.
6/2/2007, "Too bad," Wall St. Journal, by Peggy Noonan
"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 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....
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.
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.
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 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."
.
Thursday, June 12, 2014
George Bush day by day tore apart the conservative movement, sundered a great political coalition, especially scorned those concerned about border security, called them 'unpatriotic,' ally Lindsey Graham said, 'We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up.' 'Bushes, father and son' wasted great political inheritance, threw it away 'as if they'd earned it.' Peggy Noonan, June 2007, WSJ
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