[Vision2020] Bush is a Conservative Afterall!

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Good Morning Visionaries:

I've posted some excerpts from a column that demonstrates that Bush is a Reaganite afterall and it will do no good for GOP candidates to do one more for the Gipper.

David Greenberg, May 16, 2007, NYTimes

[Bush and Reagan not so different]

The examples are many. Reagan’s skyrocketing budget deficits and multiple tax hikes violated the right’s notions of political economy as surely as any of Bush’s actions. His wars on drugs and pornography gave rise to intrusions on individual liberties similar to those that some libertarians now decry. Reagan’s foreign policy, notably in Central America, shared with Bush’s the assumption that America had to project more, not less, might around the globe. If Bush has abjured true conservative values, so did Reagan. . . .

[Now, Bush with a GOP House and Senate]

Indeed, so few were the obstacles that conservatism was able to run amok. The result — in the assessment of not just liberals but also other observers — has been disaster: a mess of a war, the failure to plan for Hurricane Katrina, the erosion of the church-state wall, widening inequality, the loss of civil liberties including habeas corpus, and scores of other ills that readers of this column can list as easily as I. This was the fruit of modern American conservatism.

But now Republicans are deserting Bush. Businessmen and evangelicals, libertarians and social moderates are all astir. The reason isn’t that Bush failed to espouse their causes any more than Reagan did. From the Iraq War on down, after all, his policies have also been their policies — backed by their legislators, upheld by their judges, championed by their journalists. 

No, the reason so many are complaining about Bush or today’s G.O.P. is that their policies haven’t worked out very well. Since the 2004 election, majorities of Americans have turned against them. What conservatives like Chuck Hagel and Bush’s other right-wing detractors fear in their bones — and not without reason — is that majorities of Americans will soon also turn against the creed of conservatism itself.