EVEN TED KENNEDY MAKES A MISTAKE ONCE IN AWHILE

The GOP's New Deal: Big tent, big government, big mistake (Timothy P. Carney, July 28, 2003, The American Conservative)

The starting point of this summer's Medicare prescription-drug debate should cause concern for Republicans with any political memory. The drug bill that hit the Senate floor was the offspring of a deal between President Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the "liberal lion" of the U.S. Senate. This seems an odd partner for a Republican president to choose. Kennedy, after all, is the most straightforward advocate in Washington of a universal health-care system mandated and funded by the federal government. Bush and the Republican Party believe this would be a disaster.

But the White House appears to believe that it can get political mileage out of Rose-Garden signing ceremonies with Ted Kennedy in attendance. We've seen this play before, with Bush's premiere policy initiative: the "No Child Left Behind Act."

In the eyes of conservative education reformers, policy-wise, this bill started off as a bad one with some good elements and ended up a disaster. From a fiscal perspective, it was a disaster from the start. Politically, it was no better. But Bush had campaigned as "The Education President," and he needed a bill to live up to that reputation. Congressional Republicans gave his education bill a top spot on the agenda, with the bills in the two chambers garnering the numbers H.R. 1 and S.1 in the 107th Congress. (In the 108th Congress, those numbers adorn the prescription-drug bills.)

In the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, liberal Democrat George Miller (Calif.), the ranking member, effectively took control of the bill markup. This shouldn't have been surprising-drafting a bill on expanding the federal role in education is moving the ball onto the Democrats' turf. The committee, effectively under Democratic control, stripped out Bush's school-choice provisions, added to the costs, and passed it with a five-year cost of $132 billion. It grew to $135 billion before Capitol Hill was done.

On Jan. 8, 2002, Bush signed his prized education bill into law with a grinning Kennedy and Miller over his right shoulder. A week later, at a rally in Boston, Bush said, "I told the folks at a coffee shop in Crawford, Texas that Ted Kennedy was all right. They nearly fell out." Those shocked folks at the Crawford diner very likely had their suspicions confirmed just a few weeks later, when Kennedy and Miller launched an attack on Bush for not providing even more money in his education budget. "The President's budget deals a severe blow to our nation's schools," Kennedy said in a March press release.

In October, as the midterm elections approached, Kennedy smacked around Bush and the GOP a little more. "Today, the President and the Republican leaders in Congress are cutting funding for our schools," Kennedy said. Since Republicans took over Congress, Department of Education funding has risen by 132 percent. The White House seems to hope it can feed the liberal lion to keep him quiet. The story of the education bill should have shown that Republicans can never spend enough to satisfy Kennedy or even to keep him from attacking them.

The attempt to disarm the Left by co-opting their issues fails in the end.

Until they can get past their irrational hatred of George W. Bush, the Buchanacons aren't going to be able to figure out what's really going on in Bush's America and they'll keep aping the Democratic line, even after the Ted Kennedy's of the world have realized they were had,trading their principles for money. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2003 8:05 AM