Too Bad
President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder.

Friday, June 1, 2007 12:00 a.m. EDT

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.

I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.

The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.

What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom--a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don't need hacks.

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked. Bush senior inherited a vibrant country and a party at peace with itself. He won the leadership of a party that had finally, at great cost, by 1980, fought itself through to unity and come together on shared principles. Mr. Bush won in 1988 by saying he would govern as Reagan had. Yet he did not understand he'd been elected to Reagan's third term. He thought he'd been elected because they liked him. And so he raised taxes, sundered a hard-won coalition, and found himself shocked to lose his party the presidency, and for eight long and consequential years. He had many virtues, but he wasted his inheritance.
Bush the younger came forward, presented himself as a conservative, garnered all the frustrated hopes of his party, turned them into victory, and not nine months later was handed a historical trauma that left his country rallied around him, lifting him, and his party bonded to him. He was disciplined and often daring, but in time he sundered the party that rallied to him, and broke his coalition into pieces. He threw away his inheritance. I do not understand such squandering.

Now conservatives and Republicans are going to have to win back their party. They are going to have to break from those who have already broken from them. This will require courage, serious thinking and an ability to do what psychologists used to call letting go. This will be painful, but it's time. It's more than time.

You guys will refer to the Bush era as "the good ole' days" within months of the first Clinton/Obama/Edwards/Gore/Richardson term

this one's not bad either...

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Carter and Bush: Not So Different After All


Jimmy Carter has backtracked from his comment suggesting that George W. Bush is the worst president in history, and let's hope his gesture soothes relations between the two. Because if there is a place in the next world where unsuccessful presidents go to pay for their sins, Carter and Bush will be sharing a cell for a long, long time.

Bush had a Carteresque moment the other day when a bird left a calling card on his sleeve during an outdoor news conference. Like his predecessor's 1979 confrontation with a killer rabbit, it suggested the president is so unpopular that even lower species are turning against him.

Failing at the job and suffering low approval ratings are not the only things the two have in common. In fact, beyond surface differences like party and ideology, there is ample evidence that Bush is to Carter what Mary-Kate is to Ashley.

Carter presided over a country wracked by economic chaos, violence, political disarray and a sense of national decline. Bush does as well -- though this time, the country is Iraq rather than the United States. Carter stood helpless as Iran took Americans hostage at our embassy in Tehran. Bush has stood helpless while Iran pursues the means to hold its neighbors hostage with nuclear weapons.

Carter was responsible for a military debacle, the 1980 effort to rescue our Iran hostages, that killed eight American service personnel. Bush is responsible for a military debacle, the occupation of Iraq, that has killed more than 3,300 American service personnel. Under Carter, Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan bled the Soviet military. Under Bush, Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan bleed the U.S. military.

Carter, as an ex-president, helped negotiate a nuclear deal with North Korea that the other side failed to live up to. Bush negotiated a nuclear deal with North Korea that the other side has failed to live up to. Carter acquired a reputation as stubborn, self-righteous and unwilling to listen to anyone outside his inner circle. Notice a pattern here?

Both men had life-altering religious experiences as adults, and both profited from the support of evangelicals. Both campaigned in favor of a more modest foreign policy. Bush's 2000 declaration that we should be "a humble nation" echoed what Carter said in 1976: "A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful and restrained."

Once in office, though, their restraint abated. In its place emerged a messianic dream of remaking the world in our image. The former thought we could spread democracy and human rights by moral suasion. The latter thought we could spread democracy and human rights by invasion. They were surprised by the world's resistance to reform.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, who later served as President Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in 1979 that the Carter administration had fallen victim to three misconceptions about governments it didn't like, such as those of Iran and Nicaragua: "first, the belief that there existed at the moment of crisis a democratic alternative to the incumbent government; second, the belief that the continuation of the status quo was not possible; third, the belief that any change . . . was preferable to the present government." Bush took those errors and applied them to Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Oil prices soared under Carter as the economy stagnated. Oil prices have soared under Bush as the economy prospers. Carter preached fiscal discipline but let federal spending rise by 17 percent more than inflation during his four years. Bush preached tax cuts but let federal spending rise by 19 percent more than inflation during his first four years.

The two illustrate the dangers of taking a reasonable approach too far. The 39th president was overly eager to negotiate and thus let other countries get away with actions that harmed our interests. The 43rd president is overly reluctant to negotiate and thus lets other nations get away with actions that harm our interests.

Both found that their policies in the Persian Gulf had the unintended consequence of inflaming Islamic extremism. Both found their trust in Russian leaders to be unwarranted. Both caused their parties to lose control of at least one house of Congress.

The Bush experience proves that philosopher George Santayana was too optimistic. Even those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it.



Steve Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune.

http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Stev ... _after_all

A lot of conservatives, including myself, like Bill Richardson.

I like him too, but he is giving Joe Biden a real run for his money in the contest to say the most stupid shit in one campaign.

Tell me about it. He's the one Democrat that I'd vote for, and I cringe everytime he says something stupid. What's his Mexican name again?

Lopez.