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WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH BEGAN HIS RUN FOR THE PRESIDENCY at the end of the twentieth century, he inherited a massive, confident, and powerful conservative movement. Though Bush’s father, a late-blooming conservative fellow-traveler, had lost his bid for a second term to Bill Clinton, the Democratic Party political wunderkind and master of a postliberal triangulated politics that attempted to satisfy both liberal and conservative voters, the Right had only grown stronger in the 1990s. Ronald Reagan had become a national icon. Conservatives owned the Republican Party. They dominated Congress and the policymaking landscape. As William Buckley had dreamed nearly half a century earlier, conservatives had forged a public culture in which conservative voices and personalities filled the airwaves, bookstores, magazines, and the emergent digital empire of public opinion. This multifaceted power did not mean that most Americans called themselves conservative in the year 2000; about half of America’s voters claimed the middle ground, describing themselves neither as liberal nor conservative but just plain moderate. But in the election year of 2000, liberals remained diffident while a confident conservative movement was proudly assertive about its vision for America.
While liberals struggled to reinvent their creed for a new century, their presumptive leader, President Clinton, had made an ideological retreat—if only to salvage what he could in order to fight another day. Reeling from a conservative Republican takeover of both houses of Congress in 1994, Clinton veered to the right. During his 1996 State of the Union address, made as he began his campaign for reelection, Clinton solemnly announced, “We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over.” Under his leadership, Clinton announced, fewer Americans were receiving food stamps and welfare checks. And in rhetoric that could have come straight from Ronald Reagan he intoned, “I believe our new, smaller government must work in an old-fashioned American way, together with all of our citizens through state and local governments, in the workplace, in religious, charitable and civic associations.” Then, in words that would have cheered Phyllis Schlafly if she had trusted Clinton even a little bit, he paid homage to the family: “Family is the foundation of American life. If we have stronger families, we will have a stronger America.” In a Buckley-esque turn, he reprimanded the producers of American popular culture for sullying the virtue of America’s youth and asked Hollywood executives to make movies and television shows “you’d want your own children and grandchildren to enjoy.” And in one more bid to reassure Americans that he understood the new politics of a post-Reagan America, Clinton promised to support legislation that would end the federal welfare entitlement that the 1935 Social Security Act had established.1 Clinton would keep that promise, signing the conservative-driven Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act in August 1996. He also advanced the deregulation of America’s financial sector, continuing the work of the Reagan administration, by signing the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act. Led by archconservative Texas Senator Phil Gramm, this act repealed a major aspect of the New Deal’s regulation of the banking industry.
Clinton was no conservative. Despite his bows to an increasingly conservative electorate—and his embrace of Wall Street’s demands for a freer hand in accumulating wealth and profits—Clinton saw many uses and many needs for an activist federal government. And the egalitarian family ideal he supported was not the one the most zealous anti-ERA activists had insisted on. Nonetheless, he believed with good reason that running for the presidency in 1996 as a liberal, New Deal or otherwise, was political suicide. So he ran as he had against Bush in 1992, as a “new” Democrat, respectful of the conservative political hurricane that had blown across great swathes of the United States. Clinton won his second presidential term, but he did so only by tacking into that wind. Clinton the Democrat was in the White House at the end of the twentieth century, but liberalism was, even still, in the doghouse.
So, in 1999, when George W. Bush went to Iowa to announce his presidential candidacy, he did so confident that he should and could run as an avowed conservative. In words that echoed those of Barry Goldwater, in the simple, emotive, and occasionally disjointed sentences that would become his trademark, he told a small crowd: “I make decisions based on a conservative philosophy that is engrained in my heart.” He ticked off the elements of that philosophy: “Understand that private property is the backbone of capitalism. Fight for American interests and American workers in the world. Know the importance of family and the need for personal responsibility. These are principles from which I will not vary.”2 In my heart, Bush said, I am a conservative like you.
Bush was an unusual conservative leader. He had not come of age intellectually in conservative institutions or organizations, nor was he well-schooled in the conservative intellectual tradition. His conservatism came from a different set of experiences. It was roughly forged in his disgust with the left-wing, sixties campus political culture he endured as an undergraduate at Yale University. While others protested the war in Vietnam and struggled for racial justice, young George embraced the conventional role of hard-drinking, fun-loving fraternity boy. And though born to one of the most cosmopolitan and powerful families in the United States, with roots deep in Northeast bastions of clubby sophistication, and though graduated from three of America’s most elite schools, he embraced his own proudly provincial life-course in Texas, where his father, in pursuit of oil riches, had moved the family when George was just two and where young Bush chose to return after his Ivy League education to make his business and then political career. Finally, and unlike Ronald Reagan, Bush found the core of his conservative values not in his readings in free-market economics or anticommunist treatises but, he said, in the words of God as revealed in the Bible. Like Barry Goldwater, Bush was an instinctual conservative. More than any other democratically elected conservative profiled here, Bush found his conservative anchor in his spiritual and not his intellectual life. That spiritual life had brought order to his troubled soul, and Bush believed that a religiously infused public life was a vital ingredient in bringing order and moral discipline to American society.
During Bush’s eight years as president of the United States this self-described “compassionate conservative” and immensely confident leader pursued the modern conservative political agenda with a fiery certainty. He revered and promoted the tax-cutting, probusiness, anti–government regulation, pro–wealth creation policies President Reagan had made the new American common sense. He fought to make the antiabortion, pro-life position government policy in every way he could. He regularly demonstrated his own commitment to Christianity and worked to instill a religious perspective into the American cultural fabric. Most fundamentally, in 2001 after the murderous 9/11 attacks on the United States by followers of al-Qaeda, President Bush and his administration convinced the American people to embrace what he described as a war against evil. Proclaiming that the world was divided between the forces of good and those of evil, he unleashed the dogs of war.
Just as William Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, and Barry Goldwater had demanded decades earlier in the struggle against the communist foe, after 9/11 President Bush cast aside those cultural and legal norms that he believed handcuffed America in its battle against “evildoers.” In search of a restoration of order, security, and international control, the president selectively dismissed the Bill of Rights and international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions in order to keep suspected terrorists captive and without legal recourse, crossed whatever borders were necessary to capture and imprison others suspected of terrorism, and used torture to try to discover what those who were captured and imprisoned might know about plans and individuals who meant the American people harm. Bush agreed with the claims William Buckley had made in his defense of McCarthyism in the 1950s: rules made for civilized people and civilized times should not be mindlessly applied when faced with enemies who were themselves extraordinarily evil. Moreover, Bush argued, when the United States used extreme measures against its enemies or those suspected of being its enemies, it was not the same as when other nations used torture or other such measures. The United States, he believed, was inherently a moral nation that only sought to safeguard its people and its principles against evil. As a result, its use of exceptional measures was moral, because a moral nation had used them under threat from immoral people.
Despite such logic, most liberals opposed these measures. They argued that breaking treaties, breaking laws, and breaking the code of simple human decency made the United States a broken nation, less respected abroad and less honorable at home. Fighting evil with evil means, they argued, carried too many costs—and displaying their pragmatic core, they often added that using such extraordinary means, including torture, often failed to provide actionable intelligence and instead worked as a recruitment tool for the terrorist enemy. Liberals were joined in their protests by a minority of self-described conservatives who added that, by their principles, morality could not be situational. But a vast majority of conservatives sided with their president. Their embrace of harsh disciplinary measures in the “War on Terror” was in keeping with conservatives’ overwhelming disgust for procedural safeguards that protected criminal suspects and prison inmates and with their support of capital punishment, long prison sentences, and, in general, harsh treatment for miscreants, law breakers, and others who abrogated the rules that, in their minds, kept society safe, secure, and orderly. A great many nonideological Americans, at least in the case of suspected terrorists, agreed with the conservative position, accepting the commonsense dictum that sometimes you had to fight fire with fire.
In 2003, when President Bush chose to go to war against Iraq in a preemptive strike, he followed the path Robert Taft had mapped in the early days of the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union. Rejecting the strategy of collective security liberals had long embraced, Bush insisted on the right of the American government to act unilaterally and decisively in the face of a perceived threat against the United States. Similarly, Bush’s strategy in attacking Iraq echoed that of conservatives in the 1950s and early 1960s who had argued that America needed to “rollback” communism in eastern Europe in order to liberate such people who, once freed, would then embrace democracy and the principles of economic liberty. The United States, Bush believed, as had his conservative forebears, was the embodiment of such universalist principles. The country was, as President Reagan often said, a “city upon the hill,” an exemplar for the rest of the world. Thus, when the United States launched a preemptive war against Iraq, it did not finally matter that the Bush administration, to be generous, had misrepresented or manufactured the evidence it had used to convince the American people that an Iraq ruled by Saddam Hussein represented a clear and present danger to the nation. More important, President Bush explained, regime change in Iraq not only would stop an enemy from endangering the American people and its allies in the region, but it would also ensure that a liberated Iraqi people could emulate the United States and form a democratic nation, thereby inspiring others in their region to do likewise.
This version of unilateral action taken both as a form of national defense and as a strategy for creating democratic nation-states around the world was not what Senator Taft had in mind when he opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s attempts to involve the United States in the fight against Nazism. And a few conservatives in the days leading up to Bush’s war against Iraq opposed his mission of democratic state building in Iraq and around the Middle East. Cultural traditions, they believed, were not so easy to change; it was liberals, they argued, who believed that government-driven social engineering could quickly bring about social good. Bush himself had made similar arguments against President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy strategy during the 2000 presidential election campaign. But after 9/11, Bush embraced a variant of President Reagan’s optimistic version of conservatism: bad governments, not bad cultures or even bad citizens kept people from enjoying their inalienable rights and from exercising their democratic desires. Liberate people from bad regimes and good societies would follow, almost automatically. Bush, like Reagan, was a sunny-side-of-the-street conservative.
By the time President Bush left office in 2009, the conservative political movement he had led was in disarray. The war in Iraq had become a long, painful slog, even as the low-intensity conflict in Afghanistan against the al-Qaeda-supporting Taliban worsened and spread to Pakistan. The president had justified the Iraq war by arguing that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction that would likely be used against the United States and that Saddam Hussein was in secret cahoots with the al-Qaeda terrorists. These claims proved to be untrue. A majority of Americans—though only a small majority—knew that the Bush administration had misled them. And despite the claims of administration officials, voiced most boldly by Vice President Dick Cheney, that the war would be won easily and cheaply, in large part because the Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops as liberators, Iraq had become a long-term sinkhole, draining American blood and treasure, as well as its international reputation. The liberal Democrat Barack Obama, the man who would replace President Bush in the White House, first energized his campaign by running against the war in Iraq and against the conservative, unilateralist, bellicose foreign policy that undergirded President Bush’s decision making.
But, in a turn of events that almost no one predicted in late 2007 when Obama began his presidential campaign, the economy, not the War on Terror and the Iraq War, became the main issue of the campaign. The Taftian-Reaganesque conservative economic policies that Bush had embraced and assiduously implemented during his presidency had, in the months before the 2008 election, catastrophically failed. A nearly unregulated capital market, driven by America’s fabulously rewarded bankers, financiers, and speculators had imploded, taking down trillions of dollars in Americans’ assets and nearly destroying the American-led global financial system. The American political economy, based for nearly thirty years on conservative economic principles, had crashed. Americans saw the value of their homes plummet; millions could no longer pay their mortgages. The stock markets lost nearly half their value. Life savings and pensions plunged in worth. Venerable American corporations were on the chopping block. Millions of Americans lost their jobs. George Bush, the conservative movement, and Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain had been overtaken by a new political reality.
Barack Obama, portrayed in conservative attack advertisements as the most liberal senator in the United States, suddenly had a powerful campaign weapon: conservative economic policies had failed the American people. The people needed help and, like Franklin Roosevelt, Obama promised to use the federal government to bring discipline to the nearly unregulated financial markets and fix what decades of obstreperously pro–free market conservative policies had wrecked. The presidential election was his, and Obama was joined in victory by dozens of new liberal members of Congress. A black man who championed equal rights and rejected all the forms of social hierarchy that conservatives had historically accepted and in some cases embraced was president of the United States. In 2009, under President Barack Obama, liberals were back in control of American policymaking and politics. On George Bush’s watch, the conservative political movement, once so mighty, had taken a great fall.
THE BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE W. BUSH, especially as presented by those who tended to prefer his various political opponents, goes something like this: baby George was born in Connecticut in 1946 to one of America’s most prominent and wealthy families; that is, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Grandfather Prescott Bush was a Yale Skull and Bones man (as had been generations of Bush men before him) who became a Wall Street banker and then Connecticut’s U.S. senator. He played golf with Ike. Prescott’s second son, George Herbert Walker Bush, the father of George W. and the man who would become the forty-first president of the United States, was a golden boy with a storybook life: war hero, Yalie, self-made millionaire, and entrenched member of the American ruling class.
Little George, on the other hand, the first-born son of George H. W. and the indomitable Barbara Bush, was kind of a screwup and most certainly a cutup; he was more interested in having a laugh than studying or working hard. After skating his way through the schools male Bushes had long attended, Phillips Academy and Yale University (class of 1968), he dodged service in Vietnam through some string-pulling and spent a minimal time in the Texas Air National Guard. During these years, as student and then young man, nobody ever accused him of being driven by intellectual curiosity, the desire to challenge authority, or a concern for social justice. He missed, willfully, the sixties. In an age of marijuana, he stayed the course with alcohol. Despite his academic limits and party-hearty attitude, and maybe because of his rejection of the causes and concerns of many of his classmates, he earned an MBA at Harvard.
Soon after, he returned to Texas, where his father had moved the family when George was but two years old. This Bush never embraced the East Coast preppie style his family ties and schooling might have suggested. He was and would remain a Texan. He dipped snuff. Back home, he used family connections to begin working in the oil business. His endeavors therein never made money, but those same family connections made sure he profited anyway. In 1977, after a whirlwind courtship, he married Laura Welch, a Midland, Texas, girl and graduate of Southern Methodist University who had been a second-grade teacher and then a librarian. She helped settle him down. Bush found the Lord, gave up drinking, helped his dad run for president. With dad in the White House, he was offered a small piece of the Texas Rangers ballclub and became a managing director of the team. He made millions off the deal. In 1994, with the help of his daddy’s name and the political Svengali Karl Rove (more, later), he became governor of Texas. In 2001, despite his intellectual limits, his inarticulateness, and his unfamiliarity with much of the world but blessed by his family name, the zealous support of both wealthy economic and masses of socioreligious conservatives, the bad taste left by Bill Clinton’s dalliance with a young intern, and the help of the U.S. Supreme Court, George W. Bush became president of the United States.
This version of the conventional biography has much truth to it, but it hides a great deal, too. There are reasons beyond the changing structure and size of the conservative movement that allowed George W. Bush to follow in his father’s giant footsteps and become a conservative president of the United States even as the more cerebral and hard-working Robert Taft failed a half-century earlier in his bids to follow his father into the White House. Bush had an array of skills of exactly the right kind for his rise to the presidency under the banner of modern conservatism.
George W. Bush, despite the fancy family name and super-elite schooling, had the common touch. And it was genuine. He was, in that sense, the opposite of the wooden and patrician Robert Taft. Nor was he like Ronald Reagan (or Franklin Roosevelt), who was unsurpassed in connecting with an audience or amusing a small crowd but who had little genuine interest in individuals or personal intimacy. Bush liked people and they liked him. He was naturally inclusive and gregarious in a towel-snapping, acid-tongued, locker-room kind of way. In the early days of Bush’s run for the Republican presidential nomination, journalists at the Washington Post, in a series of in-depth biographical reports on the then Texas governor, seized on this aspect of Bush’s personality and gave an enduring boyhood gloss to it that is almost ritualistically repeated in subsequent profiles and biographies.
At the Phillips Academy, the Post reported, other boys were in awe of the Texan in their overwhelmingly East Coast, refined, WASP midst. Bush was no brain nor was he a gridiron hero, but he was “cocky and irrepressible.” Through “sheer force of personality,” he had become a big man on campus. An anecdote serves as explanation: rather than compete on the usual terrain, Bush laid claim to his own, where he could be king. Actually, he made himself “commissioner.” Bush convinced his classmates to turn an informal game of stickball into an arena of goofy competition in which he made up the rules and established teams. Unlike the traditional sports played on campus, Bush’s stickball league was open to all, regardless of the degree of their athletic coordination. Bush made sure everybody had fun.3 Compare Bush’s stickball inventiveness to poor, stiff Robert Taft’s laborious attempts during his boyhood to teach himself how to hit a baseball.
Bush went to one of the nation’s most elite prep schools and then onward to Yale, but just as Reagan had no ounce of pessimism in his soul, Bush affected no sense of snobbery or exclusivity. People—voters—could see that in him. He was a josher not a judger. And like Bush’s prep school peers, they seemed almost to forget that his comfortable swagger and jokey ease was bred in his aristocratic bones, as much as it was formed in the rough and tumble of his Midland, Texas, boyhood.
Just as Bush trumped his politically suspect elite pedigree with his winning persona, so too did he turn his troubled years of early adulthood into a politically compelling narrative of spiritual uplift. And he was politically savvy enough to hang a lantern around the most visible of his onetime troubles. For a few years—twenty or so—Bush drank too much. He was no alcoholic, but regularly enough, he got drunk. He had been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. Hangovers were a part of his life. The drinking was hurting his marriage and his family life. As Bush told the story about himself, it took Jesus to save him from his personal failings.
In 1985, with his dad serving his second term as vice president, George Bush joined the Community Bible Study group in Midland, Texas. He was thirty-nine years old. His search for spiritual strength and religious succor had begun earlier that year when Bush, troubled and unsure of where his life was leading him, had taken a stroll, at his father’s home in Maine, with evangelical leader Billy Graham. As Bush later recalled, “It was the beginning of a new walk where I would recommit my heart to Jesus Christ.” Bush had left behind the country-club, quiet, Episcopalian faith of his father and embraced the firmer stuff of Methodism.
At the CBS, a small group of Christian men would meet weekly and work their way through a chapter of the gospels. There was nothing out of the ordinary about such a group in Midland. As one of the leaders of the group said, “[T]he atmosphere in Midland is wonderful. There’s a desire to introduce people to who Jesus is on a local level and on a national level. And there’s a confidence there that God can use me to do that. I don’t have to go to seminary. I don’t have to be the smartest person in the world. I just have to be a man who’s yielded to the Lord. And he will use me in the way that he uses so many of those people from Midland.”4 Bush participated regularly, committed himself to Jesus Christ, and from then on read the Bible every day. Through the CBS he learned to apply his faith to his life. That faith, he told the American people, allowed him to stop drinking the day after his fortieth birthday and dedicate himself to his family. That faith became his bedrock, the foundation on which he built his life.
The discovery of that faith also gave Bush and his political allies a way to narrate his life, to give an appealing arc to the relatively undistinguished record—given that he was the first-born son of GeorgeHerbert Walker Bush—of his accomplishments up until his midlife crisis. Thus in 1999, when Bush was preparing to launch his bid for the presidency, he published an autobiography meant to introduce him to a wider circle of voters. A Charge to Keep did not dwell on his family’s pedigree and wealth, his “legacy” status at Phillips Academy, Yale, and Skull and Bones, or his connections to a great many very rich and powerful individuals. Rather, the emotional centerpiece of the book, the seeming inner-look at the real Bush, emphasized instead his onetime problems with alcohol and his life-transforming embrace of Jesus. That it was true made it no less studied a vantage point.
In all of his runs for public office, after his religious turn in the mid-1980s, first during his Texas gubernatorial campaign in 1994 and then in his 2000 bid for the presidency, Americans regularly heard George Bush refer to his Christian faith in explaining himself and his principles. At the third debate among the Republican candidates for the presidential nomination in 2000, when asked what philosopher he most admired, he spoke without hesitation: “Christ, because he changed my heart.” During his stump speeches he referred to his experience walking with Billy Graham and told audiences “my relationship with God through Christ gives me meaning and direction.”5 Church-going evangelical Christians overwhelmingly approved, and so did many other religious Americans.
Bush’s embrace of Jesus Christ as his personal savior helped to turn around not only his family life but his political fortunes. In 1978, well before he began his daily Bible reading and when he was still casting around for direction, Bush had run for Congress in Texas’s Nineteenth District. Based in Midland, he campaigned against the Carter administration’s oil policy (not pro-oil enough); his TV commercials showed him on his daily run, fit and ready to lead. His opponent, a Texas Tech–educated Democratic state senator named Kent Hance, shared Bush’s economic views but ran far to his cultural right. Hance’s coup de grâce came just a few days before the election, when some Bush supporters put on a political rally that featured free beer. Hance’s campaign used the beer bash against Bush. A letter went out that began, “Dear Fellow Christians,” and then went on to lament that the Yale-educated Bush was using “his vast sums of money” to bribe young Texans into voting for him by offering them alcoholic beverages. Voters were equally disconcerted by the commercials showing Bush running in the Texas heat. A local voter observed, “if a guy is jogging in Dimmitt, somebody is after him.”6 Bush had run that campaign with great stores of personal energy and the financial backing of a host of well-to-do supporters, but it was not enough. In a relatively benign echo of George Wallace’s failed Alabama campaign two decades earlier, Bush had been out-Texan’d by his rival. Never again.
By the time Bush ran for Texas governor in 1994, he had a new image to offer voters. Since 1989, he had been the managing director of the Texas Rangers baseball team. He had become a Bible-reading, born-again Christian and was an honest-to-God family man. He campaigned in cowboy boots and kept his daily run out of his commercials. Then, too, Texas had changed in the sixteen years since he had run for Congress. The “good old boy” culture was by no means a thing of the past, but the state had far more Hispanic voters, and it also had an energized liberal-progressive bloc that had gained statewide power. Bush’s opponent, the incumbent governor, Ann Richards, represented that progressive bloc, and she did so with a scathing populist wit. Bush had to be more than an exemplary old-school Texan to win the governorship, and he knew it.
Richards had won the Texas governorship in 1990 by beating Clayton Williams, an immensely wealthy, conservative oilman and rancher. Williams made himself out as a proud exemplar of old school, white Texas masculinity. From the perspective of the national press, this made him both a humorous subject and a formidable force for the governorship. A fourth-generation rancher, he campaigned in a “gray Resistol hat and black ostrich-skin boots” and promised voters that he would bring more jobs to Texas, never raise their taxes, “fight drugs from every direction,” and “introduce [drug pushers] to the joys of bustin’ rocks.”7 Besides being tough enough to lead his men on the annual cattle roundup at his forty-three-square mile Happy Cove ranch, he also thought of himself as a country-boy wit. That wit did get him into trouble in the eyes of some Texans, as when, upon observing an incoming storm, he laughingly told a large group of reporters that bad weather was just like rape: “You can’t do anything about it, so you might as well lay back and enjoy it.”8 Richards’s upset victory proved that even in Texas, by the mid-1990s, a great many voters could only stomach so much oil man money and good old boy humor. Women flocked to Richards and proved, once again, that even in a state where liberals were far outnumbered by conservatives, many voters could be turned in one political direction or another by the power of campaign particulars, inspirational rhetoric, and individual personalities.
Richards had a lot of personality, as George W. Bush knew full well as he prepared to square off against her. Her national reputation and path to the Texas governorship had been set in 1988 when the Democratic Party, somewhat desperate to get a persuasive woman’s face on camera at their presidential nominating convention, had turned to Richards, who was then the little-known Texas state treasurer. She lit up the night. First she made a pitch for more women leaders: “But if you give us a chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels!” And she zinged the occasionally inarticulate Republican presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush: “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth!” But her speech that night added up to far more than those humorous one-liners. At a time when liberals had been ground down by years of failed policies and the great popularity of Ronald Reagan, Richards had let loose a liberal battle cry.
Calling on her rural Texas background and her childhood in the midst of the Great Depression, she asked what had happened to American values of fair play, equal rights, and dignity for all. “This Republican Administration,” she said, “treats us as if we were pieces of a puzzle that can’t fit together. They’ve tried to put us into compartments and separate us from each other.” Blue eyes blazing, she raged, “They told working mothers it’s all their fault—their families are falling apart because they had to go to work to keep their kids in jeans and tennis shoes and college. And they’re wrong! They told American labor they were trying to ruin free enterprise by asking for 60 days’ notice of plant closings, and that’s wrong.… No wonder we feel isolated and confused. We want answers and their answer is that ‘something is wrong with you.’ Well nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing’s wrong with you that you can’t fix in November!”9 Richards had seized the national stage that night, and liberals all over the United States cheered for her and her message. Alas for the 1988 Democratic presidential candidate, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, there just were not enough of those cheered-up liberals among the American electorate.
In 1994, fortunately for George W. Bush, who had not forgotten Richards’s verbal dig at his father in 1988, her record as governor had not equaled the power of her rhetoric. She had few achievements to showcase after nearly four years in office. Still, Bill Clinton had taken down George H. W. in 1992 using rhetoric much like that deployed by Richards, although Bush’s unfocused response to the economic contraction of 1991–92 and his reneging on a campaign promise to never raise taxes had at least as much to do with his defeat. While 1994 turned out to be a very good year nationally for conservatives, led by Congressman Newt Gingrich, Bush could not know that when entering into the race. Richards expected to beat George W. Bush just as Clinton had beaten George H. W. Bush just two years earlier.
Guided by the best political mind in Texas, the campaign consultant Karl Rove, Bush ran a carefully modulated race against Richards. He positioned himself as a different kind of conservative. He ran for governor without a deep commitment to any one conservative principle—though a conservative he fully believed himself to be. This was in part owing to historical circumstance: some of the conservative movement’s best issues were not available to the Bush-Rove effort. Thanks to a forty-year commitment by Democratic and Republican politicians to a policy of containing international communism and the internal contradictions of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall had fallen, eastern Europe had lifted the dead hand of Soviet-style Marxism, and the “evil empire” itself had imploded. The hunt for domestic communist subversives, long a staple in conservative Texas politics, was as a result a dead letter. And Bush chose to tread lightly around the racial land mines that still lay buried just under the surface of Texas politics.
Still, a few old-style, conservative positions were available, and Bush, coached by Rove, seized on them, creating a recipe that was equal parts something new and something old. Taking a page from Ronald Reagan’s long ago 1966 California campaign, Bush ran against welfare cheats and, as conservatives were wont to say, the whole dependency-producing system of welfare payments. National Republicans, led by the insurgent Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich, were that same year playing the same card. The electorate, in Texas and in most other places, liked it, even as some liberals continued to claim it was a racially charged attack.
To the delight of the business community, Bush seized on a relatively new issue in the conservative playbook: tort reform. The idea here was to take the deregulation movement that the Reagan administration had successfully used to unleash the financial sector of the economy (as well as a host of other industries) from firm government oversight and re-jigger it to apply to the American civil justice system. Under that system, American juries, as well as judges, had erected expansive and expensive measures to protect and compensate individuals from harm done by others, ranging from dangerous products to deadly work environments. Since those others often were businesses with deep pockets, conservatives argued that tort law had become an unfair, unnecessary, and mollycoddling structure that dragged down the free enterprise system by penalizing successful businesses that rarely had done anything seriously wrong. Too often, conservatives argued, individuals were given huge monetary rewards when a little common sense would have prevented any problem from occurring. Individual responsibility, they continued, was being trashed by a civil justice system that rewarded the incompetent while punishing successful entrepreneurs and companies. While tort reform did not ignite a massive electoral brushfire, it did garner a lot of campaign contributions from those businesspeople who felt themselves prey to plaintiff lawyers. Bush made tort reform one of the principal issues of his campaign, and it would become a staple conservative cause. In a more popular appeal—and in partial response to his father’s famous presidential retreat from his “read my lips” pledge about not raising taxes—Bush promised Texas voters that he would lower their state property taxes.
Bush ran most successfully, and with the most personal passion, on two other issues. The first, surprisingly, was education. He declared that his number one priority was the schoolchildren of Texas. Bush promised to reform the state’s education system by making schools accountable. In practice, that meant regularly testing students to measure their achievements in key academic skills like reading and mathematical calculation and then sanctioning low-performing schools. Bush also promised to increase funding to schools to pay for the testing and to assist schools in improving. To make schools better, Bush was demanding greater state oversight and was even willing to increase state spending to help them do better. Government, in this case, was part of the solution—not typical conservative fare. If not for the fact that teachers’ unions, overwhelmingly Democratic Party partisans, distrusted and even despised the accountability measures—in part, because they feared that some teachers who failed to improve students’ test scores might be fired—there was nothing particularly conservative or liberal about this hard-nosed policy. For more traditional conservatives, Bush did also call for competition among schools; he advocated outside-the-bureaucracy, state-supported charter schools, and he also supported a voucher program that would allow parents to use state money to help pay for private schools, which, in practice, would overwhelmingly be Christian academies. Still, Bush demonstrated with his school policies that he was not a dogmatic conservative; a picture he would seek to refine when he ran for the presidency.
Bush’s other major policy priority was to harden the state’s juvenile justice system. Like a good many other states, in the early 1990s Texas had experienced a fierce rise in crimes committed by young teenagers, a disproportionate number of whom were African American and Hispanic. Many in the state felt that young criminals were on the rise because too often they were getting away with murder—sometimes literally. Bush promised that he would find tougher ways to handle kids who had gone bad. In making this pitch for a harsher juvenile justice system, Bush took a page from Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. Being hard on people who had done wrong, Bush said, especially young ones, was not about being mean-spirited or hard-hearted; it was the opposite. In his gubernatorial debate with Ann Richards, he explained, “We understand in Texas that discipline and love go hand in hand.”10 It was a perfect conservative formulation, but it was a rare conservative politician up until then who used the word love, even if it was tough love, when talking about dope pushers, auto thieves, or robbers, even if the lawbreakers in question were fourteen or fifteen years old.
Guided by campaign manager Karl Rove’s expert hand, Bush stayed relentlessly on-message, sticking to his talking points and four policy priorities. His campaign discipline stood in sharp relief to that of Governor Richards, who loved a snappy one-liner just a little too much. At one point during her governorship she had mocked Texans who were demanding the right to carry concealed handguns by offering them a compromise: they could carry a gun on a chain around their necks so “everyone would know who’s packing, ‘Oh-uh, look out for that one—he’s got a gun.’ ”11 Bush promised to support Texans’ right to carry concealed weapons so that they could protect themselves. Ann Richards was a true daughter of Texas, but Bush out-Texan’d her. He won in a romp.
In Bush’s first term, he accomplished almost all of his campaign promises and more. Gun owners got their right to carry a concealed weapon, and (shades of Reagan) Bush found a way to fulfill his pledge to cut the state property tax. He moved forward on state tort reform and evidenced his disdain for business regulation by relaxing enforcement of various environmental laws. Bush talked up the idea of reducing the size of government by privatizing public services, even the University of Texas. He also began looking into turning some social service programming, like drug addiction counseling, over to “faith-based” organizations. For Bush, this policy was personal; he had reason to believe that religious faith and lessons learned from the Bible could help people make better lives for themselves.
A big majority of Texas voters liked what George Bush did as governor. He easily won a second term in 1998, raking in a record-setting 69 percent of the vote. Bush had also confounded liberals by picking up substantial Hispanic support. He had worked hard to learn some conversational Spanish and respected the traditions and customs of his Hispanic constituents, most especially their religiosity—and he let them know it. Bush straightforwardly rejected the patronizing and often hostile attitudes toward Hispanics that had historically been de rigueur for most Anglo conservative politicians in Texas. Bush, like several other conservative politicians of his generation, was forth-rightly breaking with the race-baiting and direct appeals to ethnic or racial prejudice that had long characterized the conservative movement. A majority of Hispanic voters responded by giving him their votes. Still, the overall picture Bush presented to Texas voters was a traditional one. At the state Republican convention that nominated him to run for that second term, the official campaign film featured the governor alone in a bass boat, fishing. He catches a good one and demonstrates that he knows how to hook ’em, and hold ’em up by the gills for the camera. Bush, the film explains, is the embodiment of the “Texas culture of faith and values.”12
Even before Bush had his Texas bona fides validated by the state’s voters for a second time, he had begun exploring a presidential bid. He was the son of a president with all the national name recognition that guaranteed; he had governed a major state; and he had a rock-solid electoral base in Texas that gave him the credentials to run strong throughout the Sun Belt. Also, he had personal and family connections to a big-money network of contributors that ran from Wall Street to big oil, and because no obvious front-running Republican leader had staked out the presidential race, major contributors were there waiting to be courted. Still, Bush had not spent a lifetime preparing for or dreaming of being the president, nor was he driven by some fiercely held set of beliefs that he wanted to make national policy. But George Bush did have the self-confidence to believe that he could be the president of the United States, and he did have the willingness, especially after watching eight years of the Bill Clinton presidency, to give it a go and see what happened.
In April 1998, he traveled to California to try his hand at a little out of state fund-raising and, more important, to meet with some of the wise men of Republican administrations past. George Shultz, who had done it all, including serving as secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, hosted an intimate luncheon for Bush. Bush listened and asked smart questions as Shultz, conservative economists, and policy experts such as Martin Anderson and Michael Boskin, as well as Stanford University provost and rising star in foreign policy circles Condoleezza Rice, laid out the big issues of the day: budget and tax policy, international relations, and entitlement programs like Social Security. Bush proved to this extraordinarily brilliant circle that, despite his own self-effacing comments about his lack of academic achievement and a reputation for intellectual narrowness, he was presidential timber. George Shultz took him aside and told him that nearly twenty years earlier he had hosted a similar event for the former governor of California, Ronald Reagan. After that meeting, doubts assuaged, he and the others had joined Reagan’s crusade for the presidency. Now, Shultz told Bush, we are ready to join yours.13
Bush was no Reagan. He had a different skill set, a different background, and the times were quite different, as well. Reagan, of course, was at his best when talking to a crowd. Bush was at best a mediocre public speaker; he often tangled his syntax, and his years of relative indifference to international relations and domestic policy issues showed when reporters moved him away from his prepared talking points and asked him tough, specific questions about public affairs (here, he shared ground with Reagan). Sometimes when Bush read a prepared speech, he was dreadful. But he did connect well with voters, and like-minded people thought he was a good man. Before becoming president, Reagan had been developing his conservative ideology for decades, reading, talking, and writing about political ideas and first principles. Bush had never gone through that process of refining his political and ideological beliefs. But he was a man of certain religious faith, which grounded his moral sense, and he did believe strongly in a few core conservative beliefs, in particular lower taxes, less government, and more reliance on the private sector and individual discipline. And by the year 2000, because most of conservatives’ biggest issues, such as battling communism and restraining big government, lacked the saliency they once had, a different kind of presidential campaign between some sort of “new” Democrat and some sort of conservative Republican was likely anyway. The stark divide between an old-school liberal and a fiery conservative was an unlikely scenario for the 2000 campaign. Bush had the advantage of not being the kind of “scary,” dogmatic conservative who pushed away too many middle-of-the-road or independent voters, who often liked their politics to be nicer and less divisive sounding. Bush made sure that voters understood that he was a new kind of conservative.
As Bush geared up for his presidential run, his father’s 1992 loss to “new” Democrat Bill Clinton haunted and inspired him. Bush knew that Clinton was a once-in-a-generation politician, a man of extraordinary talents tailor-made for the electoral arena. And he knew that his dad was a less-gifted politician, a patrician who was mocked when he tried to pass himself off as a regular fellow and who had lost a chunk of voters because he had memorably promised—“read my lips!”—not to raise Americans’ taxes and then did so anyway (because he believed it was the right thing to do to strengthen the economy). And Bush knew that his father, the incumbent, was blamed for the 1992 economic recession that seemed to crowd out the many victories the president had won, including the extraordinary 1991 battlefield triumph over the army of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But Bush also knew that his father’s 1992 losing campaign of reasoned, principled, conservative policies had been badly tarred by the “pitchfork” rhetoric of the more ferocious elements of the conservative movement that battled for control of the Republican Party.
Pat Buchanan had done a good deal of that tarring. In 1992, Buchanan had run against George H. W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. Buchanan was, to use William Buckley’s term, a veteran conservative “publicist.” He had supported Goldwater, had been a member of the Young Americans for Freedom, had worked for Richard Nixon, had written widely and appeared regularly on television, and had served as communications director for President Reagan. Buchanan had long believed that the majority of Americans were repulsed by the social and cultural changes liberals had supported since the early 1960s. He believed that Bush was a moderate who did not understand those social and religious passions that animated the masses of conservative voters. So he ran on cultural conservative issues against his party’s incumbent president for the 1992 nomination, garnering some three million votes before conceding the race to the far-better-financed and established George H. W. Bush campaign. Though he lost, Buchanan’s primary vote totals, Republican leaders decided, earned him a prime-time address during the Republican National Convention.
In that speech, Buchanan pulled out the stops, raging against “the discredited liberalism of the 1960s and the failed liberalism of the 1970s.” Shades of Phyllis Schlafly, he targeted Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary Clinton, for her “radical feminism.” He warned America against the agenda of “Clinton and Clinton”: “abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units.” He then declared war on feminists, gay people, environmentalists, secularists, and liberals in general: “There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.” With the Republican delegates roaring their approval, he concluded, “[B]lock by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.”14 Pundits referred to this heated rhetoric as the “culture war” speech, and while it inspired many religious conservative activists who had worried about Bush’s dedication to their issues, its vehemence frightened wobbly independent and less–culturally conservative Republican voters who feared that this Republican Party seemed to want to tear the nation apart.
In 2000, George W. Bush did not want voters to fear him or his brand of conservatism. Just as Bill Clinton had used conservative catchphrases and religious language to sometimes advance a more liberal agenda, Bush sought to soften the sometimes harsh, exclusionary language of the modern conservative movement to reach uncertain and less-ideological voters. In 1988, his father had actually done much the same in his successful run for the presidency, telling Americans, “I want a kinder and gentler nation.” Bush called his approach “compassionate conservatism.” He hallmarked his “compassionate” conservative approach in his acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican convention in Philadelphia. Rather than chastise “welfare cheats” as Ronald Reagan had done or use images of a black criminal to scare white voters as even own father had done in the 1988 election, Bush asked the people listening to him that night to understand what it was like for “single moms struggling to feed the kids and pay the rent; immigrants starting a hard life in a new world; children without fathers in neighborhoods where gangs seem like friendship or drugs promise peace, and where sex sadly seems the closest thing to belonging.” Even Bill Clinton, who had sometimes been mocked for his empathy-laden turns of phrases (“I feel your pain”), had not been so expressive in discussing the challenges facing tens of millions of Americans. “We are their country too,” Bush reminded the Republicans sitting in the hall that night. “When these problems are not confronted, it builds a wall within our nation. On one side are wealth, technology, education and ambition. On the other side of that wall are poverty and prison, addiction and despair. And my fellow Americans, we must tear down that wall.”
But if Bush was insisting on compassion for the downtrodden, even going so far as to compare that struggle with Ronald Reagan’s hallowed call to tear down the communists’ Berlin Wall, he was also insisting on conservative solutions to do so. To the cheers of the delegates, he intoned, “Big government is not the answer, but the alternative to bureaucracy is not indifference. It is to put conservative values and conservative ideas into the thick of the fight for justice and opportunity.”15 Exactly what that meant in policy prescriptions would have to wait for another day—and it would be a long wait. But the tone, for sure, was strikingly different. And if the tone was not backed up by specifics, it was supported by powerful imagery.
Unlike any previous Republican convention, African Americans played a major role at Bush’s. Colin Powell, the first African American to serve as head of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave the opening speech. Condoleezza Rice, an African American who served as Bush’s chief foreign policy adviser, also gave a major address. Laura Bush was surrounded by a sea of black schoolchildren, and numerous black singers and choral groups performed from the stage. The New York Times African American editorialist, Brent Staples, noted that only a tiny percentage of the actual delegates to the Republican convention were black and that the Bush campaign knew that it was likely to win only a miniscule percentage of black votes. Most African Americans, he observed, dismissed the parade of black faces on the stage as nothing more than “minstrelsy” and a brazen attempt to erase the party’s recent history of race-baiting “by dressing up in blackface.” But he understood, too, that the Republican Party was not actually seeking black voters; it was “directing its [racially inclusive] entreaties to the white, moderate suburbanites who abandoned the party in the last two elections to vote for Bill Clinton. The ploy of cosmetically colorizing the G.O.P. could work.”16
Bush was no racist. And in his Texas electoral contests he had a proven record of winning over, if not African American voters, at least a sizable percentage of the important Hispanic vote. Bush was not willing to change his policies to win minority voters, nor would he reach out to longtime organized opponents of conservative politicians such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but he did genuinely want to turn the page on the kind of race-baiting, blatant and coded, that a good many conservatives from the time of Barry Goldwater forward, including Ronald Reagan and his own father, had allowed and at times played a direct hand in. Thirty-two years after the martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr., Bush meant to move his party and his conservative followers forward on the issue of racial prejudice.17
Bush was well-intentioned on the issue of race, and his campaign team knew that in the year 2000 essentially no votes could be gained (the Republican Party already had those kind of voters)—and plenty could be lost—with a racially charged campaign. And given the ugliness of the 1992 Pat Buchanan-led culture wars rhetoric, few on the Bush campaign team were looking to launch a holy crusade against feminists or even gay men and women, though both issues still stirred up the passions of many ardent conservative voters, often referred to, by that time, as the mass electoral base of the Republican Party. In part, Bush could skip these targets, and thus avoid antagonizing a certain sort of more culturally progressive voter, because he had a better one: Bill Clinton. Bush could run as the candidate of moral virtue and religious rectitude—and thus stir the hearts of what pundits had come to call “traditional values” voters—by reminding Americans voters that he was not the kind of man who would ever commit adultery in the Oval Office. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Though Bush’s actual opponent was the wholeheartedly monogamous and true-blue family man Al Gore, Bush had no qualms about tarring poor Gore with the same brush that ran so smoothly over the rough hide of Vice President Gore’s two-term boss.
Bush made Clinton’s character, as well as his own, a major theme throughout the campaign. Matching his call for “compassionate conservatism” with a declaration that he would “lead this nation to a responsibility era,” he assured Americans that he knew “that [the] president himself must be responsible.” In direct reference to Bill Clinton’s Oval Office misbehavior with a young White House intern, he proclaimed, “So when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.” As Bush and his supporters saw it, Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct was the product of baby boomer Clinton’s embrace of the hedonistic cultural relativism that, conservatives believed, the sixties era had unleashed on the American people. Bush rejected those times and those precepts. His verities, he said, came from a more distant time and from a far greater authority: “I believe in tolerance, not in spite of my faith, but because of it. I believe in a God who calls us not to judge our neighbors but to love them. I believe in grace because I’ve seen it, and peace because I’ve felt it, and forgiveness because I’ve needed it.”18 In an age of moral uncertainty, Bush promised to bring his disciplined faith to the Oval Office. That faith, he assured Americans, was the rock on which his presidency would be built.
Throughout the presidential campaign, Bush’s character became a key issue. Liberals argued that Bush was at best a hypocrite. For decades, they said, he had been a heavy drinker. The mass media unearthed his drunk-driving arrest in Maine. Bush had admitted that he was not much of a student. And until he had become governor just six years earlier, his critics complained, he had accomplished relatively little on his own merits. How could this flawed man claim that his character was a worthy credential for the presidency? When liberals looked at Bush they saw the second-rate son of an extraordinarily privileged and wealthy family who was given every kind of advantage, who learned little from his education and sophisticated background, who partied his way through his youth and much of his adulthood, and then through connections and family name became governor. Now, they argued, he sought the presidency in order to punish people whose backgrounds did not protect them from their mistakes and to reward privileged Americans like himself.
Bush’s supporters, most especially those who shared his kind of religious faith, saw a completely different man. They saw a person who was almost destroyed by the cosmopolitan life he had been provided by his family’s wealth, his Ivy League education, and the sixties lifestyle to which so many of his generation, they believed, had fallen prey. But Bush, they said, rose above his background. After many difficult years, he found his personal Savior and was able to regain his moral compass through the good works of his loving wife and a forgiving religious community. George Bush’s conservative followers embraced a variety of ideological principles, but in the music of self-redemption and the possibilities of individual responsibility his political coalition became an orchestra of many instruments and voices.
Bush ran hard on his character, insisting that Americans needed a change from the traumatic, X-rated years of Clinton and Gore: “This is not the time for third chances; it is the time for new beginnings.” But he ran even harder on Taft-Reagan economic principles. Tax cuts were the centerpiece of his policy promises. He would cut income taxes, he would abolish the inheritance tax, and he would make sure Americans could invest their own Social Security savings instead of just paying their money into the government’s coffers. People had to be free to look after their own property, and government, he said, had to get out of the way of hard-working, entrepreneurial, risk-taking Americans.
Because the Clinton “new” Democratic years had been economically good ones for a great many Americans, Bush had a challenge on his hands. In particular he had to address one of the minor miracles of the Clinton years; the liberal Bill Clinton had managed to turn around the massive annual government deficits the conservative administrations of both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush had produced. Clinton had not only balanced the federal budget but through careful stewardship of federal spending had actually achieved budget surpluses! Conservatives had a hard time accusing the Clinton-Gore team of being “tax-and-spend” liberals. Still Bush tried to turn this extraordinary accomplishment into a major failing. “The surplus,” he intoned, “is not the government’s money; the surplus is the people’s money.” The rhetoric came straight out of the Reagan playbook. If voters made him president, he promised to end years of surplus by cutting taxes.
The presidential race between Gore and Bush was extraordinarily close. Gore’s campaign had a lot going for it. Gore, a studious man, was clearly much more informed about both domestic and international policy issues. More important, the Clinton-Gore years had produced, more or less, nearly eight years of peace and prosperity. Income inequality, after years of widening, had actually closed during their years in office. Like Clinton, Gore confounded his conservative opponent by running against big government liberalism. During one of his debates with Bush, he informed viewers that during the Clinton years the federal government had shrunk, while in Texas, under Bush, state government had grown.19 Gore promised that he would oversee a “smaller, smarter government.” Like Clinton, Gore ran away from the liberal label that Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson had trumpeted.
But Gore had problems, too. Clinton’s extremely well-publicized sexual peccadilloes that had led to his impeachment and nearly resulted in his removal from office shadowed the Gore campaign. And Gore was a stiff and lugubrious candidate. To attack Bush’s economic policies, particularly the privatization of Social Security, he repeated over and over … and over and over that a Bush presidency would be “risky.” He told Americans that he, unlike Bush, would safeguard their Social Security and Medicare payments by placing them in a “lockbox.” His sonorous repetition of that odd word was tailor-made for mockery. In polls, voters indicated that folksy Bush just was more likable; intellectual Gore came across as arrogant. Of such things are close elections sometimes determined.
The 2000 election demonstrated that American voters were almost perfectly split between the economically and socially moderate, zigzagging “new” Democratic politics of Clinton-Gore and the avowedly conservative, yet “compassionate” views offered by George W. Bush, at least insomuch as voters actually paid attention to the issues and not just the personalities of the two candidates. Gore won about 543,000 more votes than did Bush. But after the conservative-dominated Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that Florida could not recount its astonishingly close election results, Bush won that state by some 1,600 votes and, thus, a 271 to 266 majority in the Electoral College (one elector chose to abstain). The election was only decided on December 13, almost five weeks after the American people had voted. Gore’s supporters were left bitter and angry. George W. Bush was the president.
The conservative coalition formed in the Reagan years mainly held. Bush had won every southern state and every western state except for the heavily Hispanic New Mexico. Gore won the Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Gore also won the entire Northeast, except New Hampshire, and most of the Midwest. According to exit polls, white voters preferred Bush to Gore 55 percent to 42 percent; white Protestant voters went for Bush over Gore by 62 percent to 35 percent; and white evangelical voters, cheered on by leaders of the Religious Right, gave Bush a massive 38–percentage point advantage over Gore. Voters with household incomes over $100,000 preferred Bush 55 percent to 43 percent. On the other side, about 90 percent of black voters and about 62 percent of Hispanics voted for Gore, and households with incomes under $50,000 also sided with the Democrat.
Election day exit polls indicated that 20 percent of American voters identified themselves as liberal and 29 percent as conservative. After eight years of Bill Clinton, a resounding 50 percent of voters called themselves moderates.20 That divided electorate also produced a Senate that was evenly split, with fifty Democrats and fifty Republicans—the Democrats had picked up four seats. The House, which had been in Republican hands since 1994, stayed Republican, though by a narrower margin. Regardless of how close the election had been and what those ideological labels meant to the electorate, the American people would have a proudly self-avowed conservative as their president beginning January 20, 2001.
President George Bush ran as a conservative, intended to govern as a conservative, and believed that throughout his presidency he stayed true to his conservative principles. Not all conservatives agreed with him. His critics from the Right pointed out that as president Bush quickly reversed the Clinton federal budget surpluses by creating massive deficits and that Bush used the federal government to intervene forthrightly in American life. Some unhappy conservatives labeled his approach with the deliberately oxymoronic phrase “big government conservatism.” And Bush sometimes contradicted even his own notions of what good conservative policy meant. He had run for the presidency castigating President Clinton’s military interventions in the Balkans, Haiti, and elsewhere as a misguided liberal policy of “nation building.” Yet, Bush ended up as the greatest champion of nation building since the ultraliberal President Lyndon Johnson. Despite these problematic turns, overwhelmingly Bush did dedicate his presidency to advancing the conservative cause that had been growing, in ever-mutable form, since Robert Taft had taken on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Unlike his father, Bush kept his promise on taxes. His greatest legislative victory came early. Less than five months after taking office, Bush signed the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which reduced the amount Americans paid in taxes by some $1.3 trillion. All people who paid income taxes saw their rates go down and their tax breaks go up. Critics argued that the super-rich benefited most of all, and they did. But as George Bush explained, rich people paid most of the tax bill, so it only made sense that they got most of the benefits. At the bill’s signing, a jubilant Bush spoke: “The message we send today: It’s up to the American people; it’s the American people’s choice. We recognize, loud and clear, the surplus is not the Government’s money. The surplus is the people’s money, and we ought to trust them with their own money.”21 Two more major tax-cut laws would follow.
Bush walked triumphantly down the path Ronald Reagan had laid. And like Reagan, Bush seemed to believe that the massive deficits his tax policies created would force, over the long haul, a reduction in federal spending, even if Bush himself, again, like Reagan, was unwilling to do almost any of that cutting. President Reagan, in the words of his shell-shocked budget chief, had rung up deficits “as far as the eye can see,” thereby doubling the national debt. Bush made Reagan look like a piker; his tax-cut and big-spending policies added at a minimum $3.35 trillion to the amount of money the American government—a.k.a., the American people—owed to creditors.22 The nation of China was the largest among them. The ironic humor of the world’s largest communist, or at least quasi-communist, nation owning the biggest share of the world’s largest capitalist nation’s debt, while governed by a free market–loving conservative president, was lost on most Americans, whether they were liberal, conservative, or somewhere in the murky middle.
Tax policy was only one piece of the Bush administration’s fealty to the free market and respect for capitalism’s big winners. Big oil and other traditional energy businesses achieved major victories, too. Given Bush and Vice President Cheney’s long-standing ties to the industry, and the immediate appointment of dozens of other people associated with the conventional energy producers, the administration’s respect for the wishes of oil, gas, and coal companies surprised no one who followed politics. Cheney, who had stepped down as CEO of the Halliburton Corporation, a giant oil and gas services company, to join the Bush team, chaired a task force that met behind closed doors with industry representatives to chart a new course for the administration. Environmental restrictions on the energy sector were systemically dismantled, and new areas were opened up for oil drilling with more, including the Arctic National Wilderness Area, heartily recommended. Other extractive industries like timber and mining enjoyed the same relief from Clinton-era regulations and restrictions. Bush explained his thinking: “This new approach is based on the common-sense idea: that economic growth is key to environmental progress, because it is growth that provides for investment in clean technologies.”23 Translated into simple prose, this meant that the private enterprise system, not government regulation or federal support, would provide Americans with the environmental protections and future energy alternatives they needed. In the Bush White House, traditional energy and extractive industries were in the catbird seat, and government regulation–seeking environmentalists and alternative energy advocates had no place at the table.
Bush also dedicated himself to the religiously inspired policies he had openly advocated as a candidate. His appointments included many men and women drawn from the Christian Right, including his attorney general John Ashcroft, a speaking-in-tongues disciple of the Assembly of God, who thrilled like-minded audiences by telling them that in the United States there was “no king but Jesus” and that upon taking his major political offices he had followed the teachings of the Bible by anointing himself with oil as had King David. In the Bush administration prayer circles became commonplace in the corridors of power and the president frequently talked about the power of prayer and its sustaining force in his life and in the life of the nation. Bush quickly established an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, in an effort to channel social welfare funds to religious organizations that relied on prayer, proselytizing, and other forms of spiritual faith to help people in need. One of Bush’s first acts as president was to demonstrate his allegiance to the right-to-life movement. He overturned President Bill Clinton’s international family planning policy, returning to the restrictions created by the Reagan administration: any organization that condoned, performed, or even informed women about their legal right to have an abortion was ineligible for American funding; this ruled out almost all of the most well-established international programs. Later, Bush appointed as chief of federal family-planning programs a man who had served at a Christian pregnancy counseling center that declared “that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.”24 Most controversial, Bush decided to forbid most federal funding of stem cell research, arguing that taking the cells from frozen embryos, even though the embryos were scheduled to be discarded after fertility treatments, was essentially the same as abortion. Bush spoke to the American people on the subject: “… human life is a sacred gift from our creator. I worry about a culture that devalues life, and believe as your president I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world.”25 Bush regularly consulted with evangelical Christian leaders and announced that he supported the antievolution movement, telling Americans that if science students were instructed in evolutionary biology they should also be taught the religiously inspired belief that life forms were created by “intelligent design.” Likewise, he supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a measure fervently supported by many of the president’s conservative Christian adherents. In ways that were symbolic but also programmatic, Bush often rejected scientific experts’ advice and committed his presidency to the conservative religious values in which he and many of his most ardent supporters believed.
Bush’s first term was running along predictable, and not terribly exhilarating conservative lines right through September 10, 2001. Then, on September 11, for George Bush, at the very least, everything changed.
After the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the Bush presidency became almost singularly focused on fighting what the president called a Global War on Terror. Immediately after the attacks, the nation was paralyzed. Nearly every American had viewed the strikes on television. They watched as each of the two main towers of New York’s World Trade Center was rammed by a hijacked commercial airplane, caught on fire, and then collapsed, killing thousands, including hundreds of firefighters and police officers who had gone to rescue the men and women trapped in the buildings. They watched the Pentagon burn, also hit by a hijacked airplane, as bodies were pulled out of the rubble. The nation learned that another hijacked plane, probably headed for the U.S. Capitol, had crashed in Pennsylvania, downed as passengers fought the terrorists for control of the plane. Even thousands of miles away from the attack sites, even in small towns and cities, people feared for their lives. It was irrational, but millions of people needed to be reassured.
At the very first President Bush had appeared uncertain about what to do, and in a nationally televised speech that evening he had failed to deliver the words Americans needed to hear. Two days later, he had gone to “Ground Zero” in lower New York City, and he began to find his footing as the nation’s leader. Over a bullhorn, in brief, prepared remarks, he tried to simply thank the rescue workers and tell them that Americans were praying for “the people whose lives were lost here.” It was pretty uninspirational stuff. People shouted that they could not hear what the president was saying. Suddenly Bush came alive: “I can hear you! The rest of the world can hear you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”26 Bush was becoming a different kind of president.
Three days after the attacks, the American people observed a “National Day of Prayer and Remembrance,” and President Bush gave a major public speech at the pulpit of Washington’s National Cathedral. In what many have called his best post-9/11 speech, he explained his understanding of what had happened and what the United States must do in response: “… our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.… They have attacked America because we are freedom’s home and defender.” He concluded by calling on “God’s love. May He bless the souls of the departed. May He comfort our own. And may He always guide our country. God bless America.”27
America had faced such moments before. Roosevelt had steeled the nation after Pearl Harbor. John Kennedy, in his inaugural address had insisted that the Cold War demanded similar resolve. Both of those presidents had spoken with fervor and moral certainty. Roosevelt: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.… We will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.” Kennedy: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. This much we pledge—and more.”28 But Bush had sounded his trumpet with even greater vigor, telling his fellow Americans and people everywhere that the United States would not just “answer” the attacks and defeat a specific enemy as had Roosevelt and Kennedy. Bush would “rid the world of evil.” No liberal had ever framed America’s enemy in that way. Here was an extraordinary call to arms.
Bush repeated this religiously inflected conservative formulation again and again. By one count, Bush used the word evil, almost always as a noun, some one thousand times in public remarks made during his first year and a half as president.29 In a moving speech given at the United States Military Academy, he categorically rejected the kind of cultural relativism and situational ethics secular liberals had long used to explore the moral particularities of a given situation. In assessing 9/11, Bush saw no moral ambiguities: “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place.… There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name.”30 In the months after the 9/11 attacks, Americans, by a large majority, were exhilarated by Bush’s fiery certainties and moral absolutes.
Some on the Left tried to muddy the waters, rumbling about the United States’s many provocative interventions in the Middle East and reminding Americans that the Reagan administration had supported the very same Islamic fundamentalist mujahidin during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan who were now being called evil-doers and terrorists. And around the world, even as most people in almost all nations sympathized with the American people, many found Bush’s moral absolutism absurd; these international critics believed it was the United States that had often used violence and coercion to take what it wished from other nations and to impose its will on other cultures. They responded to 9/11 by lecturing the United States: “The U.S. imperium policy has caused too much injustice in the world because the U.S. has grown to be a huge country with huge consumption needs,” said a leading Indonesian Muslim intellectual. “It is like a giant that needs too much.”31 And closer to home, many well-respected voices in Mexico argued that the United States had only gotten what it deserved, a position stated most bluntly, perhaps, by the Catholic bishop of Chiapas who observed, “Now they harvest what they have sowed.”32 Few liberals in the United States accepted such hard-hearted indictments, even as some, at least, were made uncomfortable by Bush’s religious formulations and by the moral absolutism that informed his policymaking. But, by and large, leading liberal politicians kept quiet except as to support the Bush administration’s War on Terror.
American intelligence agencies quickly ascertained that the 9/11 attacks had been devised by the shadowy Jihadist group, al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was part of a larger movement of Islamists, some of whom likewise embraced violent methods, and a great majority of whom did not, that meant to create theocratic governments based on Sharia, or Islamic law. These groups were overwhelmingly opposed to the consumerist-oriented, individual rights–based, secular lifestyles they associated with the West. They wanted the West out of the Middle East; they wanted Israel destroyed; they rejected gender equality; and they wished to make all people live under the codes of behavior, as they understood them, that had been established by the Islamic caliphate well over a thousand years earlier. Such views made the differences between American conservatives and liberals seem almost trivial.
Al-Qaeda was based in Afghanistan under the protection and support of the Taliban, the rulers of that nation’s Islamic theocratic government. On September 20, 2001, Bush appeared before a joint session of Congress and issued an ultimatum to the Taliban: turn over the leaders of al-Qaeda to the United States, close all terrorist training camps, arrest all terrorists in Afghanistan, and allow the United States to enter Afghanistan to police compliance. As the Taliban sought to negotiate with the Bush administration, the American people overwhelmingly supported the president’s firm stand. While tens of thousands of Americans did stage antiwar protests in the days after Bush’s threat of war, tens of millions approved of his call to arms. On October 7, as the Taliban continued to equivocate, the United States, supported by the United Kingdom, launched Operation Enduring Freedom, which was aimed at toppling the Taliban government and capturing or killing the al-Qaeda terrorists based in Afghanistan. By mid-November, the Taliban government had collapsed, and al-Qaeda terrorists were killed, captured, or on the run. Several key leaders of the Jihadist organization, including the group’s leader, Osama bin Laden, did escape, almost surely into the tribal areas of southeastern Pakistan. Despite that setback, the Afghan war had seemed successful; few Americans realized how tenuous the American-led victory over the Taliban was. As a result, according to polls, Americans approved of the job their president was doing by an extraordinary 90 percent.33
Well before the Bush administration launched Operation Enduring Freedom and even before the September 11, 2001, attacks, key administration officials, including the president, had begun to target another enemy: Iraq. Bush had made his concerns clear to the American people. In his January 29, 2002, State of the Union address, he warned of an “Axis of Evil,” which included the nations of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. These nations, he warned, all sought “weapons of mass destruction” which they “could” then give to terrorists to use against the United States. “[T]ime is not on our side,” warned the President, but he also offered Americans his assurance: “I will not wait on events while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”34 Like Barry Goldwater, President Bush envisioned a world in which American might cleansed the world of evil regimes so that the American people could live out their days in peace and security.
Over the next months the drumbeat toward war intensified. In June, before the graduating class of the United States Military Academy, President Bush declared, “Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. (Applause.) In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.… Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.” Bush and his administration had begun to urge the American people to accept “preventive” war as a new necessity in the Global War on Terror.
Bush believed that the American war against “evil-doers” served a purpose far greater than that of basic security. “For too long,” he told the American people, “our culture has said, ‘If it feels good, do it.’ Now America is embracing a new ethic and a new creed: ‘Let’s roll.’ In the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like.” The war, Bush was saying in so many words, had made America conservative. He continued, “We’ve come to know truths that we will never question: evil is real, and it must be opposed.”35 Here was a new American crusade (a phrase Bush used and then quickly discarded after being told that in parts of the Islamic world, the word crusade referred to medieval Christians’ attempts to defeat the forces of Islam).
The Bush administration focused its most heated rhetoric on Iraq. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice repeatedly claimed that the brutal Iraqi dictator had weapons of mass destruction and that he meant to use those weapons against the American people. Saddam, they warned, was conspiring with al-Qaeda, and Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction could be turned over to Osama bin Laden. Rice put the case bluntly: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”36 Conservative mass media outlets, the multitudinous offspring of Bill Buckley’s 1950s brain child, including FOX television news and radio megastar Rush Limbaugh, echoed the message of the dire threat Iraq presented in ever more alarming registers. Only through “regime change,” said President Bush could the destruction of the American people be averted.
An influential group of intellectual policymakers, known collectively as neoconservatives, urged the president forward. Some of these neoconservatives had been affiliated, in the pre–Ronald Reagan era, with the Democratic Party, and most, by and large, were moderate on social matters. But on foreign policy issues they were resolutely in the camp of hard-liners. The neo-cons rejected liberals’ post-Vietnam hesitation in using military force to pursue American interests. They believed that the United States faced implacable ideological enemies who presented an existential threat to the American people. Liberals refused to recognize the evil that ruled the hearts of America’s enemies. These neo-cons insisted that the United States had the right to act unilaterally against any and all international threats, and, even more, that the United States had a world-historical mission to spread the virtues of liberty.
The most passionate neo-con advocate of these policies was also the best placed: Paul Wolfowitz was the assistant secretary of defense. Back in 1997, he had joined the Project for a New American Century, founded by leading neo-cons William Kristol and Robert Kagen. They had formed the Project in response to President Bill Clinton’s cautious, multilateral foreign policy stance. They championed a far more aggressive use of America’s massive military power to eliminate American enemies and to spread American ideals across the planet. At the advent of the twenty-first century, Iraq was at the top of their enemies list. Long before 9/11, Wolfowitz and like-minded men had argued that removing Saddam Hussein from Iraq would quickly lead to the democratization of that country. Once people in other nations in the Middle East saw the virtue of the new Iraqi democracy, they too would choose the path of freedom and democracy.
President Bush was entranced by this vision. Here, he hoped, was an opportunity to remake the Middle East, safeguard Israel, and produce an American peace across the globe. That his father had failed to remake Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War was further reason to push forward to conclude unfinished business. It was compassionate conservatism on a global scale. A few conservatives in the mold of Robert Taft were horrified by the president’s embrace of the neo-con vision. Like Taft, they believed that the United States should take any measure necessary to safeguard the United States. If—and they wanted more evidence—Iraq was a danger, it should be neutralized. But the old-line conservatives could not imagine how the United States could transform Iraqi society into a democracy, nor did they believe it should. Had not Bush himself said during the 2000 election campaign that the United States should not be in the business of nation building? Cultural traditions, the bedrock of social stability, were long in the making. That was a core conservative belief, they thundered. Within the Bush administration these old conservative voices were ignored.
Conservatism, as a foreign policy approach, provided no clear direction to most specific policy decisions. But at least since the mid-1950s, most conservatives had embraced a shared understanding of the role of the United States in the world. The United States was an exceptional country. Those who opposed it opposed the world-historical virtues for which it stood, and thus America’s enemies were enemies of freedom, democracy, and liberty. Powerful members of the Bush administration, most of all muscular conservatives such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, did not necessarily agree with the neo-cons that the Middle East could—or even should—be transformed into a land of happy democracies. But they did believe that the United States had the unilateral right to exercise its military might to destroy threats to its national security and to expand American economic and political power where and when it could. So while the neo-con ideologues and the more hard-headed—and hard-hearted—conservative warhawks, especially Vice President Cheney, did not share the exact same foreign policy vision, both factions wanted to take out Saddam Hussein and establish a new government in Iraq. President Bush never saw any need to sort out the differences that underlay his different advisers’ motives and understandings; he simply embraced them all. So did most of the Americans who voted for him. In March 2003, President Bush went to war against Saddam Hussein.
The war went well. The army of Iraq was quickly destroyed, and Saddam was deposed. In a few weeks time the United States was in control of the nation of Iraq. But the neo-cons and the Bush administration had been wrong about the Iraqi people. Vice President Cheney, using rhetoric drawn from the neo-cons in the Defense Department, had assured the American people that Iraqis would welcome the United States military as liberators and that Iraq would quickly become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. Instead, Iraq became a battleground, with Iraqi Shiites and Iraqi Sunnis at each others’ throats. Iraqis of many persuasions looked at the United States not as liberator but as conqueror. Iraqis, even as they fought each other, began to wage a war of liberation against the United States. Lured to the insurgency was an array of other non-Iraqi Islamic fighters, including elements of al-Qaeda. Iran, a Shiite regime, supported the Iraqi Shiites fighting the United States. Americans causalities mounted. Edmund Burke, the great conservative, would not have been surprised by the deadly cultural and religious terror unleashed by the American conquest, but President Bush was dumbfounded.
Still, as the 2004 election approached, Bush told the American people that they must stay the course. Though no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq and no ties had been discovered linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda or any terrorist acts against the United States, Bush insisted that the Iraq war was justified. In one of his rare press conference appearances, he read a prepared statement: “Above all, the defeat of violence and terror in Iraq is vital to the defeat of violence and terror elsewhere; and vital, therefore, to the safety of the American people. Now is the time, and Iraq is the place, in which the enemies of the civilized world are testing the will of the civilized world. We must not waver.” In response to a reporter’s skeptical question calling into doubt the rationale for the war, Bush was blunt: “Iraq is a part of the war on terror.… And it’s essential we win this battle in the war on terror. By winning this battle, it will make other victories more certain in the war against the terrorists.”37
Throughout the 2004 campaign, the Iraq war dominated the political debates. The Bush administration, led by Vice President Cheney, continued to argue that the war was necessary to protect the American people from terrorists and that the anti-American insurgents in Iraq were themselves terrorists dominated by al-Qaeda. That the war in Afghanistan continued to fester, that the Taliban was growing in strength, and that Osama bin Laden had not been killed or captured was largely ignored. President Bush, his campaign repeatedly stated, kept the United States safe; better to fight the terrorists in Iraq than in the United States. Bush’s Democratic opponent, the liberal Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, tried to make the deadly, “preemptive” war justified by the Bush administration on false and misleading information his major campaign issue. But Kerry failed to make his case.
Kerry was hampered by three major problems. First, the Bush campaign derided Kerry as just another Massachusetts tax-and-spend liberal. Despite the Clinton-Gore record, the label still stung. Second, Kerry’s opposition to the Iraq war was mocked as typical liberal “flip-flopping.” Kerry, said the Bush campaign, voted to fund the Iraq war, but now when the going had gotten tough, he wanted “to cut and run.” The Bush campaign argued that President Bush was unwavering in his beliefs but that Kerry, the liberal, had no clear standards or beliefs. Finally, Kerry was perceived by some voters, helped by the Bush campaign, as a “limousine liberal” whose personal fortune and lifestyle (he spoke French) distanced him from the problems and concerns of everyday Americans. Somewhat bizarrely, conservative supporters of Bush also were able to turn Kerry’s Vietnam War experiences, which he featured in his campaign, against him. Kerry, unlike most of his peers at Yale, had volunteered for naval service during the war and had seen major combat. He had won the Silver Star and received three Purple Hearts for his battlefield wounds. Later, however, after returning home from the war, Kerry had thrown himself into the antiwar movement and had helped to lead Vietnam Veterans against the War. A series of brutal and misleading ads raised doubts about Kerry’s valor and chastised him for protesting the war. Though Kerry supporters saw his war service and then antiwar activism as evidence of his powerful moral conscience and his ability to change his views based on changing circumstances, conservatives, and some less ideological Americans, were appalled by Kerry’s adaptability. The ads chipped away at Kerry’s support.
On election day 2004, a narrow majority of American voters gave Bush their support. Bush strengthened conservatives’ hold on the South and the West. Still, Kerry won the West Coast, all of the Northeast, and all of the Great Lakes states except Indiana. Republicans also picked up three seats in the House and four Senate seats. Bush’s leadership in the War on Terror figured prominently in his victory. Despite the evident failures in policy and the false justifications of the preemptive war in Iraq, a majority of voters preferred the hard-line security measures proffered by President Bush and American conservatives.
Bush’s reelection was the highpoint of his presidency. One debacle after another followed that victory. His first failure came after he tried to use his three million–vote majority to push Congress to end the Social Security system created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Bush wanted to begin privatizing the system and end government control of America’s major old-age pension system. Individual American should, he insisted, be allowed to invest their own money as they saw fit to create their own pensions. While fellow conservatives rallied around Bush’s proposal to end liberalism’s most enduring program, few others did. Bush expended a great deal of his political capital in a losing fight.
A few months after Bush made his case against the Social Security system, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf States. The levees that protected New Orleans were breeched by the storm surge, and the city flooded. Nearly two thousand Americans, most of them poor and African American, were killed, and hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless. The Bush administration responded miserably to the horror. Michael Brown, the Bush appointee in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, turned out to be an incompetent. Like several other high-level Bush appointees, he had received his job because of his loyalty to Bush and the conservative cause, not because he had the requisite skills and devotion to government service to do his job well. Despite Brown’s clear failure, President Bush showed the same kind of unwavering faith in his people and principles that he was showing in the Iraq war. He went on record commending Michael Brown: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”38 Americans were not pleased by what they watched on their television sets, and some, at least, began to wonder if conservatives’ antigovernment rhetoric and policies had not gone too far. Sometimes, such as when a hurricane struck, and despite the fabled words of Ronald Reagan, a strong and competent government was not a problem; it was the solution.
Throughout 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 the Iraq war ravaged on. Vice President Cheney had once said that the war would cost Americans next to nothing: American troops would be welcomed, and Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the reconstruction of Iraqi’s broken nation. He was wrong. The total direct and indirect American costs of this war of choice totaled well over a trillion dollars by the end of 2008. More than 4,200 Americans had died, and more than ten times that many had been wounded by the end of 2008. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and its government had not assisted al-Qaeda. Nonetheless, Iraqis paid a brutal price for their inability to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein; an estimated one hundred thousand Iraqi men, women, and children died violent deaths as a result of the American invasion and occupation.
Americans watched the carnage go on year after year. They mourned the toll the war took on America’s servicemen and women. And they came to understand that the war had been based on lies. By 2008, a majority of Americans had lost faith in their president’s decision to wage a preventive/preemptive war on their behalf in a country that had, in fact, represented a limited threat to the national security. A majority had also become embarrassed and even disgusted by the harsh measures the Bush administration had taken against “enemy combatants” and men suspected of being terrorists. These measures included waterboarding, “enhanced” interrogation, and indefinite captivity without any rights or recourse. Conservatives’ hard line on “evildoers,” most Americans decided, had taken the United States in the wrong direction.
Then, with the Bush administration focused on the War on Terror, came the hardest blow of all. America’s economy had been based for some three decades, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, on the conservative principle of deregulation and belief in the power of the unrestrained free market to create jobs and prosperity. President Jimmy Carter had begun the deregulatory turn; Reagan had propelled it forward, focusing on the deregulation of the financial sector. Every president thereafter followed this conservative economic policy of reducing government discipline of the private sector. New Democrat Bill Clinton had certainly supported environmental and safety regulations, but he, too, had been an enthusiastic supporter of a deregulated financial sector. Bush was a true believer—but his administration did little more than follow the long-term conservative trajectory begun in the late 1970s.
Beginning in late 2007, things began to go wrong with America’s exuberant financial system. The core trouble occurred in the home mortgage industry, which had become an unregulated free-for-all. Myriad players, ranging from long-established banks to fly-by-night financial service businesses, used a mind-numbing array of mortgage “instruments,” from traditional thirty-year mortgages to “sub-prime” mortgages (a fancy name for high-cost loans to people with bad or even no creditworthiness), to offer most any adult who could sign his or her name money to buy property. Strangest of all, in retrospect, these individual loans were then bundled together, often with little regard for the actual riskiness of the various underlying mortgages, into huge public offerings, which were owned and traded by the world’s largest banks, pension funds, mutual funds, and even governments, often on highly leveraged terms. Buyers of these multiplying mortgage “instruments” believed that even if individual mortgages went bad, the foreclosed properties upon which the mortgages had been made would have sufficient value to keep anyone from actually losing money. In other words, as long as home prices kept rising, the system would work.
Prices did not keep rising. Like other capitalist bubbles before it—such as the 1929 stock market crash—prices had run too far ahead of underlying value. In this case, the inflated price of homes exceeded people’s ability to pay for the property, even with the fanciful mortgages America’s financial industry had created. Suddenly, too many people wanted out of their expensive homes, but they could not sell them for enough money to pay off their mortgages. So, as these “underwater” people stopped paying off their mortgages, the people who owned those mortgages also started losing money, and they could not sell the foreclosed properties for enough money to avoid losing their investment. Lots of people and businesses were suddenly losing lots of money. And since those individual mortgages had been bundled together and sold to major banks and pension funds and even governments, critical institutions in the United States and around the world began to go broke. The Bush administration had not created this mess, but it had done nothing to restrain or regulate it, either.39
As had happened in 1929, a relatively unrestrained and unregulated capitalism had created a catastrophe. The economy began to contract, people lost their homes, people lost their jobs, and many of America’s great banks and corporations collapsed or fell into bankruptcy. Conservatives had long argued that the free market best disciplined the American people: by rewarding hard work, good ideas, and smart economic risks, the free market produced national prosperity and individual fortunes. By the summer of 2008, Americans began to reconsider their long adventure in unregulated free market economics. As the economy tumbled, the conservative economic principles heralded by conservative leaders from Robert Taft through George W. Bush lost much of their creditworthiness in the political marketplace. The liberal economist Robert Kuttner did his best to write the obituary for conservative economics: “The current carnage on Wall Street, with dire spillover effects on Main Street, is the result of a failed ideology—the idea that financial markets could regulate themselves. Serial deregulation fed on itself.… [T]he public should never again forget that this needless collapse was brought to us by free-market extremists.”40 According to the Gallup Poll, on election day 2008, the lame-duck President George Bush enjoyed an approval rating of just 20 percent of the American people.
An extraordinary, if unlikely, liberal politician was the beneficiary of the implosion of the Bush presidency and the debacle of modern American political conservatism. Barack Hussein Obama, the half-black and half-white, very junior senator from Illinois, had run his entire campaign for the presidency attacking the conservative principles of George W. Bush. His campaign had first gained traction in 2007 based on Obama’s long-standing and unequivocal opposition to the preemptive war in Iraq. Obama insisted that America was safer when it acted in concert with other nations and not unilaterally. He insisted that diplomacy, not bellicosity, was the answer to America’s international problems. Iraq, he said, was the wrong war, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons. By mid-2008, Obama’s stand, which he had held since 2002, was shared by a majority of Americans. His out-spoken leadership, backed by his remarkable eloquence on the issue, enraptured liberals and increasing numbers of political moderates.
Obama had been equally blunt in his critique of the deregulatory economic principles of modern conservatism. In early 2008 in New York City, the heart of America’s financial system, Obama demanded a return to a more disciplined approach to free market regulation. He blasted the Bush administration: “Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.… Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework, we simply dismantled the old one—aided by a legal but corrupt bargain in which campaign money all too often shaped policy and watered down oversight.”41
In Obama’s campaign stump speech, his words echoed those of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1933, with the Great Depression in full fury, Roosevelt had condemned the quasi-laissez-faire economics that had long ruled the United States: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”42 In October 2008, with more than 750,000 jobs already lost that year and most of America’s largest banks crashing, Obama told the American people that it was time for change: “We need policies that grow our economy from the bottom up, so that every American, everywhere has the chance to succeed. Not just the person who owns the factory but the men and women working on the factory floor. Not just the CEO, but the secretary and the janitor. If we’ve learned anything from this economic crisis, it’s that we’re all connected; we’re all in this together. We’ll rise and fall as one nation, as one people.”43
Obama’s self-described conservative Republican opponent for the presidency, Arizona Senator John McCain, and his running mate, the folksy, social conservative Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, blasted Obama as a socialist. Later, conservative evangelical and onetime presidential aspirant Mike Huckabee accused Obama of following in the footsteps of “Lenin and Stalin.” And former conservative Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich looked at Obama’s economic plans and warned the American people that an Obama presidency had all the makings of a “dictatorship.”44 It was Roosevelt redux; all these charges had been made against FDR and his New Deal. And as was true in the Roosevelt campaign in 1932, a majority of the American electorate was no longer listening to such charges.
Obama called himself a progressive, not a liberal. And unlike most of the liberal politicians who had preceded him—though not Franklin Roosevelt or “new” Democrat Bill Clinton—he made clear that his Christian beliefs played a fundamental role in his life. He showcased his lovely family before American voters, and, like George W. Bush, he admitted to past personal failings, if only to foreground the moral life and strong character he had developed over time. So, Obama was not an old-fashioned liberal, though as an African American candidate he was the recipient of liberals’ greatest civil rights triumph, the end of legal racial discrimination.
Even if Obama did not advertise himself as a liberal, his policies overwhelmingly were. He called for more government regulation of the economy to protect Americans against the fierce insecurities and depredations of the capitalist system. He rejected those who called on traditional values to castigate gay Americans and sneer at feminists. He spoke freely of a fully inclusive social compact and championed equality over individual liberty. Even as he spoke of his spiritual beliefs, he called for a reliance on scientific expertise and not religious orthodoxies in making public policy. Finally, he called for an end to the bellicose, unilateral foreign policy approach that had long characterized modern American conservatism. Obama promised to reach out to the rest of the world with an open hand, not a mailed fist.
Obama defeated his conservative Republican opponent John McCain for the presidency on November 4, 2008. No one called for a recount this time. Barack Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, holding the Northeast, the Pacific Coast, and the Great Lakes states, including Ohio. But Obama also cracked conservatives’ long hold on the South, winning Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina. And in the West he added New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. The House and the Senate also went strongly Democratic, creating a liberal-moderate majority in Congress.
George W. Bush had given modern conservatism a two-term presidency. But Bush’s military, international, domestic, and economic failures dealt the modern conservative movement a mighty blow. Some conservatives tried to explain away the 2008 defeat, arguing that Bush had not been a true conservative. They had a weak argument. Bush’s policy failures were conservative failures. In 2009, liberals, after many years out of power, would have their chance, again, to craft a political order. Conservatives, as many of them admitted publicly, could only hope that the liberal Obama presidency would fail so that they could, someday soon, try again. The modern conservative movement had fallen.