The Romney campaign’s approach to the Bush question can be summed up as follows: George who?
Top Republicans who served in Congress during the Bush administration, however, must resort to other means of deflecting blame.
In a review of Philip Klein’s new book Conservative Survival in the Romney Era, Conor Friedersdorf writes:
Paul Ryan, Tom DeLay, and Rick Santorum are all quoted explaining why they cast votes for Bush-era legislation they found wrongheaded even at the time. The anecdotes are useful reminders of the pressure a president and the establishment of his party can bring to bear, and the frequency with which partisan loyalty is put before principle and the public.
Klein’s book sounds like it’s worth a read, and I don’t have the exact quotes in front of me, but my BS detector is beeping like crazy. Of course they’re going to say they thought such legislation was wrongheaded at the time. What else are they going to say? And how can we falsify self-serving accounts of their state of mind?
I’ll leave Rep. Ryan out of this for now; I personally saw him in closed-door Republican Conference meetings as a House freshman, and he voiced the same concerns about overspending that he does today. But the notion of DeLay and Santorum feeling the pressure of the Republican establishment: They were the Republican establishment!
Santorum was raked over these coals during the primary, so let’s focus on the disgraced DeLay. Tom DeLay, who pushed the boundary of House ethics in order to ensure passage of the Medicare prescription drug bill. Tom DeLay, who said Sen. John McCain took “the easy way out” and violated conservative principles because he voted against Medicare Part D. Tom DeLay, who said of the mid-2000s federal budget, “we’ve pared it down pretty good.”
Sure. This same Tom DeLay thought all this was wrongheaded at the time.
It’s worth pointing out that the GOP lost control in Congress in 2006 largely because of the slow-motion debacle that was the Iraq War. Yet these same characters seem incapable of even entertaining the possibility that that was wrongheaded at the time.
When you’ve got this many layers of deception, resisting the enticements of the plastic Mitt Romney should be the least of conservatives’ worries.
Conservatives’ fault, though, lies not in their stars, but in themselves.
Philip Klein writes from a parallel universe where the GOP base cares about policy matters. But those of us old enough to remember the Bush administration know that isn’t so. The problem isn’t that “Bush is an excuse”, it’s that all conservatives loved Bush.
As Bush left office, he had a 28 percent approval rating from independents– and a 75% rating from Republicans, according to Gallup. According to an ABC/WaPo poll, Bush left office with 34% approval from independents, and 68% from Republicans– but 82% from self-professed “conservative Republicans”. Over the course of his presidency, Bush received an average of about 80% approval of “conservative Republicans”.
Those same conservative Republicans, now refashioned as the “Tea Party”, maintain today that they are very preoccupied with the deficit and with federal & executive power. But we know they don’t care about those things, because they were Pres. Bush’s most loyal supporters.
The Romney administration will give us the exact same advisers giving us the exact same policies that the Bush administration enacted to wild cheers from conservatives: Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the executive’s asserted power to wiretap and to detain & torture US citizens without charges or a warrant, surpluses turned into deficits, Raich v Gonzales, and also the invasion for bogus reasons & failed occupation of an arbitrarily selected Middle Eastern country.
The rank-and-file took their cue from above, buying the endless supply of fawning biographies and tchotchkes pumped out by the conservative “intelligentsia”. Jpod and Jonah explained at the time at NRO how Bush Jr. showed that the “party is all Reaganite now.”
It wasn’t just conservative op-ed writers. All of Mitt Romney’s advisers were on board with all of it; so were Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, et al.
(Not sure whether it’s to Ryan’s credit or discredit that he is rumored to have voiced concerns behind closed doors. The reason we care about the government is because it implements policies that affect people’s lives; Paul Ryan voted for all those policies. There was no Republican glasnost back when it mattered, and Republicans now blame their former idol, George Bush, rather than looking to their own faults).
In light of the Bush-era purges of folks like Bruce Bartlett, it appears that there are no more fiscal conservatives, small-government conservatives, or federalist conservatives left in the Republican Party. Philip Klein’s concerns are irrelevant. The Republican base will demand a stand against the terror of the fairness doctrine, or of the series of assaults on white America, or the tyranny of hypothetical gun control regulations. They will be gleefully terrified, and they will vote Republican. The size of government has nothing to do with it.