In the last two weeks, President Bush has come in for harsh
criticism, most pointedly from his conservative supporters.
Byron
York, writing repeatedly and effectively in National Review
Online, detailed the administration’s failure to support and defend
Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. as a nominee for the 5th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals. David A. Keene, chairman of the American
Conservative Union, quoted March 28 in the Washington Times’s
“Inside Politics,” said, “”Conservatives find it difficult to
understand why President Bush, who promised during his campaign to
veto just the sort of campaign-finance bill Congress sent to his
desk [McCain-Feingold], decided to sign it.”
And on April 1, the Weekly Standard’s
David Brooks, ordinarily so careful in laying the predicate,
exploded in an essay so overwrought that it looked like someone had
chopped off the first two paragraphs. It climaxed in this passage:
“After six months of wonderfully moral handling of the war,
suddenly Dick Morris seems to be running things. First there was
the dreadful decision on the steel tariffs, then the
McCain-Feingold maneuver, and then the cynical turn of our policy
in the Middle East.” Rough stuff.
Any of these questions may be legitimately debated. But critics
have lost sight of the essential George W. Bush. Like Ronald
Reagan, he keeps his eye on a couple of big things. For now, Bush
has decided he can accomplish two of those big things. He can
defeat terrorism abroad, while, at home, he can regain control of
the Senate for Republicans. For the rest, he’ll bob and weave, and
do his best to avoid consuming conflicts with the
Democrat-controlled Senate or the mainstream media.
That decision may be argued — and indeed, it is being argued,
loudly — but critics ought to allow that it is a decision, not
just a default position, and not simply weakness. In fact, it
represents a political strategy of breathtaking brinksmanship and
long-range vision. Both at home and abroad, in the Bush view,
America confronts a kind of eschatological crisis — the end times,
literally, for a certain kind of world and domestic
civilization.
Abroad, that’s easier to see. Behind all the tut-tutting about
the Bush foreign policy (“de-stabilizing the region,” etc.) lies a
very real fear, a fear Bush is willing to confront, and that his
critics are not: World civilization itself will be re-shaped by
American actions. If it is not re-shaped by American action, it
will be re-shaped by American inaction. Bush has bitten down firmly
on this bullet. If, in doing that, he remains more than a little
tight-lipped, we should not be surprised. This is not a recap of
1991, or 1967, or 1948, or any of the other oft-tolled dates in
Mideast history. This is 1941.
At home, there is a crisis of end-times proportions in the
political world. Republican and Democrat operatives alike looked at
the famous USA Today red-and-blue map of Election 2000, and in it
they read the lineaments of political doom. Democrats saw Texas and
Florida governed by Bushes, and knew they could not control the
country with just California, New York, and the Volvo states — the
rest of the map was hopeless. Republicans saw that, if Democrats
buried Texas and Florida the way they had flooded California —
primarily via Hispanic immigration — the GOP would be reduced to
permanent minority status, and the federal system would effectively
come to an end, as the country was ruled by the seaboard
elites.
Tactically, this political Armageddon focuses on the judiciary
and on law enforcement. As often observed, the key elements of the
liberal agenda — abortion, affirmative action, the tobacco
lawsuits, environmental activism — never could have gained
traction through representative voting. The program required a
judicial end-run, and activist judges to implement it. From the
Democrats’ perspective, the judiciary and law enforcement look very
different. They’re trying to get away with something. Seen from
that angle, the Democrats’ Bolshevik solidarity in defending
President Clinton was an absolute necessity. If Republicans could
bust a Democrat President, they could bust anybody. And Democrats
are legally vulnerable for the various frauds (campaign finance,
voting) that support their majorities in states like Missouri,
Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan. Thus the high-profile
mau-mauing of Republicans by the Carvilles and Shrums and
McAulliffes of the DNC. They cannot allow the Republicans to feel
confident in their control of the Justice Department or of the
various U.S. Attorney offices throughout the country.
Electorally, the end-game battle focuses on the Spanish-speaking
immigrant population of the U.S., the largest single
foreign-language immigrant group ever to enter this country. George
W. Bush thinks he can win votes in this constituency. Democrats are
outraged that he would even try. On March 23, speaker emeritus of
the California state assembly Antonio Villaraigosa, delivering the
Democrats’ weekly radio address, “blasted” (in the words of the Los
Angeles Times’ headline) Bush for “an orchestrated strategy to
curry favor with Latino voters in the United States.” The unspoken
outrage? “Those are our voters. You can’t do that.”
Will the two-pronged Bush strategy work? Some serious
conservative observers (like John O’Sullivan) think the Spanish
voter strategy is silly, that the Democrats’ welfare state appeals
will trump Republican economic and moral values every time. The
President obviously thinks otherwise. His brother has married a
Spanish-speaking woman and converted to Catholicism; George W.
himself speaks rapid fluent commercial Texican, and he has a feel
for the Mexican people and a friend in the Mexican President.
But there should be no doubt about what he’s up to. Bush himself
said it, as reported by Reuters on March 27: “These Senate races
are very important for me. I want the Republicans to take control
of the Senate.”
Without the Senate, the President can’t take full control of the
executive branch. He cannot appoint the judges who will stall the
liberal agenda, and entertain the prosecution of Democrat crimes.
And with a Democrat Senate echoing the mainstream press, he cannot
successfully ignore the media, with its Tar Baby issues like
campaign finance reform.
So when the news turns troublesome, at home and abroad, and the
President seems to playing it cute, a little understanding is
called for. George W. Bush thinks he knows how to win. So far, it
seems that he does. He also knows how not to lose. Contemporary
political discourse is dominated by the delusional: campaign
finance reform, racial profiling, global warming, second-hand
smoke, and all the rest. For a Republican President, it’s a Brer
Rabbit play, a mug’s game, to take on any of these issues without a
Republican Senate as backstop. The press would tie him in knots,
and the Democrats in the Senate would help.
George W. Bush will not kick those Tar Babies. Not now.
