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Examples of What Not To Do

The modern conservative movement did not waste time pitching primary challenges against George W. Bush in 2004. It spent that time trying to take down liberal Republicans in local, winnable races. In doing so, groups like the Club for Growth made it harder and harder for Republicans to break from anti-tax, small government orthodoxy, even […]

The modern conservative movement did not waste time pitching primary challenges against George W. Bush in 2004. It spent that time trying to take down liberal Republicans in local, winnable races. In doing so, groups like the Club for Growth made it harder and harder for Republicans to break from anti-tax, small government orthodoxy, even when George W. Bush did so.

“There’s no point in just spending money for the sake of feeling good about attacking someone if no chance of winning,” says Club for Growth executive director David Keating. “You pick races you can win.” ~Dave Weigel

Weigel was making a lot of sense in this post until this part. It’s true that the conservative movement didn’t expend any energy or resources challenging Bush in 2004. It occurred to me earlier this week that I couldn’t recall anything like the outrage over the tax deal after Bush and his allies forced the prescription drug benefit through Congress. In terms of the damage it did to the long-term fiscal health of the country, Medicare Part D was infinitely worse than anything that has happened in the last few years, and it still represents the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ. By and large, conservatives have swallowed this, they generally never talk about it now, and they certainly don’t talk about repealing it. I suppose the one thing that Bush could say for himself is that he never specifically pledged not to do it.

There were conservative activists and pundits who disliked Medicare Part D, and many of them publicly opposed it, but there was never much mainstream conservative desire to penalize party leaders who pushed it through. Indeed, many of the people who voted for it have been promoted into the leadership since then. Aside from the immigration debate in 2007 and the much less important fight over Harriet Miers, the Bush years were a time when the conservative movement rolled over and tolerated one rejection of their views after another. Conservatives under Bush are a case study of how ideological core supporters are taken for granted. They also provide a good example of how these supporters reconciled themselves to their own policy irrelevance by engaging in constant intellectual contortions to justify their continuing support for an administration that regularly ignored their priorities.

It’s also true that many of the high-profile primary challenges launched by the Club for Growth against moderate and liberal Republicans in the last six years failed or led to a Democratic win in the general election. I found the Club executive director’s remark fascinating. It’s as if he doesn’t know that the Club has acquired quite a reputation for picking races that it cannot win, and for winning races that helped the GOP to lose seats in Congress. I suppose these challenges made it a little harder to break from anti-tax orthodoxy, but the GOP leadership happily ignored any “small government” principles until it was tossed out of power. Progressives are undoubtedly on the wrong track with talk of primarying Obama, but I can’t think of many worse examples of how a political movement can get its way than the conservative movement under Bush and the electoral strategy of the Club for Growth.

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