MAYBE HE MEANS RON JUNIOR (via Danny Postel):

Conscientious Objector: WHY I CAN'T VOTE FOR BUSH. (Robert A. George, 10.14.04, New Republic)

Sixteen years ago, just out of college, I volunteered at the Republican National Convention as a man named George Bush prepared to begin a fall campaign that would see him defeat a Democrat from Massachusetts. The sparkling words of an acceptance speech crafted by Peggy Noonan--and delivered almost flawlessly--helped him inspire his party and a country that saw him as an extension of Ronald Reagan. It fell to that George Bush to "close out" the cold war and launch a different one in the Persian Gulf.

Now, sixteen years later, after tenures working for the party and a couple of Republican members on Capitol Hill (including a speaker named Newt Gingrich) and becoming an earnest fellow traveler of the conservative movement, I find it impossible to support the current George Bush--whom his party sees as the ideological extension of Ronald Reagan--as he faces his own showdown with a Democrat from Massachusetts and oversees a war centered in the Middle East.

At the Republican National Convention, George W. Bush mocked John Kerry's claim of having "conservative values." But what are conservative values? Two of the core principles at the heart of modern conservatism are a belief in the virtue of smaller government and a conviction that government must be accountable to the public. Those principles were enunciated ten years ago in the Contract with America, which helped Republicans take full control of Congress for the first time in four decades. That document sought "the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money." In this context, Bush's first term has represented a betrayal of conservative values.
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It's not simply a matter of outrageous spending or enlarged government programs--both offenses of which this administration is guilty, as manifested in a 25 percent domestic discretionary spending hike, a half-trillion-dollar Medicare expansion, and the ripping away of free-market agricultural reforms enacted over the past decade. The president continues to pursue tax cuts, as any conservative president would. But a government that cuts taxes and continues to spend ultimately becomes as amoral as one that raises taxes and spends.

Yet the Bush administration's free-spending fiscal record only hints at its larger rejection of conservative principles. The more fundamental betrayal arises from the administration's central focus: an ill-defined "war on terror" that has no determinable endpoint and that is used to justify an unprecedented expansion of executive power.

Mr. George is obviously free to support whomever he wishes, but the notion that running up the deficit and the size of government and fighting an expansive war effort are departures from Reaganism is completely asinine--they define Reaganism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 15, 2004 6:04 PM