The New Republic

Everybody, with the exception of Jack Abramoff, agrees that Jack
Abramoff is a very sleazy man. (You can get a sense of Abramoff's
low repute from his ubiquitous description as a "disgraced
lobbyist"; in a profession of such rock-bottom standards, to
distinguish yourself as unethical requires villainy on a truly epic
scale.) And most everybody agrees that Representative Tom DeLay,
Abramoff's longtime friend and ally, is at least moderately sleazy.
"The Beltway wisdom is right. Mr. DeLay does have odor issues,"
argued The Wall Street Journal in a widely noted editorial.All that is certainly true. But DeLay and Abramoff are not merely a
pair of ethically challenged individuals. They do not even merely
represent the Republican leadership having grown "comfortable with
the perks of power," as National Review noted with dismay. They are
the inevitable byproducts of the governing ideology that has taken
hold in George W. Bush's Washington. The ideology is called
"big-government conservatism."

"Big-government conservatism" may sound like an oxymoron, but Bush
has proved that it is not: He is undeniably a conservative, and,
just as undeniably, he has expanded the power of the federal
government. How, though, can a conservative preside over a larger
and more intrusive government? Conservative intellectuals have made
a series of attempts to explain (or, in some cases, explain away)
the president's Leviathan tendencies. Three interwoven theories
have emerged.

The first defines big-government conservatism as a concession to
public demand. As Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review has written,
"[T]he constituency for smaller government is too weak to prevail."
Many of the critics as well as the defenders of big-government
conservatism agree on this point. The critics-- like Ponnuru and
his colleague Jonah Goldberg--see big-government conservatism as a
simple ideological capitulation.

Defenders have tried to portray big-government conservatism as
making virtue out of political necessity. George F. Will defines
big-government conservatism as using government programs to promote
moral values among the citizenry. Weekly Standard editor Fred
Barnes posits that big-government conservatives are "realistic and
programmatic," embracing "programs that work." The Economist has
endorsed both the virtue and the programmatic interpretations.

None of these accounts, though, goes very far toward explaining what
Bush has done and why he has done it. If government has expanded
under Bush because of hostile currents of public opinion, then it
should have expanded even faster under President Clinton, who was
less conservative than the current president. But, in fact,
non-defense spending as a percentage of the economy actually
declined under Clinton, from 17 percent of gross domestic product to
15.5 percent, before rising smartly under the present
administration from 15.5 to 16. 5 percent. (Did homeland security
contribute to the rise in spending under Bush? Just a bit: It
accounts for about one-seventh of the domestic spending hikes.)
Conservatives haven't explained why a moderate liberal like Clinton
had an easier time than Bush in resisting popular demand to spend.

And the efforts to put a positive spin on big-government
conservatism are embarrassingly sparse. If you itemize the ways
Bush has enlarged Washington's power, few of them have any
plausible connection to moral values. (David Kuo, former White
House deputy director of faith-based initiatives, complained that
the administration "never really wanted the 'poor people stuff.'")
Fewer still can be considered demonstrably effective. (Barnes
musters only three examples of Bush supporting "programs that
work": the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program, the
National Weather Service, and the National Science Foundation,
which combined represent a miniscule portion of the expansion of
spending under his administration.)

The failure of intellectuals on the right to adequately define big-
government conservatism reflects their failure to grasp the ways
that DeLay and Abramoff became central to the conservative movement
in Washington. To define big-government conservatism as a form of
pragmatism or as the promotion of virtue is to miss its
fundamentally corrupt nature. In truth, the most accurate
definition--that is, the definition that explains the broadest scope
of Bush's big-government initiatives--is far less edifying:
Biggovernment conservatism consists of initiatives that benefit
economic elites without using free-market mechanisms.

Conservatives before Bush did not, of course, oppose each and every
way in which Washington commandeered society's resources. Some of
Bush's biggest initiatives--increased spending on defense and
security and the vast deficits that inevitably result when those
are combined with huge tax cuts--are very much in keeping with
mainstream, small-government conservatism. (Or, at least, to the
extent that there's a contradiction between them and
small-government principles, it's a contradiction that most
conservatives have been willing to overlook since long before Bush
took office.) But that still leaves plenty of new ways that Bush
has expanded federal power to set him apart from the conservative
tradition.

Begin with the Medicare bill, Bush's largest social spending
initiative by far. It's true that Bush probably embraced the notion
of adding prescription- drug coverage because opposition had grown
untenable. But the distinctive characteristic of Bush's bill is its
staggering array of handouts to private interests. The goodies
included a $71 billion subsidy for corporate health care plans, $46
billion for Medicare HMOs, $25 billion for hospital chains, and
more than $100 billion for pharmaceutical companies, not including
a lucrative provision forbidding the federal government from
negotiating lower drug prices. Just about all of Bush's
big-government conservative agenda works the same way. Whereas
Clinton signed a law phasing out federal crop payments, Bush
lavished $180 billion in subsidies for agribusiness. His energy
plan, roundly condemned by free-market economists, would have done
the same for the energy industry, which, after all, wrote much of
it. Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, had he been more
committed to their funding, could have turned thousands of
charities into federal clients.

Bush's expansion of government is not limited to higher spending. At
various points, he has imposed protective trade barriers on imports
of textiles, steel, lumber, shrimp, and other goods. And he has
been particularly shameless in creating narrowly targeted tax
breaks of the sort that increase, rather than diminish,
Washington's role in the economy. Last fall, Bush signed a little-
noticed corporate tax bill that, rather than cut rates across the
board, showered benefits on bow-and-arrow manufacturers, foreign
dog-race gamblers, ceiling-fan importers, and other dubious
beneficiaries whose only claim to preferential treatment lay in
their ability to lobby for it.

Bush's big-government conservatism represents the coming to fruition
of a Republican strategy ten years in the making. When the GOP took
control of Congress after the 1994 elections, it undertook an
ironclad alliance with the business lobbyists of K Street. The most
famous aspect of this alliance was the K Street Strategy, the
successful Republican campaign to force business donors to abandon
their traditional bipartisanship and instead hire from and donate
to the Republican Party exclusively.

The less well-known, but far more important, aspect of the GOP-K
Street alliance revolved around policy. By steering government
largesse toward their own donors, Republicans could create a
self-perpetuating money machine. Industries whose profitability
relies on government largesse--and especially those that depend on
favors that only Republicans support--will naturally invest some of
those profits back into the political party that provides them.
Nicholas Confessore explained how this machine works in a definitive
2003 Washington Monthly cover story. Taking the example of
Medicare, he wrote, "[U]nder the GOP plan, the medical insurance
industry would gradually become a captive of Washington, living off
the business steered to it by the government but dependent upon its
Beltway lobbyists--themselves Republican surrogates--to maintain
this stream of wealth. Over time, private insurers would grow to
resemble the defense sector: closely entwined with government, a
revolving door for Republican officials, and vastly supportive,
politically and financially, of the GOP."

Does that sound overly dramatic? Consider what Robert E. Moffitt, a
policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said about
Bush's Medicare bill last fall. "The Medicare program has now
become a vast arena of special interest politics," he told The
Boston Globe. "It has been transformed from a system where we were
providing health care for seniors into a system where there is a
massive redistribution of income among health care providers."
Social Security privatization would, over time, affect a similar
transformation in the financial sector. While ideology surely
motivates would-be privatizers more than money, they have no doubt
given some thought to the future prospect of grateful Wall Street
executives looking to protect the hundreds of billions of dollars
of business steered their way by Republican Washington.

Conservatives protest that their close ties with K Street make them
no different than the Democrats who once ruled Congress. It's
certainly true that the old Democratic Hill barons, like their
Republican successors, engaged in plenty of unseemly
influence-peddling. But the contrast between the two is a
difference in degree so great it is essentially a difference in
kind. The Democratic Party's capacity to raise money from, and
provide favors to, business has always been limited by its alliance
with other interest groups-- labor, environmentalists, consumer
groups--largely hostile to business. Liberals have traditionally
seen K Street as an impediment to their agenda, even when Democrats
controlled the White House and Congress. In 1979, Michael Kinsley
wrote in these pages about liberal Democrats (he took the example
of famed New Dealer-turned-lobbyist Lloyd Cutler) who sold out to
illiberal business interests:

The more sympathetic you seem to the general cause of progressive
reform, the more sympathetic legislators and regulators will be to
your suggestions for "compromise" or "delay" in a particular case.
So the best Washington lawyers are ones with long and varied
experience in government, lots of friends who are still there, and
sterling liberal credentials. Such highly polished souls do not
come cheap.

Contrast Kinsley's sentiment with that expressed in a recent column
by Tony Blankley, the Washington Times editorial page editor and a
former spokesman for Newt Gingrich. "In a thousand ways that are
hard to publicly spot," writes Blankley in an impassioned defense
of DeLay, "the K Street effort helped all Republicans win
elections, pass legislation they believed in and generally govern
the country." Democrats often worked at cross-purposes with K
Street. (Sometimes the two were at war, such as when business
lobbyists helped kill Clinton's health care reform in 1993-1994.)
Republicans, with their inherent mistrust of taxes and regulation,
would have enjoyed friendlier relations with K Street no matter
what. But the distinct contribution of big-government conservatism
has been to cement an alliance between the two, to the point where
the line between party and private interest has all but
disappeared.

You simply cannot make big-government conservatism work without
people like Abramoff and DeLay. News accounts have focused on
Abramoff's personal lucre. But much of the money he wheedled from
his clients did not go into his own pockets. He directed it instead
to various financial cogs in the GOP machine-- candidates,
foundations, and think tanks (see "Writers' Bloc," page 27). His
role was to find business interests--be they Indian casinos or
sweatshops in the Northern Mariana Islands--whose profitability
depended on Washington, and turn them into paid-up clients of
big-government conservatism. As lobbyist and GOP operative Grover
Norquist told National Journal ten years ago, "What the Republicans
need is 50 Jack Abramoffs. Then this becomes a different town."

DeLay, meanwhile, took it as his role to discipline K Street. He
famously kept a list dividing lobbyists into "friendly" and
"unfriendly" categories based on the partisan loyalty of their
donations, threatening those in the latter category to throw
themselves wholly into the GOP camp. "If you want to play in our
revolution," he notoriously warned, "you have to live by our rules.
" His close alliance with lobbyists forced DeLay to tiptoe so
lightly along the line of legality that he was bound to cross it
eventually. Most of the DeLay scandals--a memo suggesting he made
promises to a company called Westar Energy Inc. in return for
donations; members of his staff's (almost certainly)illegal
funneling of corporate money into Texas races; his acceptance of
prohibited gifts from lobbyists--stem from his efforts to build and
operate a patronage machine for his party.

Whatever rules or laws DeLay may have broken were premised on the
assumption that there is a distinction between the interests of
elected officials and the interests of corporations and their
lobbyists. It's no surprise that he lost sight of that distinction.
In his world, it had long ago ceased to exist.

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