Posted by
Bruce Bartlett on Tuesday, June 05, 2007 8:48:21 AM
I see that liberal columnist Glenn Greewald has an article out this morning condemning all the conservatives who praised George W. Bush to the sky when his poll ratings were in the stratosphere, but have turned on him viciously now that his polls are in the tank:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/06/04/fraud/index.htmlI think he has a point. It's not so much that they are down on Bush just because he is unpopular. But I do think a lot of conservatives overlooked his mistakes when he was riding high. Now, like Claude Raines in "Casablanca," they are shocked, shocked to discover that Bush has been regularly betraying conservative principles for 6 1/2 years.
To the extent that they are just covering their own butts, these conservative Johnny-come-latelys to Bush realism deserve all the scorn Greewald heaps on them. But Greenwald would have strengthened his argument by noting that some conservatives have seen Bush for what he is from Day One. I would mention particularly Pat Buchanan and the writers for
The American Conservative magazine, who had the guts to attack Bush when he was riding high.
Greenwald should also note that everyone has their threshold. I have written many times about how the tipping point for me was the Medicare bill in 2003. Before that, I tended to see the glass as half full as far as Bush was concerned; afterwards, I saw it as half empty. In other words, for the first 2 1/2 years of the administration, I gave Bush the benefit of a doubt, viewing his anti-conservative actions, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, as the sort of inevitable concessions to political necessity that all politicians make. I concentrated instead on things like the Bush tax cuts, which I thought compensated for a lot of mistakes in other areas.
But after Bush rammed the grossly expensive Medicare bill through Congress, steamrolling conservative opposition in the process, I started focusing more attention on his mistakes and saw less virtue in his efforts to enact conservative reforms, such as privatizing Social Security. Eventually, it became clear to me that the defining characteristic of Bush's presidency wasn't so much his routine abandonment of conservative principles, but his utter ineptness. The Miers nomination, the Katrina mess and the increasingly obvious incompetence of so many high level Bush appointees began to overwhelm me.
My point is that even for someone like me, who has been highly critical of Bush for many years and even wrote a book attacking him from the right, the conversion from Republican loyalist to Bush critic didn't happen all at once. It took time and some issues impacted me more forcefully than others. The immigration bill has impacted many conservatives the way the Medicare bill affected me, and they have finally had their eyes opened. Rather than criticize them for being so slow to realize the truth, people like Greenwald ought to be welcoming them to the fold. Saying "I told you so" is not a good way of attracting allies. "Better late than never," I say.
Addendum:
Ross Douthat addresses the question of how conservatives ought to deal with Bush today:
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/06/bushism_compassionate_conserva.php#more