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FAITH-BASED COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVES. As Michael Crowley points out, David Kuo's anecdotes about the Bush administration's total abandonment of the "compassion" agenda are rather remarkable:
A West Wing friend called to say the president heard about the article as he walked from the Oval office of the OEOB. He was angry. "Well," he yelled through the stairwell, "is he right or isn't he? Have we done compassion or haven't we? I wanna know."An hour later we got the first and only call from the deputy chief of staff Josh Bolton's office requesting an urgent "compassion meeting." In the two years since the transition, it was the first time the president's senior staff fully engaged in the compassion agenda....The president's question first needed to be answered. He wanted to know how much we had spent on compassion programs in his first two years in office. We made some calls and did some calculations and discovered that if we applied his definition of compassion to federal social servoices programs, we were actually spending about $20 million a year less on them than before he had taken office. That number never actually made it to the president. The question was deemed, "still in process of being accounted for."The compassion agenda, however, isn't over: It's on hold. The economic trends in this country simply cannot support a party that seeks to counter excess personal risk and economic loss with more risk and upward redistribution. It's an electoral impossibility. Further, the right's absorption of downwardly mobile, Southern whites has ushered in a massive base that appreciates and relies on the entitlement state, and that will be first and worst affected by the middle class squeeze in the coming years. Bush's original appeal was to these people, who were comforted by his promise of conservatism without cruelty, which he conveyed by calling for a prescription drug benefit, promising he'd protect Social Security, and generally acting sort of like a liberal who went to church a lot (and, of course, also loved tax cuts).But then 9/11 happened. The attack obviated the need for a domestic policy, and spurred the administration to expend political capital on foreign policy issues, not economic controversies. Bush, who had no particular interest in domestic policy himself, just went where events took him, and never fought back against the tide to restore his original agenda. The mantle will eventually be taken back up, though: Huckabee, Brownback, and Romney are all compassionate conservatives of a sort, and all offer a certain recognition that folks and their families require outside help to withstand the global economy. McCain and Giuliani are more old-style populists -- where the compassionate cons will work to strengthen institutions that mitigate harm and risk to the individual, McCain and Giuliani will attack the actors they perceive to be doing the harm (McCain is, in many ways, surprisingly anti-corporate). However it shakes out and whoever ends up taking the party's mantle, I expect the GOP to enter a wrenching period of soul-searching and transformation, as they try to marry their current corporatism with the needs of their base. --Ezra Klein
