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The Price of Bush
 A
year ago, John Kerry caused conservatives to rally behind President
Bush; even I, no fan of the president, softened on him, given the alternative,
 when
the 2004 election
seemed likely to be almost as close as the one in 2000. I was relieved to the
point of elation when Bush won a clear victory.
Today things are very different.
Bush is on the verge of losing his conservative base. His nomination of
Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme
Court has enraged those who feel, with good reason, that recent Republican
presidents have betrayed their trust with lousy judicial appointments: chiefly
O’Connor herself, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, all of whom
have upheld the Court’s worst ruling ever, Roe v. Wade.
We have only Bush’s word that Miers would be a reliable defender of
the Constitution.
And why should anyone trust his
judgment about that? The same conservatives are beginning to notice,
belatedly, that Bush himself shows no great awareness of, or respect for,
constitutional principle. He has yet to veto an act of Congress, has violently
expanded Federal power, and takes a Buzz Lightyear approach to government
spending: “To infinity and beyond!” The list could easily be
lengthened, and it makes a grim joke of Bush’s claim to be a
“strict constructionist.”
Until lately, Bush could count on
conservative support for his Iraq war, which he sold as vital to his larger
“war on terror.” This too was constitutionally questionable, but
war is the one huge Federal spending program conservatives usually believe
in. As long as Bush could plausibly claim the war was succeeding, they were
willing to overlook most of his sins and ignore the qualms of the stern
conservatives who were shouted down and slandered by the warlike
neoconservatives egging him on.
Now, however, the war has failed.
Bush still clings to his absurd optimism about democratizing the Middle East,
but the American public no longer believes him and wants to bring the troops
home pronto. Even the neocons who urged him to wage “World War
IV” are slinking away, leaving him to fend for himself.
The unexpected disaster of
Hurricane Katrina has further damaged Bush’s popularity. Trying to
respond to popular demand, he has promised virtually limitless new spending
to rebuild New Orleans.
![[Breaker quote for The Price of Bush: Discrediting conservatism]](2005breakers/051011.gif)
Compounding his woes is the aura
of corruption that now surrounds the Republican Party, with the arrogant
House majority leader, Tom DeLay, under indictment and Bush’s
indispensable advisor, Karl Rove, also facing grave legal and ethical
questions. Other Republicans are understandably trying to distance
themselves from their party’s leader, who has abruptly become a
liability to his loyalists.
No president since Richard Nixon
has faced such a welter of problems, and even Nixon, until his final days in
office, never faced such rapidly dissolving support. No single “smoking
gun” like the Watergate tapes is likely to finish Bush off, but he looks
unexpectedly desperate, confused, ineffectual.
What does he stand for? Only one
thing: the failed war he has already staked his reputation on. He has
subordinated everything to that, and in its absence it would be impossible to
name any philosophy, conservative or otherwise, he could be identified with.
So conservatives are now afraid
that when the dust has settled, their philosophy will be identified with
Bush’s failure. That would be unjust to their philosophy, but
they’ve asked for it. It’s too late for them to repudiate him
now. He hasn’t betrayed them as badly as they’ve betrayed
their philosophy by supporting him all these years.
The president Bush most
resembles is not Nixon, but Lyndon Johnson, who also tried to expand the
Federal Government in every direction and fatally split his base. Democrats
paid a heavy price for supporting his war in Vietnam along with his
multifarious social programs. They tried to recoup by pretending he
hadn’t happened and moving leftward, but liberalism got a bad name
and by 1994 they’d lost the electoral majority they’d taken for
granted since the New Deal.
Now Bush has given conservatism
a bad name — with a lot of help from conservatives who should have
known better. Was keeping John Kerry out of the White House worth the
price of backing Bush’s war?
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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