The Scum at the Top
Commentary on the Rats in Washington
Bush is Losing Support on the Right
By Bob von Sternberg
StarTribune
page 1
© September 20, 2003
The criticisms of President Bush aren't surprising: He's bungling
the war in Iraq; his budget deficits are disastrous; he's
trampling civil liberties; his spending plans are misguided.
But the source of those criticisms is: They're increasingly
coming from conservatives.
Think tank studies, op-ed columns, talk radio callers and opinion
polls show conservatives' disenchantment with Bush's policies and
priorities has been climbing, although nowhere near as much as it
has among liberals. And although those dismayed conservatives
might rally round him in next year's presidential election, his
campaign aides are keeping a close eye on the trend.
"I hate to say they've got nowhere else to go, but I think most
conservatives will stick with the president," said former Rep.
Vin Weber, who is co-chair of Bush's reelection campaign in
Minnesota and four other states. "Conservative voters across
the country will conclude backing the president is imperative. Of
course, it's impossible not to have a few dissident voices."
One of those voices belongs to Daniel Cragg, a college student
from Eagan who in June launched a Web site called
conservativesagainstbush.com "to propound the conservative
principals this administration has forsaken."
The site has been averaging about 200 hits a day, Cragg said.
"The idea is to get the word out about how far off track he's
gotten," he said. "A lot of people are mad about what's going on."
Evidence of grumbling on the right can be gleaned from recent polls.
A Star Tribune Minnesota Poll this month found that 31 percent of
self-described conservatives gave Bush a thumbs down for the way
he's doing his job. That was up from 9 percent who disapproved
in April, days after the fall of Baghdad. The current disapproval
rate among conservatives is the highest the Minnesota Poll has
recorded in Bush's presidency.
Conservatives' displeasure has been growing nationally too. A
recent ABC News poll found that 23 percent of conservatives
nationwide disapprove of the job Bush is doing, up from 14
percent in April.
Such sentiments (along with considerably higher disapproval
ratings by moderates and liberals) shouldn't be surprising,
Weber said. "We've come off an summer of difficult news, what
with the economy and the post-war," he said. "If those things
were to continue and deepen, you'd start to worry. But the
opposite is true."
Besides, no president satisfies every member of his political
base all the time.
Minnesota conservatives' disapproval of Bush's performance has
seesawed, from as low as 3 percent immediately after the Sept. 11
attacks to 18 percent 10 months later. (And it's a bipartisan
phenomenon: Witness the fact that a month after Bill Clinton
became president, 19 percent of liberal Minnesotans disapproved
of his performance.)
"Every successful Republican president, including Ronald Reagan,
ends up criticized by a number of voices on the right who
complain he's not pure enough," Weber said. "Any compromise
is unacceptable to the m, but it's impossible to govern the
country with rigid ideological principles."
A similar point was made by Mitch Pearlstein, who heads the
Center for the American Experiment, a Minneapolis-based
conservative think tank. "There are indeed conservatives out
there who will complain about any officeholder who's not doing
precisely what they want him to do," he said. "These are early
seeds of disgruntlement, but they're still very faint."
Fuming
Conservatives universally praise Bush's relentless tax cutting
but have little good to say about the growth in government
programs, spending and budget deficits.
Pointing to this year's projected $455 billion budget shortfall
and proposals for a Medicare prescription drug benefit, Club for
Growth president Stephen Moore wrote this month: "Imagine that
Al Gore and a Democratic Congress were doing all this profligate
spending. Would conservatives stand for it? . . . Fiscal sanity
is in retreat, under a solidly Republican regime."
Federal spending last year grew by 7.9 percent, the highest in
a dozen years. Much of that is because of increased military
and homeland security spending in the wake of the 9/11 attacks,
but a double-digit increase in Medicaid spending has contributed
to the growth.
Cato Institute president Edward Crane fumed to the New York Times
this summer that Bush's "fiscal record is appalling -- spending
is out of control. The fiscal record of the Bush administration
makes Clinton look downright responsible."
Research recently published by the Brookings Institution, a
liberal-leaning think-tank, showed that the true size of the
federal workforce stood at 12.1 million in October 2002, up
from 11 million in October 1999.
Despite the Bush administration's claim that it has shrunk the
federal workforce, reductions have been more than offset by
"off-budget" jobs paid for with federal contracts and grants,
the study found.
An analysis last spring by the Cato Institute compared spending
during the first terms of Bush and Reagan and found that spending
grew in 11 categories under Bush and four under Reagan. While
spending on education, training, employment and social services
shrunk by 32.6 percent under Reagan's watch, it has grown by
26.8 percent under Bush's.
Assessing Bush's record, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan
recently wrote: "The Bush administration is actually a big
government liberal administration on fiscal policy. It likes
spending money; it takes on big projects; it's quite content
to borrow 'til the fiscal cows come home."
Some conservatives have blasted Bush for his quiet acquiescence
in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent ratifications
of affirmative action and gay rights. Others have complained
that he has not attempted to restrict the number of abortions
performed in the United States.
Conservatives of a libertarian bent have railed against the
Patriot Act and what they see as its threat to trample civil
liberties. And conservatives with isolationist beliefs have
blasted the war and occupation of Iraq.
Prominent among these is erstwhile Republican and former
presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. Now editor of the American
Conservative magazine, his lead editorial in the current issue
concludes that "the Bush administration's prosecution of the war
on terror has gone terribly, terribly wrong."
Twin Cities talk show host Jason Lewis has occasionally gotten
an earful from conservatives fed up with one or another of
Bush's policies.
"It's uneasiness, not open revolt," he said. "There's a limit
to conservatives' patience, but I don't think it's going to be
a huge problem in the election."
In many ways, Lewis said, Bush's domestic policies resemble his
father's, who was famously unable to hold onto conservatives'
allegiance.
The saving grace for the younger Bush is his tax-cutting zeal and
his war on terror, Lewis said. "Without the specter of war right
now, Bush would be getting many of the same criticisms his dad
got," he said. "Plenty of criticismson the spending side are
warranted, but the war on terror trumps all of that."
Bob von Sternberg is at vonste@startribune.com.
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