Rising Freshman
Bush at Year One.

By Ramesh Ponnuru, NR Senior Editor
From the January 28, 2002, issue, of National Review

hat President Bush has done a splendid job as a war leader, by now, goes without saying. On all the big decisions, he made the right calls. He also quickly became an eloquent spokesman for national resolve. Bush's stratospheric approval ratings reflect not only the public's instinct to rally around a leader in a crisis, but its appreciation for his actual performance. He has been better than many people expected.

Bush's leadership since September 11, however, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that he was having a fairly successful first year in office even before the attacks. While most liberals appreciate what Bush has done over the last four months, there is here and there carping to the effect that Bush was flailing about before the attacks, which came in the nick of time for him.

In particular, the war is said to have helped Bush by disarming liberals who wished to argue that he was an idiot and an illegitimate president. But these arguments were never likely to prevail with voters. Liberal pretensions to intellectual superiority have a consistent track record of failure. Democrats played the IQ card against Eisenhower, Reagan, and W. himself. Each time they merely reinforced their association with an arrogant mandarin class while burnishing Republicans' populist credentials. The argument from Florida, meanwhile, wrongly assumed that voters would be eager to rehang chads in 2002 and 2004. Liberals' abandonment of these tactics is a good thing for them and bad for Bush.

It's true that Bush had some political problems before the war; some of them have been erased, others eclipsed (perhaps temporarily). The public was not fully sold on him. This had nothing to do with Florida, except in the sense that his lack of decisive support in 2000 made Florida possible. It was more that Bush didn't quite fill the stage. He now does, not least because he is on stage more often.

Other potentially damaging issues have receded in importance but could resurface. Bush is, for one thing, overidentified with the interests of corporate America. His failure to devise a sustainable environmental politics is both a contributor to and a result of that problem, as well as being a vulnerability in its own right. On health care, his agenda has been reactive and inadequate. His domestic cabinet generally lacks figures as substantial as Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice. (Quick: Name the education secretary.) His policies on taxes, trade, and regulation had not been devised or presented as a compelling response to economic conditions.

Right before the attacks, the administration was beginning to show signs of drift. The White House was said to be on the verge of launching an ill-considered initiative called "communities of character," wherein the awesome power of the federal government would be deployed to help grandmothers use e-mail to stay in touch with their families.

But none of these problems was insuperable. None of them compared to those besetting Bill Clinton at the same stage of his presidency. The Travelgate, Whitewater, and Troopergate stories all blossomed in 1993. Clinton's stimulus bill was defeated, as was his attempt to let open homosexuals serve in the military. Time ran a cover story on him as "the incredible shrinking president."

From time to time during 2001, liberal journalists would say, wishfully, that some Bush initiative would be his version of gays-in-the-military. Among the candidates were his decision to restore the ban on funding for groups that perform or promote abortion overseas, his tax cut, and his delay in reducing arsenic levels in water. But Clinton got into trouble because he tried to do things as president for which his 1992 campaign had not prepared the country. He ran pledging a tax cut, and raised taxes. Repealing the military's ban on gays became a priority only after the campaign. Bush faced no such danger. His policies on taxes, abortion, and the environment were extensively debated during 2000. By and large, President Bush has merely tried to deliver on the promises of Candidate Bush.

He has gone a long way toward fulfilling those promises, both before and after September 11. His most important policy victory was, of course, his tax cut, which passed without much alteration. Its design could be faulted, but it was the first reduction in income-tax rates in 20 years. It is already altering the political terrain in Bush's favor: Democrats are complaining that there's not enough money left in the budget for all their favored "investments." (Bush's father, by contrast, saw the Senate sink his signature economic policy, a capital-gains tax cut, in his first year.)

Bush has triumphed on missile defense. Withdrawing from the ABM treaty in January 2001 would have provoked howls from liberals, including the media. Instead, the administration kept saying it was thinking about leaving. By the time it made the decision final, it was old news and the outrage was muted.

Even on issues where President Bush adopted a defensive strategy, he was able to get tactical wins. Democrats had hoped to embarrass Bush by passing a version of the "patient's bill of rights" that he opposed. He surprised them by splitting the coalition behind the bill — resulting in a stalemate.

When Bush has tripped up or missed opportunities, it has usually been because of his reluctance to engage in partisan fights. He hasn't yet issued a single veto, which has emboldened his opponents. The airport-security bill was a fiasco, with the administration making its preferences clear too late in the game, and then caving.

Bush may have learned this lesson, as evidenced by his recent disputes with Tom Daschle over the stimulus bill. Bush has always aspired to be a leader above the parties, and the war increased his desire and ability to play that role. But Daschle's obstruction of the stimulus bill, of other bills, and above all of judicial nominations seems to have convinced Bush that he has to play hardball. Already, the president has managed to pin the blame on the Democrats for the failure to enact a stimulus. He thus ended 2001 with political momentum. His popularity will help him win partisan fights this year, too, especially if Daschle continues to overreach.

Bush can build on his success this year. He will continue the war on terror. He should also challenge Congress to show the world how civilized countries solve their problems by using democracy and free markets. Welfare reform has made a dent in longstanding social ills; it comes up for re-authorization in 2002. We can modernize entitlements, too, and end such lingering injustices as partial-birth abortion. Americans' new confidence in their political institutions need not be simply reduced to confidence in big government — not if Bush outlines a can-do conservatism as an alternative.

Bush's continued success is obviously important to conservatives. He has achieved, or advanced, important conservative goals. On taxes, missile defense, judicial nominations, Social Security, and trade, conservatives can applaud him. Bush's black marks include the education bill, the airline-security measure, the apology to China after the spring hostage incident, and the surrender to political pressure to stop military training in Vieques.

His record on two other issues is mixed. The faith-based initiative got off to a bumpy start. All the emphasis was on its most worrisome feature, the invitation to small religious charities to join the hustle for federal grants. On stem cells, Bush created a political headache for himself by leaving his position open for several months instead of sticking with his pro-life campaign position. When he finally resolved the controversy, however, he did so with a principled compromise and the most articulate and high-profile defense of the sanctity of life from a president since Ronald Reagan wrote "Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation."

Conservatives can be happy with the general tenor of the administration as well. Bush does not govern with an eye nervously over his shoulder at the editorial page of the New York Times. Perhaps he would have been more likely to "grow in office" — i.e., become more liberal — if liberal elites had tried to seduce him. Instead, after Florida, they were out to get him from the start of his term.

Conservatives' complaints with Bush are more often strategic than ideological. Indeed, anyone who is happy with the conservative movement as it stands should be happy with this administration. They should be happy, too, with the Republican party, which is now about as programmatically unified as political parties get. Bush has even begun to occupy some of the space in conservatives' hearts that used to be reserved exclusively for Ronald Reagan, whose inauguration is now closer in time to John F. Kennedy's than to our own day.

But Bush and the conservative movement share weaknesses: a reluctance to challenge liberal pieties concerning race; failure to exploit the full potential of the new investor class; blindness to the costs of continuous mass immigration; lack of zeal to shrink government; a reactive approach to health care; and a general lack of creativity.

And the downside to Bush's dominance of the Right is that it reflects the decay of such conservative organizations as the Christian Coalition. The dormancy of organized conservatism deprives Bush of useful allies. It also means that there is no force tugging him right to offset the many forces tugging him left.

Conservatives should be grateful that Bush is as conservative as he is, since they have no independent political power to force him to be so. As they celebrate Bush's success, they might profitably worry about their own failures.