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Title: Too Bad President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
Source:
WSJ
URL Source: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/
Published: Jun 2, 2007
Author: Peggy Noonan
Post Date: 2007-06-02 06:30:13 by Zipporah
Keywords: None
Views: 193
Comments: 10
Too Bad What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future. The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place. For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad. But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad." The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism." Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement. I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate. They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true! If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin. The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq. One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance. Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering. Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time. Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on >http://OpinionJournal.com
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.
Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT 
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.
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#1. To: Zipporah (#0)
If you look at the representations made by candidates George HW Bush & George W Bush and compare them to the actual policies and actions of those 2, then it is like night & day.
Not really. If I was able to see the Bush for what he really was in 2000, I am sure that many could see through his phoniness. I was so outraged the GOPs were pushing this freak to make him the country's prez, I quit the GOP before the election. Anyone remember the 'passionate conservatism' propaganda? His stated ambition of shaping the children's minds in ways that the feds saw fit? The 'armies of compassion'? His quick distancing from those who help put him in office and his warm embrace of Clinton and Clintonism as soon as he moved into the White House? The main factor for the freak being elected twice was the ability of his propagandists - and Noonan was part of the effort - of scaring the voters shitless with the prospect of an even greater evil (Gore, Kerry) making it into the White House. Thank the '2 party system' and each of the '2 parties' for getting us where we are. Well... don't thank them. It's the people who tolerate this or just don't care. We get what we collectively deserve and, it seems, we're going to get more of it for a long time to come.
#3. To: a vast rightwing conspirator (#2)
vast... Excellent summation... The placing of blame for the situation of this country can be spread over a long period of time and several presidents. Roosevelt loved and wanted power and authority, money he inherited. Early on he found two ways for him to become King for life. One, expand the Federal government into everyday day American life and two, make the masses dependent on the US Treasury. In return the masses have responded to their patriotic duty by bleeding and dying in untold wars that were arranged for gain by the few.
you were a little quicker on that learning curve than me. I did start to distrust the Republicans back in 1989 when I saw that the first Bush administration was doing things directly against what he campaigned on. I only voted for Bush in 1992 (and reluctantly) because I could see Clinton was a sleazy liar. But in 2000 I voted for Bush again, telling myself he was a better alternative than Gore. In summer of 2001 I turned strongly against him as he began breaking his campaign representations. Now I won't vote Republican at all (and rarely democrat). It's just like you say - the 2-party system scares us with worse alternatives.
Bush showed his true colors shortly after 9/11. I knew that he would be a lousy President from the very get-go, but his hands were tied for the first year, and he actually had a few relatively sane advisors at first. After 9/11, he and his neoconservative inner circle could basically get away with doing things they normally couldn't get away with in the name of "national security." In other words, idiots who became hysterical over "the terrorist threat" and actually believe that Shrub and friends are "protecting" them are largely to blame for this loose cannon.
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#2. To: Red Jones (#1)
(Edited)
Replies to Comment # 2. We get what we collectively deserve and, it seems, we're going to get more of it for a long time to come.
#5. To: a vast rightwing conspirator (#2)
I quit the GOP before the election.
#6. To: a vast rightwing conspirator (#2)
End Trace Mode for Comment # 2.