AND WHAT DID THAT GET US...:

The Bloody Crossroads (DAVID BROOKS, 9/08/09, NY Times)

The Public Interest closed in 2005, when the last of the original editors, Irving Kristol, retired. It left a gaping hole. Fortunately, a new quarterly magazine called National Affairs is starting up today to continue the work. The magazine, edited by Yuval Levin, occupies the same ground: the bloody crossroads where social science and public policy meet matters of morality, culture and virtue.

The Eternal Return of Compassionate Conservatism (STEVEN M. TELES, Fall 2009, National Affairs)

The standard campaign-strategy orthodoxy of the time dictated directing attention to the issues voters associated with Republicans (crime, national security, taxes, abortion), and away from those (like racial ­equality, social services, urban policy, and social insurance) that they did not. Beyond simple campaign calculation, this strategy reflected a conservative inferiority complex, a worry that empowerment would simply hand Democrats an opportunity to push policy in a more liberal direction.

This strategic orthodoxy was undermined by three lessons Republicans learned in the 1990s. First, the Clinton campaign's success in seizing conservative issues for liberal purposes — most effectively by pairing welfare reform with "making work pay" — pointed to the end of an era in which each party stuck to its own turf, signaling that Republicans needed to become more entrepreneurial in their issue selection and campaign rhetoric. Second, the failure of the Gingrich Congress to roll back the growth of the welfare state, followed by Clinton's re-election in 1996, suggested the effective limits of anti-statism as a governing strategy. Third, while Republicans in Washington were failing to push back the frontiers of the state, Republican governors — in particular Tommy Thompson in liberal Wisconsin — were demonstrating that conservatives could devise creative strategies for using government, rather than just cutting it, and gain considerable political advantage in the process.

No Republican seemed to have learned the lessons of the 1990s better than George W. Bush. In his 1994 campaign for governor of Texas, Bush put education front and center. And at a time when fellow ­Republicans — like Dole in his 1996 presidential campaign — were seizing on immigration restriction, Bush embraced immigrants and aggressively campaigned for Hispanic votes. Bush avoided Republican hot-button issues like affirmative action, supporting an alternative that allowed for substantial minority representation in hiring and school admissions. Bush openly sold his policies as being in the interests of the state's minority voters, distancing himself from the rhetoric of race "blindness" that was making a bid for party orthodoxy. When Republicans in Congress sought to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit, Bush accused them of trying to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor."

Bush's approach was a sharp contrast to that of his own brother — who, when asked at a voter forum during the 1994 Florida gubernatorial campaign what he would do for African Americans, stated: "It's time to strive for a society where there's equality of opportunity, not equality of results. So I'm going to answer your question by saying: probably nothing." While Jeb Bush's answer may have been principled, it fed into the party's long-term image problem, which his brother in Texas seemed intent on correcting.

George W. Bush's re-election as governor in 1998 signaled to ­empowerment-oriented Republicans that the political strategy they had been urging for two decades might finally have arrived. Bush won a quarter of the black vote and half of the Hispanic vote — remarkable results for a party whose support from blacks regularly dropped into the single digits, and which was worried that the Hispanic vote was headed in the same direction.

Advocates of empowerment treated these results as proof that Kemp had been right all along. Michael Joyce, then president of the ­Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, argued at the time that Bush's compassionate conservatism was the key to "reach[ing] out to minority voters — especially the rapidly expanding Hispanic electorate in key states like California, Texas, and Florida — on terms that do not compromise core conservative principles." Even more important, Joyce wrote, Bush's ideas pointed to how conservatives could "appear (and more important, be) more compassionate — a critical factor as we seek to bridge the gender gap that is beginning to take a serious toll in the Republican suburban base." Joyce understood, as many empowerment advocates had, that conservatives' image problem on race and related issues was hurting them not only with minorities but with women as well.

The 2000 Republican National Convention was the setting for Bush to take the compassionate-conservative electoral strategy mainstream. The first night of the convention was labeled "Opportunity With A ­Purpose: Leave No Child Behind." In her speech that evening, Laura Bush stressed her husband's commitment to education as a strategy for reducing inequality. Colin Powell addressed the need for Republicans to consistently appeal to African Americans. George W. Bush's acceptance speech later that week was devoted largely to introducing the country to the concept of compassionate conservatism, and he followed it up with events emphasizing his commitment to education and faith-based ­strategies for fighting poverty.

The Republican convention only scratched the surface of Bush adviser Karl Rove's ambitious political strategy. His approach built on Kemp's appeal to traditional Democratic constituencies by using ­government affirmatively for a wide range of domestic concerns: money for faith-based social services, prescription-drug coverage under Medicare, education reform, more liberal immigration policies, and Social Security privatization.

This strategy aimed to give the party enough support to pass legislation that would cut into the heart of the Democratic coalition. Faith-based services and education vouchers would pit African Americans and Hispanics against Democratic governmental-provider interests, and transform inner-city churches and private- and charter-school ­operators into a lobby for conservative policies. Social Security privatization would weaken one of the Democrats' strongest electoral weapons, and create a new generation of conservative voters by directly connecting their financial interests to the stock market. This would gradually expand into a full-blown vision of an "ownership society," substituting connections between citizens and private markets for the Democrats' electoral logic of cementing connections between citizens and government programs. Rove argued that on this basis a long-term Republican majority could be built, as strong as that created by McKinley in 1896, and as enduring as that which Roosevelt established for the Democrats in 1932.

The strategy that Reagan refused to embrace when it was associated with Jack Kemp, and that George H. W. Bush had spurned when it was rechristened the New Paradigm, had become the party's electoral orthodoxy under the name of "compassionate conservatism."

...besides unprecedented electoral success, tax cuts, the Faith Based Initiative, public school vouchers, HSAs, retirement account reform...

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 8, 2009 7:37 AM