When George W. Bush became president, the Right was in a precarious position. Both conservatives’ failures and their successes were conspiring against their future.

Six years previously Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, had taken control of Congress and embarked on a program to eliminate Cabinet departments and rein in entitlement spending. That program failed: The public sided with Bill Clinton on such matters as Medicare funding. On the other hand a largely Republican-designed welfare reform was enacted. This achievement, however, blunted Republican attacks on big government. Once federal activism was no longer seen as subverting middle-class values, it rose in popularity.

Bush adapted to the post-Clinton political environment. Running in 2000, he made no specific pledges to cut spending but did promise to make Medicare pay for senior citizens’ medications for the first time. On some days Bush seemed to promise more continuity with Clinton than Bush’s rival, Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president, who had decided to run as an angry populist. These tactics enabled Bush to win even though the country was at peace and at the tail end of a boom. But he barely won, in circumstances that made him illegitimate in his opponents’ minds. Republicans actually lost seats in the Senate.

In his early months Bush won a few legislative victories, the most important being the passage of his tax cuts. But many observers felt he was running out of steam by the middle of his first year. Bush did nothing to dispel that impression by announcing, around that time, a new “communities of character” initiative that, among other things, proposed to help the elderly learn how to e-mail their grandchildren.

September 11 then thrust Bush into the stratosphere of public approval ratings while raising the salience of the national-security issues that had benefited his party since the late 1960s. Fear of terrorists propelled Republicans to victories in 2002 and 2004. Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House — a degree of power they had not possessed since the 1920s. Some Republicans, and not only Republicans, began to think that the party had built a durable majority.

The point of reviewing this familiar history is to suggest three things about Bush’s domestic-policy legacy. First, that Republicans were overconfident in the middle of the decade. The aftermath of Sept. 11 obscured but did not erase the party’s weakness on domestic policy. Second, that Bush’s record should not be judged on the basis of that overconfidence. It should not be assumed either that Republicans would have had a lasting majority but for Bush’s incompetence or that he could have governed in a manner much more pleasing to limited-government conservatives if only he had so chosen. And third, that the elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004 nonetheless gave Bush and his party an opportunity to reverse the country’s liberalizing trends. They failed.

Perhaps out of conscious design, Bush’s domestic policies largely fit with a strategy to expand the center-Right coalition. The first component of that strategy was to co-opt public sentiment for government activism, as with the prescription-drug plan. The second was, where possible, to push in roundabout ways to limit government. Bush sought, most notably, to build an “ownership society” in which people would be able to provide for their own needs and thus turn less frequently to government. Third, Bush delivered on social conservatives’ top priorities. Fourth, he attempted to reach out to blacks and Hispanics. Some of these components were in obvious tension, but others reinforced each other: Both Bush’s social conservatism and his willingness to spend federal money were considered useful in expanding the party’s share of the minority vote.

Tax cuts were the most significant of Bush’s conservative domestic achievements. He cut income-tax rates for the first time since 1986. He also cut taxes on capital gains, dividends, and estates, and expanded the child tax credit. These tax cuts largely followed the supply-side command to increase incentives to work, save, and invest, and they probably marginally increased economic growth. Bush’s tax cuts differed from Reagan’s in one key respect: They were explicitly temporary. Because Bush’s tax cuts were not accompanied by much in the way of spending restraint, however, they are very likely to prove temporary in practice as well. (Bush’s unwillingness or inability to be a budget-cutter got expensive, most shamefully in the case of farm subsidies, where he presided over the demise of a bipartisan free-market reform introduced under his predecessor.)

At least some of Bush’s tax cuts will endure. Most Democrats say that they will keep those tax cuts that offer direct benefits for the middle class, such as the enlarged child credit. President-elect Obama has suggested that he does not want capital-gains and dividend taxes to leap all the way back to their pre-Bush levels. Even if the tax level rises, then, the tax structure will have been improved: Taxes will fall less heavily on investments (including investments in the next generation) and more on consumption.

Social Security reform was supposed to be to Bush’s second term what tax cuts were to his first: an early and big conservative victory. It was a more ambitious goal, involving as it did an extremely popular New Deal program. Bush proposed to allow young workers to invest some of their Social Security funds for themselves while reducing the growth of benefits for the affluent. He viewed this proposal as a way to help people of modest means acquire financial assets and thus join the ownership society. Many conservatives hoped that the effect would be to make voters more favorably inclined to free markets.

Had Bush prevailed, his record on many issues would look very different. The cuts in future spending contemplated in his plan amounted to $10 trillion in present-value terms — easily dwarfing most of the spending increases that conservatives hold against him. Republicans would have gone into the 2006 election with a huge, if controversial, accomplishment.

But Democrats had no reason to cooperate with Bush. Even in conservative states, voters were not demanding reform, and left-wing groups were promising retribution against any Democrat who stepped out of line. Without some Democratic support, reform could not get the 60 votes in the Senate required to clear a filibuster. And if reform was not going to pass, congressional Republicans were not going to go out on a limb for it. Bush’s cherished plan died a slow death without ever coming to a vote.

Bush was able to make major changes to one entitlement: Medicare, which he expanded. Prescription drugs play a much bigger role in medicine now than they did when the program for the medical care of the elderly was founded in 1965. That Medicare covered most surgeries but not most medications was an anomaly that was bound to end. Paying for prescription drugs was very popular, including among voters who considered themselves conservative. But it was also very expensive. Medicare’s trustees say that the drug program faces an $8 trillion shortfall over the next 75 years.

The Bush administration initially wanted to couple the benefit expansion with a market-oriented reform of the program. But the Republican Speaker of the House, Denny Hastert, told the press that the congressional party had no stomach for such reform. Bush settled for expanding the role of competing private-sector companies in delivering benefits. This innovation worked well enough that conservatives have talked about it as a model for a larger Medicare reform. But Democrats are hostile to this policy, and they appear to have the votes to cripple it.

Republicans were able to attach another conservative idea to the Medicare bill: health savings accounts. Americans can now buy high-deductible health-insurance policies and use a tax-free savings account to pay for expenses below the deductible. The hope was that as more Americans paid for routine care out of pocket, a true marketplace would emerge, with more competition and lower prices. The accounts were thus another end-run around the welfare state. More than 6 million Americans now hold such policies.

The Bush years also, however, saw the growth of public provision of health insurance. To some extent this was the result of the continued unraveling of the corporate welfare state for employees that the federal government has long subsidized. Companies stopped offering health insurance, and people went on Medicaid. The Bush administration aided the trend by granting waivers to states to let them enroll more people in their programs. It did so in the name of federalism, but a peculiar kind in which the feds ended up picking up much of the bill. The future may yield a different verdict, but right now it looks as though the Bush administration was at best a net wash for health-care freedom.

The verdict is out, as well, on Bush’s education policy. Defenders of his attempt to reform K–12 schooling from Washington say that he instituted a testing regime that has generated a wealth of new information that will, in turn, be useful in spurring future reforms. With test scores flat, Bush’s policies will be vindicated only if those future reforms ever materialize.

President Bush did nearly everything that pro-lifers could reasonably ask of him. He signed a number of pro-life bills, such as a ban on partial-birth abortion and a law recognizing two victims in federal crimes against pregnant women. He tightened policies against federal funding for abortion. He appointed two Supreme Court justices who are considered likely to vote to overrule Roe if given the chance. And he spoke repeatedly about his desire to see America build a “culture of life.” On his watch, both the abortion rate and public support for abortion continued slowly to decline.

Federal funding for stem-cell research became a hot issue at the beginning of the Bush administration. Bush again sided with pro-lifers, refusing to offer funding that might encourage the destruction of human embryos. He withstood very strong political pressures in sticking to this stand: Some members of his party and even of his Cabinet disagreed with him, and Bush cast his first veto on the issue.

By blocking federal funding for embryo-destructive research while encouraging other types of stem-cell research, Bush bought time for the science to develop along less objectionable lines. During his second term it became increasingly clear that stem-cell research could proceed fruitfully without destroying human embryos. Obama will allow federal funding of embryo-destructive research, but that research does not dominate the scientific agenda the way it did in 2001. Federal funding for research involving the production and destruction of embryos through cloning, meanwhile, is off the table. It probably would have occurred if Gore or John Kerry had been elected.

The president’s attempts to modify immigration policy were a fiasco. He made the issue of illegal immigration very prominent, first by presiding over a large influx of illegal immigrants and failing to enforce the law, then by pushing a “comprehensive reform” that provided legal status to most illegal immigrants. The ill-considered plan elicited little support from the public and fury from most conservatives, and it failed. Conservatives were left alienated from Bush, and Hispanics alienated from the Republican party.

Hurricane Katrina, meanwhile, washed away the modest but real progress Bush had made with black voters. Working-class blacks, Hispanics, and whites alike were at the same time growing frustrated at the stagnant wages and rising cost of living that characterized what some conservatives called the “Bush boom.”

Overall the Bush administration fell far short of its stated ambitions. The causes of these disappointments included the persistent mediocrity of many of Bush’s appointees and the administration’s top-to-bottom reluctance to engage its critics and attempt to move public opinion. But before Republicans conclude that Bush led their party astray, it is worth remembering that at many key moments the congressional party was more short-sighted and less conservative than he was: on entitlements, on spending, and on ethics, for example.

To return to power, Republicans will of course have to learn from Bush’s many mistakes. But it is very likely that the next Republican president will share some crucial traits with Bush. He will be socially conservative. He will reach out to minorities. He will seek — more successfully, let’s hope, than Bush — to reform and restrain the welfare state, but will not try to shrink it dramatically. Bush’s successor will adopt this approach for the same reason Bush did: There is no alternative.