RORSCHACH BUSH

Four More Years?: The invincibility question (Patrick J. Buchanan, September 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

Though some in the media may portray George W. Bush as a right-wing extremist, he is surprisingly vulnerable to a challenge from his right. Issues: his soaring deficits; his preferential option for the rich; his sellout of conservative principle to embrace big government; his failure to protect America's borders and control immigration; his cave-in on the assault-gun law; his concessions to the gay Log Cabin Republicans; his refusal to put a stop to race preferences and reverse discrimination; his free-trade zealotry, which has helped to kill one of every eight manufacturing jobs in the United States while creating jobs in China; and, potentially the most explosive, his "quagmire" in Iraq. If U.S. soldiers are still dying from sniper fire and ambushes in Iraq in September of 2004, Bush could be vulnerable to the campaign slogan "Support Our Troops-Bring Them Home Now!"

Continued casualties would also raise anew the questions of why we went into Iraq in the first place, who "cooked the books" on the intel, who misled us about the weapons of mass destruction. The President dismisses this as revisionist history. But after World War I-which produced Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism-the revisionist historians, who indicted the "merchants of death" and "British propagandists" who had "lied us into war," carried the day.

The Democrats are paralyzed in making a case against Bush on most populist issues because they agree with him on so many: war in Iraq, free trade, affirmative action, open borders, big government, amnesty for illegal aliens, foreign aid, gay rights.

Indeed, it has been the great success of Bush-Rove to talk the talk and affect the swagger of cowboy conservatives while occupying the center and the center-left and crowding out the moderate Democrats.

What's most amusing about the putative revolt on the Right is the starkness of the contrast with the Dean phenomenon. As the Buchanacons seek to portray George Bush as a new Nixon, clandestinely pursuing liberal policies, Governor Dean has gained traction for his presidential candidacy by portraying Mr. Bush as a conservative ideologue somewhere to the Right of Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it's just a case where to those on the extremes even the man in the middle appears to occupy the opposite extreme. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 14, 2003 9:36 PM