10/12/00 8:00 a.m.
The Tough Get Going
And Bush was tough last night.

By Rich Lowry, NR Editor-------------------------------------richardlowry@hotmail.com

ush was well-informed, confident, and even deft in his debate performance last night, but perhaps most importantly he was tough. Toughness is an under-appreciated virtue in American politics, one that Bush — thanks to his compassionate conservatism — has often avoided, to his own detriment. But last night a commonsensical tough-mindedness ran through almost all his answers. It was the skeleton on which he hung his entire performance, providing a coherence to his night that really was quite remarkable.

The hallmark of Bush's tough-mindedness was a keen sense of the limits of government, a theme Bush returned to again and again whether it was recognizing the limits of what changes the U.S. government can effect overseas, or remarking on how infrequently the Texas legislature meets, or arguing that people can spend their tax dollars better than the federal government. The premise of this theme is that not everything can be solved by the government and good intentions, or to put it in colloquial terms: "Life is tough."

So, especially when it comes to foreign policy, we've got to be tough too. Of Saddam Hussein, Bush said: "We don't know whether he's developing weapons of mass destruction. He'd better not be or there's going to be a consequence, should I be the president." Repeatedly, he said the military has to be about "fighting and winning war." It'd be nice if it were available for less bloody tasks, but it can't be in a dangerous world. And Bush scoffed at the idea that there may be some non-military organization that could be devoted to "nation-building": "I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not."

Bush's answers in this area tapped into what Walter Russell Mead dubbed "the Jacksonian tradition" in a memorable National Interest article, a tendency in the American temperament to want to intervene only when the national interest is at stake and then to do it in the most ruthless way possible. Bush applied essentially the same tough, slightly bloody-minded sensibility to his answers on "hate crimes," arguing that the death penalty is the most appropriate penalty for the perpetrators of vicious hate crimes. He said three or four times that the killers of James Byrd would get the death penalty, sometimes with perhaps a little too much relish: "We can't enhance the penalty anymore than putting those three thugs to death. And that's what's going to happen in the state of Texas."

This theme of toughly enforcing the laws currently on the books was one Bush hit over and over. It featured prominently in his answers on guns, when Bush eagerly talked of arresting people. It was telling that Bush, in a question on racial profiling, defended cops: "Most police officers are good, dedicated, honorable citizens who are doing their job, putting their lives at risk, who aren't bigoted or aren't prejudiced." Indeed, if you had to choose a profession that embodied Bush's attitude last night — no-nonsense, focused on responsibility and enforcing the laws — it would be the cops.

A nice side effect of the sensibility is that it tends to melt away Washington cant. So it was that Bush brushed aside Gore's rhetoric about "gun-free schools": "He says we ought to have gun-free schools. Everybody believes that. I'm sure every state in the union has got them. You can't carry a gun into a school, and there ought to be a consequence when you do carry a gun into a school." And he gave the back of his hand to the idea that kids are getting "cheap" guns: "It doesn't matter where the gun comes from; it can be a cheap gun, expensive gun. What matters is, something in this person's head says there's not going to be a consequence."

Again, the emphasis is on individual responsibility and consequences — ideas that run through almost everything Bush said last night, even education. Bush's education proposals focus on accountability, holding someone responsible for the results in public schools. So, even one of Bush's "soft issues," education, had a get-tough feel: "And if [children are learning], fine. And if they're not, there has to be a consequence."

There has been much talk of how to capture the magic John McCain this year. Some McCainics still argue that the candidate who endorses the best soft-money ban will capture some of McCain's appeal. But what was most attractive about McCain was his tough plain-spokeness, something people find refreshing and associate with leadership and honesty. Bush last night borrowed some of McCain's demeanor and sensibility, which positioned him perfectly to regret the distortions of his opponent from Washington D.C.

"That's the kind of exaggeration I was just talking about," Bush said at the end of the debate, in response to a Gore attack on his tax plan. And suddenly, given all that had come before, Bush's riposte didn't seem just another political line, but what earlier this year was referred to as "straight talk."