The New Republic

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On the first morning of convention week, a raft of high-roller
donors and the politicians who take their money congregated at a
fusty Gilded Age club in Midtown. In contrast to much of the week's
frivolity and agitprop, the purpose of this gathering was
substantive discussion: a seminar on the Bush economy hosted by the
Club for Growth, a group that funds the candidates most devoted to
the gospel of conservative economics. Because the Club fielded a
panel of writers venerated by the right--Paul Gigot, the editor of
the The Wall Street Journal editorial page; Larry Kudlow, a Reagan
administration official turned cable talk-show host; and Arthur
Laffer, the academic who developed much of supply-side
doctrine--the audience began the morning in an enthusiastic mood,
ready to clap and yelp.Supply-siders are known for their Pollyannaish predictions about the
power of tax cuts. And, for most of the morning, the panelists
played to type, waxing lyrical about the beauty of Bush's
rate-slashing spree. But, as the session ground to a close, it took
an unexpectedly dour turn. A senior from Fordham University wearing
an untucked white shirt stood to challenge the panel. "Bush spends
like Carter and panders like Clinton. It feels like we've had the
third term of a Clinton presidency," he said, decrying the dramatic
growth of government on the president's watch. "Is there any
betrayal that we wouldn't support?" With so many party loyalists in
the room, you might have expected such comments to elicit boos.
Instead, there was scattered applause. One man shouted, "Yes!"
Stephen Moore, the president of the Club for Growth and the
morning's moderator, solemnly turned to the speakers. "Why don't we
address this? It's a serious question."

It wasn't just a stray moment of discontent. For all the encomiums
GOP speakers have been showering on George W. Bush from the podium
at Madison Square Garden, conservatives--especially conservative
intellectuals--have a far less rosy view of the president. Last
month, Andrew Ferguson wrote in The Weekly Standard, "[W]e'll let
slip a thinly disguised secret--Republicans are supporting a
candidate that relatively few of them find personally or
politically appealing." Or, as conservative columnist Bruce Bartlett
told me, "People are careful about how they say it and to who they
say it, but, if you're together with more than a couple of
conservatives, the issue of would we be better or worse off with
Kerry comes up--and it's seriously discussed."

In part, this unhappiness reflects the temperament of ideological
true believers, whose expectations few politicians can meet. (The
left was similarly, if not as vehemently, exasperated by Clinton's
New Democrat agenda during his first term.) And, in the end, their
griping won't lead many conservatives to jump ship. Even among the
president's loudest critics, frustration with Bush is far exceeded
by fear and loathing of Kerry. But the breadth of the unhappiness
with Bush is nonetheless striking. Although it began on
conservatism's isolationist fringe, it has moved to the movement's
mainstream and now emanates from every segment of the right's
coalition, from neoconservatives to libertarians, with the
exception of social conservatives (see Clay Risen, "Tanked"). And
conservative discontent isn't just the result of policy
disagreements with Bush. It is based on a stylistic and personal
critique of the president that can sound a lot like the critique
leveled by the left.

Conservative criticism of Bush falls into several categories, the
most significant of which concerns the president's economic
policies. "There's a sense that he is not a real Ronald Reagan
anti-government conservative," says Moore, who, with Bartlett, is
one of Bush's loudest economic critics. Granted, when conservatives
signed up for Bush's 2000 campaign and its "compassionate" agenda,
they understood that their man wasn't going to eviscerate the
welfare state. (After the Newt Gingrich debacle, most Republicans
conceded that they couldn't sell raw anti-statist ideology in a
national election.) But they didn't expect so many flat-out
betrayals: tariffs on steel and lumber, federal regulations on
corporate accounting, the creation of a new Cabinet department
(Homeland Security) and no elimination of existing ones, and a
failure to veto any of Congress's deficit-ballooning spending
bills. Last year, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru wrote, "More
people are working for the federal government than at any point
since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster
than it did under Clinton." At the convention, I kept hearing
economic conservatives denouncing a line in the party platform
extolling a boost in education spending. "Weren't we supposed to be
against that?" kvetched one.

A second set of complaints has to do with the war. Some
conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and his fellow isolationists at
The American Conservative, opposed it from the start. Their
arguments, however, never gained much traction in the conservative
mainstream. With the administration's failure to extinguish the
Iraqi insurgency, however, that has begun to change. A growing
camp, including pundits George F. Will and Tucker Carlson, have
joined the antiwar right. Their conversion can be traced to the
failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But they have also
bluntly expressed qualms about the administration's goal of
planting democracy in the Middle East, a goal they say disregards
conservatism's traditional skepticism about government's ability to
transform culture. Although you wouldn't know it from the op-ed
pages, frustration with the war has spread far and wide within the
movement. Paul Weyrich, the head of the Free Congress Foundation,
told me, "The one message that rings true that Kerry has been
pushing is when he says that we could not have been a better
recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. I've had that repeated to me over and
over again, not by people who are Kerry supporters by any means....
Phyllis Schlafly [one of the founders of the modern right] surprised
me. I was talking to her casually, and she went into a virtual
diatribe against the neoconservatives. 'Why do we have these people
controlling our foreign policy? Bush has strayed from what he
promised.' ... I was shocked by the vehemence by which she
expressed this."

The frustration with Bush doesn't just come from a growing antiwar
right. It comes from the pro-war right, too. Given America's
evident difficulties in Iraq, boosters of the war can either
fundamentally reconsider the principles that led them to predict
relatively painless success, or they can blame the administration's
ham-fisted postwar policy. Many have chosen the latter. Writing in
the Los Angeles Times in June, the Council on Foreign Relations's
Max Boot wrote, "When President Bush's foreign policy players came
into office, the widespread assumption was that they would be
cautious but competent. Sort of like the last Bush administration.
Instead they've been great at enunciating bold policies--such as
preempting terrorism--and terrible at executing them." The most
extreme example of this discontent with the administration's
postwar execution is Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. After
championing the virtues of invasion and empire, he wrote an op-ed
last week in The Wall Street Journal suggesting conservatives would
be better off with a Kerry victory.

In recent months, these complaints have metastasized into an
extremely dim view of Bush the man and his management style.
Conservative critics accuse him of harboring an unhealthy obsession
with electoral considerations. Moore says, "Bush and [Karl] Rove
are very political. Bush throws a big sop to the left and then does
something for the right. They'd sell out to the left on education
and then play hardball on the tax bill." And what makes Bush's
concessions to the left even more irksome is that they have yielded
so few political benefits. None of his so-called "big-government"
initiatives--from campaign finance reform to the prescription-drug
benefit to No Child Left Behind--have significantly tilted poll
numbers in the Republican direction. Ponnuru wrote in National
Review last spring, "As they survey the public reaction, many
congressmen who voted for the education and Medicare bills are
regretting their votes. Nobody who voted against them regrets his.
The reforms have lost Bush conservative support without gaining him
compensatory support from the center."

Malcontents also complain that the ruthlessness Bush displays toward
his political foes on the left extends to his treatment of
conservatives who voice dissent, echoing the image presented by Ron
Suskind in his book The Price of Loyalty. "Someone who says
something off-message, they're blackballed. It's like high school,"
says Bartlett, who admits that he has suffered this fate himself.
In private, conservative critics complain about the silencing of
Greg Mankiw, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic
Advisers, following his principled defense of outsourcing. And, in
gory detail, they relive the firing of Lawrence Lindsey, the
president's top economic adviser, after he had the temerity to
provide an honest, if impolitic, estimate of Iraq war costs.

And, for all the representatives Rove sends to the weekly
conservative meetings held by Grover Norquist and Paul Weyrich, at
which the movement coordinates strategy, the president doesn't
schmooze conservative intellectuals and leaders nearly as
skillfully as Reagan did. Indeed, though Reagan by no means gave
conservatives everything they wanted--social conservatives, for
instance, left his administration pretty much empty-handed--he
maintained the right's support by throwing it rhetorical bones and
publicly identifying himself with its leaders. What's more, Reagan
could always blame the Democratic- controlled Congress for
stymieing his conservative agenda. Bush can't fall back on this
excuse, nor does he have Reagan's personal touch. Conservatives say
he doesn't write them congratulatory notes for supportive op-eds,
and his top aides rarely consult them. One of Bush's defenders
says, "He's done less entertaining in the White House and done more
traveling in the country than any president since the war. If some
conservatives have opposed Bush ... well, they have never been to
dinner at the White House."

To an extent, conservatives have only themselves to blame for their
disappointment. There's a tendency within the movement to
mythologize its leaders. Reagan, of course, benefited from this
hero-worship more than anyone. One Bush critic told me, in a bout
of self-flagellation, "Conservatives don't want a transactional
relationship with their leaders. They want to be inspired by them,
and this leads to romanticism and an abandonment of clearheaded
analysis." Even before September 11, conservatives mounted Bush on
the same pedestal as Reagan. After the terrorist attacks, his
standing rose even higher, with books like David Frum's The Right
Man and John Podhoretz's Bush Country making the case for his
historic importance. It would be difficult for nearly any
politician to fulfill such impossibly high expectations.

So what's the practical effect of this discontent? It's by no means
transcendent or all-consuming. Only a few conservatives, like Niall
Ferguson and Carlson, have suggested they won't vote for Bush.
Still, frustration with Bush has shaped the campaign. Unable to
muster enthusiasm for their man, conservatives have justified their
continued support for the president by resorting to passionate
Kerry-hating. At the Club for Growth confab, the mere mention of
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth garnered resounding cheers and
applause. Delegates walked around Madison Square Garden with Purple
Heart Band- Aids on their cheeks, mocking Kerry's war injuries. But
there's no document more telling than National Review's "Republican
Convention Special." Instead of defending the president, the
magazine used the occasion to put out its "All- Kerry Issue." For
ten solid pieces, writers took turns hammering the Democratic
nominee. Apparently, when you have nothing nice to say about your
own guy, it's best to say nothing at all.

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