Four months into the primary season, the Republican candidates are all running way to the right on domestic policy, talking about tax cuts and porkbusting and abandoning the territory that Bush tried to swipe from the Democrats; meanwhile, the man currently leading in the GOP primary polls, Rudy Giuliani, seems to have decided that his path to the nomination requires a frontal assault on the party’s social-conservative consensus. The only place where there hasn’t been any serious deviations from Bushism is foreign policy, and particularly the war in Iraq, which is the one place where I thought deviations were most likely. ~Ross Douthat

I think Ross is being far too hard on himself here.  I read Ross’ piece on the staying power of Bushism not too long ago, and it made sense to me at a time when the primary contest had already started taking the shape it now has.  Let’s take it point by point.  Ross wrote:

All of the prominent candidates, for instance, champion fiscal restraint, but none are [sic] likely to revive the small-government conservatism that Bush deliberately abandoned. 

This is a true statement for both prominent and obscure candidates, save Ron Paul and perhaps Tom Tancredo.  Ron Paul is like a voice crying in the wilderness (as usual) in the midst of a field of people who are mostly either perfectly content with the current size and scope of government of the Bush Era or who focus their criticism on the excessive deficit spending of the last few years.  Who among the leading candidates is making a real small government agenda an important part of his campaign?  Of course, everyone always talks about tax cuts and reforming the tax code, but Mr. Bush was one for tax cuts and spending increases.  Sam Brownback can talk about killing the tax code with a “dull axe,” but we will wait in vain for the “compassionate conservative” to take that dull axe to any federal programs.  If anything, the prominent candidates aim to close this gap between revenues and expenditures by being more skeptical about cutting taxes (cue John McCain saying that he will follow the deficit to the gates of hell).  The candidates will make noises about shrinking government, the same way that Mr. Bush made similar noises during the primaries when he needed to fend off attacks from the right, but they are not making any proposals to this effect.  I think Ross has taken their Reagan-mania too much to heart: they are mouthing empty platitudes, not making concrete statements about policy.  That is a problem in itself, but it doesn’t make Ross’ analysis wrong.  Ross is much more right than he allows on this point in particular.

Keeping social conservatives happy and engaged is important for these candidates, and we have not yet seen whether any of them can actively spurn them and get away with it.  It is true that Giuliani has decided to take the Balaclava approach to wooing social conservatives, but it is not at all clear that this is a smart or winning strategy.  The merest whiff of a Fred Thompson candidacy has started to collapse Giuliani’s once-formidable position at the head of the pack, and his more openly pro-choice candidacy promises to hurt his position still more.  McCain tried to run to Bush’s left in 2000 and he was crushed; Giuliani wants to run to the left of Bushism, which is already pretty far to the left, and will almost certainly suffer the same fate.

The near-unanimity of the candidates on backing Bush’s foreign policy in almost every particular has already been noted before.  Ross had good reason to think that someone other than Ron Paul would break with the administration on Iraq or foreign policy more broadly, but here he has assumed a rational response to the failure of Bush’s foreign policy that you might expect from a foreign policy realist.  This makes sense, since I believe Ross is basically a realist, but it imputes to most of the candidates understanding of foreign policy that they do not seem to have.  As a matter of political self-interest for the general election, they should be running away from Iraq as fast as they can, except for the baffling reality that Republican voters overwhelmingly support the war and the “surge” and seem to think that victory is just around the next “corner.”  The party has truly become Bushified, and now the ’08 candidates are stuck playing to a base that embraces Bushism at a time when most of the country loathes it. 

In what sense have most of the candidates, especially the “prominent” ones, actually moved away from Bushism, by which Ross means “social conservatism and an accommodation with big government at home, and a moralistic interventionism abroad”?  In reality, they haven’t moved very far from Mr. Bush’s chosen ground at all, which is why all of the insipid Reagan chatter is that much more depressing.  The candidates seem to believe quite genuinely that if they invoke certain talismanic words and names that the primary voters will respond with Pavlovian automaticity.  Most of them do not feel obliged to take up policy positions that might actually reflect a commitment to smaller, limited government, because they seem to think that simply saying that they are against big and wasteful government will do the trick.  Don’t ask them what they would do differently–they like Reagan, and that’s enough, isn’t it?