Anytime I make any reference to the fact that George W. Bush has been pursuing some objectively liberal policies, I get slammed in the blogosphere, and also get hostile email denying that anything W. has done could be construed as liberal. What I mean by objectively liberal is simply that if the same policy was pursued by, say, a Gore Administration, it would win praise from liberals. Some obvious examples that come to mind are (1) the new Medicare drug entitlement; (2) the massive increase in federal education spending; (3) increased funding (proposed) for the National Endowment for the Arts; (4) the general huge increase in discretionary federal spending, including spending on infrastructure projects (what Bill Clinton called “investment”); (5) close attention to affirmative action concerns in excecutive appointments. Imagine that Al Gore, facing a Republican Senate and House, had managed to enact any of these policies. Is there any significant doubt that while liberals may have found these policies imperfect in various ways (e.g., the drug program doesn’t include price controls), they would be praising his political acumen in winning these victories for Progressivism? And at least some liberals would also be praising Bush’s protectionism, though among them would not be the more clever liberal bloggers.
The strangest emails I get furiously protest that Bush’s education spending has been accompanied by expensive unfunded mandates. The objection, at least in the emails I have received, is not simply to the content of the mandates themselves (testing and whatnot), but to the idea that Bush should be allowed to claim credit for increasing education funding while also imposing huge costs on public schools. Yet federal education policy since the 1960s has imposed huge costs on public schools–requirements to provide expensive educational help to physicially and mentally handicapped students, bilingual education requirements, etc. It was always conservatives, not liberals, who opposed these federal interventions on principle, and who noted that federal “aid” to education comes with expensive and often counterproductive strings. As I’ve noted previously, conservatives have long objected to replacing what they see as a flexible, local system, with a federal one that would feed the bureacracy instead of helping students. Moreover, I’m old enough to remember that in the 1980s it was liberals who argued that mandatory nationwide testing was the solution to America’s educational problems, while conservatives furiously objected that testing is no substitute for sound education. I am wondering how many liberal critics of Bush’s “unfunded mandates” want to repeal, say the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or remove the applicability of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act to public schools.
I’ve also discovered that Democratic propaganda on the Medicare prescription drug benefit has been so effective that some of my correspondents believe that the program is simply a giveaway to the drug companies, with literally no benefit to seniors. One correspondent even belived that theRepublicans have replaced a previously existing generous Medicare drug benefit with one that won’t benefit a single senior.
The actual basis of the idea that the drug benefit is a giveaway to the drug companies is simply that there are no price controls as part of the package, and drug companies will therefore benefit from the plan. Yet physicians were among the primary beneficiaries of Medicare for its first two decades; their income soared as the government generously reimbursed basically any and all doctor visits from the over-65 set. Where are the retrospective condemnations of Medicare as a “giveaway” to the doctors?
The failure of liberals to give Bush credit for pursuing policies that they would normally desire reminds me of nothing as much as conservatives’ unwillingness to give Bill Clinton credit for holding down federal spending during most of his term, signing the welfare reform bill, or encouraging free trade. In both cases, the president’s opponents are consumed with a visceral distaste for the man, and see any “positive” policy he pursues as a mere cynical ploy to achieve additional power so he can puruse his “real” ultra-liberal (Clinton) or “right-wing”(Bush) agenda. (E.g., Mark Kleiman: “It’s only marginally obvious that betraying conservative principles in the service of right-wing interests and political gain also doesn’t bring you closer to liberalism.”) I am more inclined to assume that they are both pragmatic politicians, doing what politicians generally do. Sure, Clinton was inclined toward liberalism, and Bush toward conservatism, but neither of them would let ideology get in the way of purely political ends on most policy matters (I think Clinton had a genuine, if somewhat shallow, commitment to racial equality, and Bush has a genuine commitment to his vision the War on Teror). In other words, Clinton and Bush are typical politicians trying to govern from the center while placating their parties’ base, much more alike than they are different, and the constant attempt by partisans on either side to pretend otherwise is grating.
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