David Frum, author of The Right Man, a biography of Bush as president, offers his views regarding the Daniel Casse piece in Commentary we posted yesterday on whether Bush is a conservative. Frum disagrees, as I did, with Casse's claim that Bush's domestic policies represent a grand new conservative synthesis that maximizes choice and accountability. He points out that "if choice and accountability were the administration’s touchstones, it would never have adopted either steel tariffs or the farm bill." Accordingly, Frum concludes that while Bush "is conservative personally, on most issues anyway, he is manifestly not governing in a consistently conservative way."

Frum attributes this to political necessity. According to Frum, "America in 2004 is a less ideologically conservative country than it was in 1984." Thus, Bush cannot afford to govern from the right -- "Where he can hold onto traditional conservative principles, he does -- as he did on taxes. But where he cannot safely uphold conservative principles, he is not prepared to suffer martyrdom for them. . . .If he could be more conservative, he would. If he has to be less conservative, he will be that too. He's not steering in some new direction. He's steering to avoid hitting the guardrails on a suddenly very narrow stretch of road." Thus, Frum concludes that, while Bush is not a very conservative president, he's probably as conservative as he can be.

I can't dispute that some of Bush's compromises of conservative ideals -- the steel tariffs and perhaps the farm bill -- were driven by perceived political necessity. But neither can I agree that the administration is conservative as it can be. As I asked yesterday, where was the political imperative to increase NEA funding or to defend certain forms of affirmative action? For that matter, Bush was doing quite well in the polls before he pushed through the new prescription drug benefit. I don't think Frum can show that this program was essential to Bush's re-election. Frum is closer to the mark when he calls Bush a "managerial politician of the Eisenhower/Ford type." Eisenhower wasn't as conservative as he could have been. Neither is Bush.

Posted by Paul at 05:29 PM  |    |  

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Mitch Berg, my Northern Alliance comrade at A Shot in the Dark, asks us to blog on the question that may present George Bush his toughest political challenge in 2004 -- is Bush really a conservative, and if not, will [Read More]

Tracked on February 2, 2004 11:20 PM