The 1991 Bush tax increase and Harriet Miers.
If you really want to understand the importance of the
conservative base of the Republican Party, and more importantly
understand why conservatives are pausing carefully over the choice
of their prospective 2008 presidential nominee, look no further
then the firestorms surrounding the 1991 Bush tax hike and Ms.
Miers.
Often overlooked in conservative lore is the importance of the
1988 GOP presidential nomination. The field included Ronald
Reagan’s Vice President, George H.W. Bush. His main antagonists
were then-Senator Bob Dole, Congressman Jack Kemp, former Delaware
Governor Pete DuPont, and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson.
After the usual tussle, Bush won, presenting himself successfully
to voters as Reagan’s heir. He went on to win a considerable
victory over liberal Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.
Almost immediately the Bush presidency began to go off the
rails.
Why? The suspicions conservatives had long held of Reagan’s vice
president were that Ronald Reagan’s loyal vice president or not,
Bush was in reality a card-carrying member of the Eastern liberal
Republican establishment. While he could talk a good game, if and
when push came to shove the gentlemanly Bush was either too
philosophically rudderless, stylistically disdainful, or far too
eager to go-along-to-get-along with liberalism, or all of the
above. He would, so went the concern, sell conservatism short once
seated in the Oval Office on his own.
This was, of course, exactly what began to happen even before
Bush was inaugurated. Stories flew in conservative circles that the
new president-elect, participating in the last Reagan-Gorbachev
summit on Governor’s Island in New York harbor, had confided in
Gorbachev that he considered some of Reagan’s conservative team to
be “thugs.”
WHILE IT WAS PERFECTLY NORMAL for a new president to want his own
team staffing his administration, there seemed to be a deliberate
blind spot that confused the conservative base with Reaganites, not
understanding that the latter were in fact also the former. “This
is the Bush administration, not the Reagan administration,” huffed
one senior Bush aide to a reporter, unable to grasp that Bush had
been elected, as had Reagan, on a conservative platform. A visiting
Reaganite being guided down the halls of the Old Executive Office
Building was advised quietly that the Reagan tie clasp he was
wearing was forbidden among the new crowd.
Inevitably, the political ship of state hit the iceberg. It came
in the form of the now-infamous breaking of the Bush pledge that he
would never sign on to a tax increase. Egged on by his team of
non-conservatives headed by then-Treasury Deputy Secretary Richard
Darman, Bush broke his famous “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge.
His conservative support melted and the rest, as they say, was
history. Very instructive history. The President’s 90% favorability
ratings after the Gulf War vanished. Then came the Pat Buchanan
primary challenge, followed by the Perot candidacy and finally,
almost inevitably, the dawning of the Clinton era.
By 2000, as fate would have it, Bush’s eldest son set out to be
the conservative champion, vividly aware of where his father went
astray. Karl Rove made it a point to cement the then-Texas
Governor’s relations with conservatives. Yet even so, when the
moment came to fill an all-important Supreme Court vacancy, Bush
ignored dozens of highly credentialed men, women and minorities in
the conservative movement to select the philosophically challenged
Harriet Miers.
Exactly as occurred with his father, rebellion in the
conservative ranks ignited. The difference, of course, is that this
Bush White House, however grudgingly, understood its mistake. Miers
was pulled and replaced with conservative favorite Sam Alito.
SO WHAT DOES ANY of this history, recent and ancient, have to do
with the 2008 presidential nomination? Everything.
There is a reason the pro-life John McCain came in a dismal
fifth in the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)
straw poll. There is a reason Rudy Giuliani came in second, that
the thunderous cheers were reserved for non-candidate conservative
hero Newt Gingrich, and that Romney opponents were handing out
flip-flop sandals to symbolize the ex-Massachusetts governor.
Each in their own way, McCain, Giuliani and Romney are viewed as
capable, either deliberately and with malice, or by accident out of
insufficient dedication to principle, of turning on conservatives.
How? By raising taxes or putting liberals and suspected
pro-choicers on the bench — the mistakes of the Bushes father and
son. And if and when that happens, as with the 1991 tax hike and
the nomination of Miers, conservatives will turn on the new
president in a heartbeat.
In the middle of what all sides agree is a dangerous national
security threat that goes to the very heart of the country’s
safety.
Yet no one with any experience in the conservative movement
believes conservatives will simply roll over while a President
McCain raises taxes or if a President Giuliani appoints pro-choice
judges to the bench or a President Romney tries to appease liberals
on policy as he did by denying Ronald Reagan in his Senate race
against Ted Kennedy.
Conservatives are in fact not simply the base of the modern
Reaganized Republican Party, they are its heart and soul. The real
stars at the CPAC meeting were not candidates Romney, Giuliani,
Brownback, Gingrich, McCain, Gilmore, Huckabee, Hunter or Cox. The
real stars were the stunning crowd of over 6,000 rank-and-file
conservative attendees. How the candidates play ball with the
conservative base that was represented by all those activists will
be not simply the key to the nomination — it will be the key to
success in the White House.
Or failure. And if you don’t believe that, you can go read up on
the second term of the first President Bush when you aren’t reading
the latest Supreme Court opinion from Justice Harriet Miers.
