Should Conservatives "Get over It"?

By Donald Devine

“Get over it” is pundit Fred Barnes’ advice to conservatives disappointed with the performance of the George W. Bush presidency.

The Medicare drug bill may have been Bush’s chief “apostasy” to conservative principle, he admits, and was opposed by almost all on the right for its socialization of the senior prescription drug market and its $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities. But he defends the president’s action because it has “taken off the table” for future elections what was “among the single best issues Bill Clinton used to club conservatives,” Medicare, agreeing with this assessment promoted by an unnamed senior “Bush official.”

Considering that President Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove, made a similar argument a few days later contending against his conservative critics that the president was effectively controlling discretionary spending--and that Rove was the major source for Barnes’ inside the White House book, it is hardly necessary to name the official. Barnes and Rove also defended the president’s silly threat to investigate oil companies for price gauging, calling this divergence from “conservative orthodoxy” by Bush “probably harmless,” even though Barnes himself admitted the prices only represented a properly-functioning market.

Barnes’ justification is that “in this fall’s election the drug bill will hardly be an albatross” against Republicans and that the oil demagogy by the president represents “taking control of the issue and protect[ing] himself politically.” So why is the president at a 31 percent job approval rating, the third lowest in history after Harry Truman, who was unable even to seek re-election, Richard Nixon, who was then forced to resign, and Jimmy Carter, who was decisively rejected by the voters in the following election? Contrary to some rationalizations on the right, the polls were by conducted over many years by the Gallup Organization, hardly part of the Democratic conspiracy, as Jonathan Schwartz shows in his article this issue.

Is it just too inconceivable to these pragmatic “experts” that lack of principle hurts politically? Now Barnes was never an ideological conservative despite his performing as one on Fox TV. Your servant debated him on this during the first Bush administration. Mr. Barnes argued then that no policy sought by Ronald Reagan that he was unable to enact should be considered practical and therefore should be removed from the conservative and Republican agendas. So no one should be surprised, in spite of the fact some of these were actually adopted later in the wake of the 1994 Congressional victory. But it does take the prize for chutzpah for Mr. Rove to tell his American Enterprise Institute audience that controlling spending is one of the untold success stories of the Bush years.

For the first time, Rove has revealed that the president has quietly threatened numerous vetoes and they have forced Congress to retreat to the spending levels set in the Bush budget. Someone should inform his Office of Management and Budget of this hot news, since OMB maintains domestic non-security spending has increased not only beyond the president’s budget but by an incredible 25 percent over the Bush years, higher than under any president since Great Society spendthrift Lyndon Johnson. Yes, Congress would have spent even more but it did spend much less during the Clinton years, not even counting entitlement spending where Mr. Bush has far surpassed all his predecessors except Mr. Johnson.

A similar strategy has informed Bush Administration education policy. Not that long ago, Republicans talked about abolishing the Department of Education. Now President Bush has adopted a No Child Left Behind program that has increased national education spending by 99 percent, more than under any other president. Even worse, the so-called conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal recently complained that Bush Education Secretary Margaret Spelling’s “tenure has been marked by lax enforcement of NCLB.” Conservatives now want more federal Government enforcement of this local function? “NCLB’s raison d’etre is to hold schools accountable for all of their students; otherwise,” the editorial continued, “why not leave schools free to be run by local officials who pay most of the bills?” Yes, why not?

But the “conservative” editorial concluded that the Bush Administration must “enforce their own laws” for the sake of “the system’s most vulnerable children,” indistinguishable from the liberal rhetoric of presidents Johnson, Carter and Clinton. Mr. Rove had earlier bragged to GOP leaders that NCLB also had taken education policy off the table. Yet, somehow, Americans still say Democrats will do a better job on education, by 56 to 33 percent, while mandates have been imposed on local schools that conservatives would have denounced if done by the other party. The Democratic advantage on talking care of health matters like Medicare is 64 to 28 percent, according to the most recent ABC News poll.

Mr. Barnes and company apparently have a new political theory. Adopt their programs and spend much more than your political opponents so you can take their issues away from them. But, then, why should someone interested in less spending and smaller and local government support Republicans? Apparently, they will not. A recent Associated Press poll found that President Bush was supported only by 52 percent of self identified conservatives. With almost half of conservatives not approving of his performance, this is an incredibly and historically low support level for a Republican president, which greatly affects his overall popularity and his ability to govern, not to mention the upcoming election.

The Republican revolt in Pennsylvania may be an early warning. When the Republican leadership in the legislature signed on to Democratic Governor Ed Rendell’s borrow, tax and spend agenda, as the conservative Commonwealth Foundation’s Matt Brouillette labeled it, they were told to get over it too. In the following GOP primary last month, two top Senate leaders and 13 House incumbents were overwhelmingly defeated by no-name conservatives upset by the betrayal. Despite outspending their opponents by 8 to 1 ratios, the big government legislators lost by overwhelming majorities among their own party members.

There is another option to “getting over it” and apparently many conservatives have chosen it. It may not turn out all that badly even for Republicans. When the conservatives stay home this November, they will make their point to the GOP that default on principle does not pay politically. But this will actually help in the presidential race in 2008. After two years of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, conservatives will be ready to nominate a principled conservative and get the Reagan Revolution back on track.

Donald J. Devine is the editor of Conservative Battleline.

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