In the 2000 election, the voters of this country could have been forgiven for sizing up George W. Bush as a cross between a moderate Republican and DLC Democrat. Here are some of the things he said while campaigning:
In a stirring passage in his convention speech, Bush invoked
single moms struggling to feed their kids and pay the rent.Immigrants starting a hard life in a new world. Children without fathers inneighborhoods where gangs seem like friendship. ... We are their country, too.... When these problems aren't confronted, it builds a wall within our nation. Onone side are wealth and technology, education and ambition. On the other side ofthe wall are poverty and prison, addiction and despair. And, my fellow Americans,we must tear down that wall.
One could imagine Bobby Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson -- or even Al Gore on agood day -- uttering just those words.
"To seniors in this country," Bush earnestly declared, "you earned yourbenefits, you made your plans, and President George W. Bush will keep the promiseof Social Security -- no changes, no reductions, no way."
"Medicare," he added, "does more than meet the needs of our elderly; itreflects the values of our society. We will set it on firm financial ground, andmake prescription drugs available and affordable for every senior who needsthem."
In the third presidential debate, Bush told Gore, "You know I support anational patients' bill of rights, Mr. Vice President. And I want all peoplecovered." He called for grants to the states "so that seniors -- poor seniors --don't have to choose between food and medicine."
He pledged to change the tone in Washington, to govern as a bipartisan the wayhe had done as governor of Texas. "I know it's going to require a different kindof leader to go to Washington and say to both Republicans and Democrats, 'Let'scome together,'" he said.
Bush repeatedly promised to balance the budget and insisted that the nationcould afford a tax cut without slipping into deficit. He even criticized a HouseRepublican plan to achieve budget savings by cutting the Earned Income TaxCredit: "I don't think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of thepoor," he said.
Turning to the environment, Bush regularly suggested that he would beunusually green for a Republican. "To enhance America's long-term energysecurity," he said, "we must continue developing renewable energy."
On education, he famously promised to "leave no child behind," borrowing notonly liberal ideas about universal inclusion but literally plagiarizing thethree-decades-old slogan of the Children's Defense Fund (the fund now prints itsslogan with a trademark sign).
All of these declarations were, of course, lies. While all recent presidentshave periodically gone back on promises and some have told explicit untruths,what's interesting about this president is that his multiple lies are somethingvery rare in politics: They are ideological lies. Worse still, according to The Washington Post's David Broder, Bush seems determined to make compassionate conservatism the centerpiece of the 2002 campaign -- the actual substance of his presidency notwithstanding.
Hypocrisy, as La Rochefoucauld observed, is the homage that vice pays tovirtue. In the case of Bush, campaign lies are the homage that Republicansloganeering paid to the popularity of Democratic ideology.
Imagine instead that Bush had hit the campaign trailpromoting aSocial Security shift that increased the system's deficits, requiring cuts inbenefits and an increase in the retirement age; that he'd promised a tax cut thatcost more than twice Social Security's long-term shortfall. Imagine that hispatients' rights bill was advertised as authored by the HMO industry -- and asprohibiting patients denied care from suing their insurer; that he'd touted aMedicare plan that would keep ratcheting down payments to hospitals and doctors;that his environmental policy would scrap one protection after another and letindustry rewrite the rules; that he'd pledged to demonize Democrats who resistedhis policies; that his No Child Left Behind program pledged to freeze funding forHead Start and money for child care -- and to go back on a bipartisan deal toincrease federal funds for poor public schools in exchange for high-stakestesting.
Campaigning on that set of views, Bush would have been the minoritycandidate of a minority party. There would have been no cliffhanger in Floridaand no narrow Supreme Court resolution of Bush v. Gore. Yet that set of views has been his actual program.
More interesting still, Bush has mostly gotten away with it. While a carefulreader of the quality press might connect the dots and conclude that Bush'spresidency is a double fraud -- not only wasn't he really elected, he isn'tremotely governing on the program he offered voters -- there's been no widespreadoutrage.
One simply cannot conjure up a systematic presidential deception ofcomparable cynicism and scale. Bill Clinton, to be sure, lied about his sexualescapades. He often enraged allies both left and center: The DLC and the labormovement agree on just about nothing but they share Monica Lewinsky's assessmentthat Clinton is a faithless lover. Clinton tacked right on values issues in the1992 campaign only to embrace gay rights. He assiduously courted the gaycommunity only to back a lame halfway policy of "don't ask, don't tell."Conversely, he initially postured liberal on economic issues only to abandon bothuniversal health insurance and economic stimulus by public investment. Manyblacks were so comfortable with Clinton that they considered him the firstAfrican-American president. But for all his marquee appointments of blackofficials, Clinton could embrace a cruel version of welfare reform and abandonold friends such as Lani Guinier.
Yet there was about Clinton a broad ideological consistency. Though he couldinfuriate his friends on the particulars, these were tactical reversals within arelatively narrow, consistent ideological whole. Clinton was at heart a centrist-- a moderate with some liberal leanings who governed as a wily pragmatist andwho often fought his conservative adversaries to a draw or better. Jimmy Carterwas similar. Bush Senior was essentially a moderate Republican who tried to courthis party's right wing, but his heart wasn't really in it. Ronald Reagan was agenuine conservative who never pretended to be anything but. To find a deceptionof comparable scale to Bush's, you have to go all the way back to Lyndon Johnson,who ran in 1964 as the candidate who would keep us from a wider war in Vietnamand then escalated the conflict. On domestic policy, Johnson gave the country theprogressive program he promised and more. Indeed, as Robert Caro's latestinstallment makes clear [Robert Mann, "Masterful," TAP, May 20, 2002], if anyone should feel betrayed by LBJ, it was the Senate's southern bourbons with whom he'd allied himself to become majority leader in the 1950s.
As ideological fraud, then, George W. Bush remainsin a class byhimself. It's understandable why he does it: Democrats' domestic positions arebasically popular. But why does he get away with it? He pulls it off, I think,for several reasons (of which September 11 is fairly far down the list).
First, in his own goofy way he's a political natural, a nice guy. Hispolitical style has a chumminess and warm physicality that's disarming. It's easyto detest his policies but not so easy to hate the man. The first time I watchedhim at close range, he was working a room of Democratic senators (he'd boldlysolicited an invitation to a Democratic Caucus retreat and I was an invitedspeaker). That's when I realized how much his critics had underestimated the manas a politician. Bush was off script and off the record, and he did just fine atthe banter. The wisecracks were spontaneous and smart. Indeed, if Clintonalienated because he was too clever by half, Bush endears when it turns out he'snot as dumb as you thought. You're waiting for him to stumble and you're charmedwhen he doesn't.
Second, Bush has absolutely superb handlers and tacticians. His speechwriter,Michael Gerson, is so gifted that he could make a trained monkey sound likeThomasJefferson. Karl Rove, his political grand strategist, has perfected a game ofleaving the Democrats with no popular issues on the table. If Democrats are forSocial Security, so is Bush. If they back patients' rights and prescriptiondrugs, so does he. If they embrace kids, he does them one better. Bush then takesaway in the fine print everything that he offers in the headlines. Politically,alas, this is mere detail -- so much policy wonkery. The betrayal enrages expertsand advocates but can be dealt with by creative obfuscation when it comes to thevoters. But what does that say about the voters?
Here we have the third and most alarming factor. This is an era in whichvoters are unusually quiescent. For two decades, expectations about whatgovernment can do have been so lowered -- and here many Democrats are just asculpable as Republicans -- that the broad public doesn't get terribly indignantabout betrayals, much less of the ideological kind. The public has come to expectgovernment to jerk people around. When Bush breaches a promise, it only confirmsthe general suspicion that government can't be trusted anyway. And the fact thatthe Democratic Party doesn't have a clear opposition ideology makes Bush's taskthat much easier.
September 11 certainly allowed Bush to change the subject. At the same time,however, voters remain closer to core Democratic views on a broad range ofdomestic issues. Polls consistently show that voters don't translate Bush'spopularity on national-security issues into support for Republican positions onpatients' rights, Social Security, and the rest [Ruy Teixeira, "Politics forDemocrats," TAP, April 8, 2002]. But politics itself is so debased and devalued that all Bush need do is genuflect to those broad Democratic themes. After all, the guy really does seem to care about poor people, seniors, and kids.
In fairness, voters were well aware that Bush was no liberal -- on someissues, at least. He straightforwardly called for a tax cut, and for vouchers asa remedy to "failing schools." He said he wanted to reduce the incidence ofabortion, though he was careful not to support overturning Roe v. Wade. He embraced private retirement accounts as a complement to Social Security for younger workers, but not at the cost of weakening Social Security itself. And he advocated greater use of religious institutions to carry out social services. But he carefully balanced these views with a sweeping embrace of liberal rhetoric and programs on a host of other issues.
Moreover, a lot of Bush's hard-right program has flown beneath the radar. Onthe issue of reproductive rights, for example, where Bush has always stopped justshort of calling for an end to a woman's right to terminate an unwantedpregnancy, he's done just about everything else to hobble abortion, familyplanning, and even the therapeutic use of discarded fertilized embryos. Anadministration plan to eliminate contraception coverage from federal employees'insurance plans was reversed by Congress.
Or consider No Child Left Behind. Bush's grand scheme for children inlow-performing schools had three elements: relentlessly test kids, let someparents opt out of such schools with vouchers, and increase public-schoolfunding. But Bush has repeatedly welshed on the funding. [See Noy Thrupkaew, "ADollar Short"] Under the newly enacted education law, children as young as eight will be subjected to standardized testing. In inner-city schools, as many as half will fail. These kids will be "left back" as they used to say, but without adequate resources for good remedial education. What then? Will they just keep repeating fourth grade?
Schools carry the burden of society's other deficits. If Bush were seriousabout leaving no child behind, he would not just throw tests at kids and vouchersat their parents. He would offer kids decent day care while their mothers worked,fully fund Head Start, and get children of low-income families prepared forschool with high-quality pre-kindergarten. Decent wages wouldn't hurt, either.He's of course done none of this, and millions of children will be left behind.But with a few eloquent Gerson speeches informed by careful focus groups andsome nice photos of himself with poor kids, Bush has seized the rhetorical highground.
Holding bush accountable for these deceptions willrequire morethan partisan or journalistic truth squads. The detail is hidden in plain view,courtesy of the Web (for one-stop shopping, try our own www.movingideas.org). However, information without political narrative might as well not exist. So the larger challenge is to re-energize not just liberal politics, but politics as such. Today's characteristic politics lends itself perfectly to slogan, symbol, deception, even systematic prevarication.
As political scientists since Maurice Duverger have pointed out, a disengaged politics is necessarily a conservative politics. Without thecounterweight of a mobilized citizenry that has the motivation to pay attentionand the institutions that can aggregate and express its concerns, the systemdefaults to its other source of residual power: concentrated wealth. Institutionslike the labor movement, which give ordinary people the mechanisms to effectpolitical change and the motivation to take politics seriously, are diminished.It's no accident that labor did so much of the heavy lifting for Gore -- and thatit wasn't quite enough. As another political scientist, Kay Lehman Schlozman, hasobserved, most people of modest means no longer participate vigorously inpolitics -- not only because they don't believe politics make a difference, butalso because the institutions that invite their participation are dwindling.
Media are also culpable: Short-attention-span TV and Internet gossip sitesfunction as though politics were not about how a great democracy makes weightychoices; it's just another form of commerce or entertainment. The media loves thegotcha game, but whopping discrepancies in the Medicare budget or global-warmingpolicy are not good gotcha.
These trends, all of which debase politics, have been building for a longtime; their full fruit is George W. Bush. Now the Bush charade is due for arevival in this year's campaign. As long as the citizenry is anesthetized,however, even systematic presidential lying is of little consequence. And apolity in which leaders lie and the public shrugs falls short of a democracy.That's the hard truth.
