has to move,” or expanding entitlement programs, or nominating cronies without a paper trail to the Supreme Court, or completely dismantling the notion that the Republican Party has any further interest in smaller government. But these are not new–they’ve been going on since the campaign in 2000. The notion that Bush has ever been some kind of extreme right-wing conservative is laughable to anyone but the hard left (whose views, sadly, have permeated the media). If Bill Kristol’s advice is for him to become more of a Reagan conservative, it’s good advice, but it’s advice that he needed five years ago.