GROVER'S WHITEWASH OF HISTORY :

Bush's White Elephant : The president's high approval ratings are a liability. (GROVER NORQUIST, August 23, 2002, The American Enterprise)

President Bush's approval rating has remained above 70% for nearly a year. Far from being an asset, these approval ratings are a liability that has hurt his agenda.

Immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Democrats feared and Republicans hoped that Mr. Bush's approval ratings--which jumped from 57% to 90%--would create political capital that would help the president advance his legislative agenda and elect more Republicans. [...]

Since Sept. 11, George W. Bush has agreed to federalize tens of thousands of airport screeners, approved Sen. John McCain's campaign-reform legislation, and signed the most expensive farm bill in U.S. history. Why?

Back when the president had an approval rating below 60%, he rammed through a $1.3 trillion tax cut, made the Senate approve John Ashcroft as attorney general, pulled the United States out of the Kyoto treaty, and gave notice that the U.S. would leave the ABM treaty in order to build a missile-defense system. Why was Mr. Bush more successful in pushing his agenda and standing up to his critics when his approval rating was in the 50s than when it was in the 80s?

It may not be fair but conservatives bear a heightened obligation to history, to assume that it has a meaning, to tell it honestly, and to be guided by it. The argument that being a wartime president would enable George W. Bush to shove his partisan agenda down the throat of an unwilling Democrat Senate was always based on fantasy rather than on history. As H.W. Brands convincingly demonstrated in his book, The Strange Death of American Liberalism, the "need" to wage the long Cold War far from giving the conservatives who waged it the authority to impose a wartime economic regime instead created a situation in which successive presidents bought off the at least vaguely anti-war tendencies of the American Left with massive government spending on their pet projects and programs. Even Ronald Reagan, with the clearest mandate of any incoming President since FDR in 1932 did not attack Social Security. And while we true believers may find such accomodation galling, it really makes perfect sense. After all, what kind of wartime leader would intentionally divide his own people as he prepares to lead them into battle?
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 3, 2002 11:21 PM