Expect to see a lot of counterintuitive articles arguing that Bush's real legacy is a liberal one. At current count, we've got one in the Guardian, one in Newsweek, and many more to come. And they'll have what to write: Bush vastly expanded the size of the federal government, signed into law the largest increase in the entitlement state since the Great Society (Medicare Part D), sharply increased federal control over the nation's schools with No Child Left Behind, elevated democracy promotion to an explicit tent of foreign policy, increased funding for global AIDS prevention, signed McCain-Feingold, and quite a bit more. So does it prove Bush was a liberal? Hardly. What it proves is that American politics has more inputs than the president. Medicare Part D was Bush's effort to diffuse a powerful Democratic issue. Smartly, he did it in such a way that preserved pharmaceutical industry profits and added some conservative goodies to the program, thus diffusing a potent liberal issue, achieving some longstanding party priorities, and netting some chits with important corporate contributors. McCain-Feingold was signed under political duress, and global AIDS prevention has the Christian Right's stamp on it (including their insane opposition to contraception). Elsewhere, Bush was actually liberalish, or at least not conservative: His immigration reform, had it passed, would have been an important progressive advance, and NCLB, despite problems in funding and testing requirements, was a Ted-Kennedy/George Miller project that Bush embraced. The overall lesson is a simple one: No president is perfectly pure, and the will of the country, the will of Congress, and various strategic considerations often lead leaders in unexpected directions. Bush was no liberal, but there were moments over the past eight years when it suited him to pretend otherwise. In general, however, that was proof of the the country having liberal tendencies, not Bush.
