Incompassionate Conservatism

The Demise of Compassionate Conservatism
Bush finds himself up a creek without a political philosophy.
By Bruce Reed
Updated Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005, at 2:21 AM PT


We Have a Loser: Earlier this week, neo-con Bill Kristol told the Washington Post that almost every Republican he had spoken to was disappointed in Bush's performance. By evoking broad disdain for the administration's response from Republicans and Democrats alike, Bush has finally kept his promise to be a uniter, not a divider.

Usually, the blame game is a loser for both parties. However, when Republicans and Democrats can make common cause against a common enemy, like the federal government or hapless FEMA Director Michael Brown, there is more than enough blame game to go around.

Among the many illusions that washed away over the past week is one that was particularly precious to Bush: the long-lost and perhaps now never-to-be-seen-again political philosophy of compassionate conservatism.

For close political observers, this is hardly news. As a movement, compassionate conservatism always seemed like a leap of faith by an awfully small group of true believers, such as Bush's longtime speechwriter Michael Gerson and his first choice to head the faith-based initiative, Prof. John DiIulio.

DiIulio quit in late 2002, telling Esquire that the Bush White House cared only about politics, not policy. "There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism," he said. Gerson still believes, but now he's stuck working on domestic policy for a White House that tries not to have one.

As an agenda, compassionate conservatism died by Bush's own hand in May 2001, when the president called for a new war on poverty the same week he threatened the Senate he would veto anything less than his full tax cut. If LBJ's war on poverty came to an unsatisfactory, Vietnam-like conclusion, Bush's war on poverty was a Bay of Pigs fiasco: Poverty won, the battle was lost before most knew it had started, and many Republicans swore to themselves they'd never get involved in an endeavor like that again.

No Child Left Behind – the aspect of compassionate conservatism about which Bush seemed to care most sincerely – has run smack into the same force that has bedeviled him on Katrina: his administration's own bureaucratic incompetence. The rest of Bush's innovative (if woefully underfunded) campaign agenda had all the hallmarks of a governor and gave way to a Republican Congress that quickly ditched compassionate conservatism in favor of what Jacob Weisberg calls interest-group conservatism. Moral leadership that was supposed to come from Gerson and DiIulio came instead from the likes of Jack Abramoff and Ralph Reed, who didn't even feel compassion for clients paying them millions of dollars.

Brain-Dead Politics: Still, the Bush White House defiantly kept compassionate conservatism on life support, even though its best days were behind it. Bush's can't-do list grew longer—no faith-based bill; no welfare reform bill; no tax cuts for charity—but the speeches kept coming.

Why keep the faith? Because for Bush and his political team, compassionate conservatism was never primarily about a policy agenda. First and foremost, it was a political project. Just as Peggy Noonan had coined "a kinder, gentler nation" to inoculate Bush's father against the dark side of Reaganism, Karl Rove and company used Gerson's doctrine of compassionate conservatism to imply that George W. Bush wouldn't be another Gingrich Republican.

As a short-term political project, it worked famously. Bush's 2000 convention speech was a triumph. During that campaign, Bush gave the appearance of softening conservatism's hard edges by criticizing House Republicans for trying to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit. Never mind that at the same time, he was making any compassion agenda impossible by giving trillions to those who didn't need it.

As a governing philosophy, however, it was a disaster—too much faith, not enough works. Bill Clinton had it pegged back in 1999, when he said:

This compassionate conservatism has a great ring to it, you know. It sounds sooo good. And near as I can tell, here's what it means: It means, "I like you. I do. And I would like to be for the patients' bill of rights, and I'd like to be for closing the gun show loophole, and I'd like not to squander the surplus and, you know, save Social Security and Medicare for the next generation. I'd like to raise the minimum wage. I'd like to do these things. But I just can't. And I feel terrible about it."

We're too close to the Katrina disaster to understand its lasting impact on the American psyche. America's initial response to Sept. 11 held out hope of more unity and less division, but soon, politics as usual returned with a vengeance. The undelivered promise of a kinder, gentler conservatism has endured almost 20 years despite a mountain of meaner, harsher evidence to the contrary. Moreover, despite high hopes that a stronger role for government will be back by popular demand, Democrats still have to earn that support with a compelling vision of what government can and cannot do and how America can do better.

Nonetheless, I remember how much the first President Bush suffered from the 1992 riots in South Central LA, as it dawned on people that his administration had no answers to the nation's festering problems. For a man whose vision was "a kinder, gentler nation," all the moral high ground was suddenly underwater.

With so much to grieve about these days, no one will mourn the passing of another hollow slogan. We can only hope that Republicans jockeying for their party's nomination next time around will take the demise of compassionate conservatism to heart and see it as a failure not just of competence, but of ideology.