Change We Can Believe In: A Rambling Post-Mortem

When George Bush was inaugurated, I was twelve years old and in seventh grade. I have lived the twelve most meaningful and intellectually stimulating years of my life under him, forming my worldviews and political philosophies. Frankly, I feel a bit deprived from growing up in this era as I realize coming out of it that something was wrong. This is not the normal critique, but a deeper, more fundamental sense of unease coming from my memories of the last eight years.

The impetus for writing this is obviously the end of the Bush Presidency and Obama’s inauguration tomorrow. Yet, it came about as a combination of three stories which I was going to write about, that I realized was all just one story, the story of that unease.

The first was about Joe the Plumber and specifically this clip:

To put it simply, this is fucking stupid. To call it anything else is to couch it in terms that deny the level of idiocy presented by Samuel Wurzelbacher. First of all, this man started as a campaign prop. He asked a question which McCain seized upon and attempted to exploit to idiotic levels. From there, he has now decided that he is a war reporter and is qualified to give updates on the geopolitical struggles of the Middle East. I know that saying this makes me an elitist that Joe is fighting back against, but this is complete crap. He is nowhere near qualified and exists solely because conservatives think he pisses liberals off. A guy who was focused on taxes is now an expert in war.

This is part 1 of the Bush legacy. How many times did we hear what a great guy Bush was? He was an everyman who cleared brush. He wasn’t a brainiac like that boring nerd Al Gore or an elitist like that Kerry guy. His ascension to the presidency was a triumph for the average American. If the last eight years has showed us anything, it is of the vast need for expertise. Thank god Obama has surrounded himself with a highly impressive group of advisors who are willing to let intelligence and not gut thinking guide major decisions.

Even more than just the advisors though, it’s Obama himself. I first became aware of Barack Obama with his convention speech in 2004, just like most of the rest of you. I became a big fan and a supporter for the presidency after reading Audacity of Hope in December 2006, sitting in Borders. The big thing that that book had was a sense of self-awareness. I saw what it was like as a freshman senator to enter the Senate and the humility that he had about it. He understood how weird and new his celebrity was and how to effectively deal with it. I thought that his campaign was characterized by disengagement from the daily stupid stuff in campaigns and the media cycle. It was a disciplined campaign in message and execution of strategy which was extremely successful. This gives me hope.

The next major story I was going to bring up was a story of my personal contact with the powerful and the Bush Administration. This is Congressman Sherry Boehlert:

I’ve done some writing in the past, like here and here about the splits in the Republican Party and its current nature. Boehlert was one of the last of the old-school moderates. He was also Chair of the House Science Committee when I met him in 2005. Through a summer program called Presidential Classroom, we got to go on the floor of the House of Representatives and hear Congressman Boehlert talk to us about his role and the House of Representatives in general. That part’s a little hazy. What’s very clear to me was what came after. We were being hustled out of the chamber in order to start legislative business, but I managed to ask the Congressman a question on the way out. I knew he was pro-stem cell research and pro-choice and I asked him if he felt frustrated with the rest of his party on that issue and that stem cell research couldn’t get passed. He said yes and that he was doing his best to work against them. It was a big moment for me. I knew all about intra-party dissent, but to hear it articulated so simply by somebody with such power was extraordinary. He retired in 2006. He’s gone now.

Partisanship is not an evil. Our political system is based on fundamentally opposed interests and the bargains that result are the basis for all of the laws and statutes that govern our country. These are pushed through by the strongest of partisans, those with the firmest of passions who are willing to fight for what they believe in. Hard fought elections often determine these outcome and there is the idea that once in office, they will govern for the best interests of the country. This was what was really missing. I truly did not believe that Bush and the Republicans in Congress were looking out more for the interests of the country than for their party at all times and acted in a disgraceful, dishonorable, and utterly disillusioning manner contrary to custom and decency. The best example was the Department of Homeland Security. In general, Republicans were against the reorganization of government and Democrats were in favor of it. Yet, the Congress added in union-busting provisions at the last minute, making the 180,000 workers non-unionized. Democrats voted en masse against this new bill, but Republicans magically switched over. This was used as an electoral tactic then against Democrats in the 2002 elections, against those had voted against the new bill. Basically, this is not a party of Boehlert anymore. It is a party of mean-spirited and petty partisans who cared more about the Republican Party than putting forward an effective government. Examples abounded: The US Attorneys scandal, Justice Department Hiring and Monica Goodling, the Republican Congress’ utter lack of oversight of Bush Administration officials, and the burrowing of career employees into civil service positions on the way out the door. It’s disgusting and not normal. This behavior breeds the cynicism which makes people think that government can never work, causing more people to vote for Republicans. Obama is not that, putting it as simply as possible. If he does do this, I will be even more disappointed then now.

The final, and perhaps most important piece, comes here. This is a quote from the blog The Next Right, put together by Patrick Ruffini who was Bush-Cheney 04′s web director. He is a pretty self-aware Republican who actually recognizes how badly the Republicans got trounced the last two cycles and recognizes their major problems. As a result, the blog is interesting to read most of the time. This is a quote from his post-mortem here:

In listing some of these successes, it strikes me that Bush was conservative on all the issues conservatives were equipped to enforce conservatism: taxes, national security, judges, life. These are usually very simple, up-or-down issues where conservatism or liberalism is easily identified, and pledges signed and issue groups organized. It is not that Bush wasn’t authentically conservative on these things, because he came up in a much more conservative milieu than his father. It’s that conservatism failed to articulate clear conservative ideals — and the means to enforce them — on a whole swath of other issues that the form the vast majority of government policymaking.

On these issues — education, health care, housing, and spending writ large — Bush was consensus-driven at best, seeking to apply conservative rhetoric to an environment where real spending cuts were inconceivable. The lone exception was Social Security, where Bush bravely opted for reform and Congressional Republicans cowardly demurred. They said if we pushed Social Security reform, we would lose the 2006 elections. Well, we pushed Social Security reform and lost the 2006 elections — for reasons completely unrelated. Had we been more serious, the Republican Congress actually might have accomplished something serious before exiting.

Faint-hearted Republicans were able to get away with this because there was no comparable infrastructure in the Bush years to enforce discipline and reform on everything related to expenditures in the same way that we have on simple issues like taxes and life. This is a major challenge for the conservative movement going forward if we are going to articulate a conservative vision for smaller government, but only have the political muscle to create a half-assed tax-cut-and-spend regime. We need to have defined positive ideas on health care, on Social Security, and on entitlements that we will actually enforce once we return to power. Bush maxed us out on the gamut of conservative litmus test issues, and it still wasn’t enough.

The blog is about remaking the right and the Republican Party. His problem was that there weren’t any litmus tests on these issues. His ideal vision, keeping in mind he is one of the reasonable ones, is a series of lockstep House and Senate members who are punished for any straying from orthodoxy. The world we have now where Republicans accuse Democrats of being traitors on national security issues, baby killers on social issues and judges, and economy killers on the tax issue is his ideal world. This blows my mind. It is absolutely extraordinary to me. Terry Schiavo was one of the low points of the Bush Presidency, not just because of the wildly unjustified intervention, but because of how many went along with it. Ruffini wants the world divided into easy yes/no, black/white divisions where compromise is wrong and can never happen. This is their ideal world and his main critique of Bush

We needed Obama. This post is about the complete failure of the Bush administration and how it made things go so wrong. I believe in Obama. My hope was not some grand vision of utopia, but a grand vision of normalcy. It was one of cooperation. Not everything I want to happen will happen, but a lot would. It would be a government that I could really be proud of. This was my only chance because I certainly didn’t get one for the last eight years.