George W. Bush, who united almost all Republicans during most of his time in national politics, now divides them.
Most Republicans view his presidency favorably, and cheer his recent rise in the public’s esteem. A vocal group of conservatives, though, thinks of the Bush presidency as a wrong turn — a turn toward big government that the party needs to repudiate.
The dedication of Bush’s presidential library last week reheated this long-simmering debate, which the party is no closer to settling than it was when Bush left office in January 2009.
The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has been asking people for years which party they trust most to handle various issues. It shows that voters trust Republicans less on taxes, the economy, controlling spending and reducing the deficit than they did before Bush became the leader of the GOP.
The only issue on which Republicans do better than they did in the late 1990s is health care, and that’s entirely the result of President Obama’s health-care plan.
Bush’s critics forget something, too: The Republican Party was already in poor shape when he took control. It had lost two presidential elections in a row to Bill Clinton.
Republicans took Congress in 1994 because the public didn’t want unified Democratic control of the government. But the defeat of Congress’s attempts to restrain Medicare spending and shut down Cabinet departments had left the party without any clear direction. Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost as much as they do now.
To be competitive in 2000, Bush adopted a softer tone than other Republicans, made clear that he was no enemy of the government programs that voters like, and broadened the party’s agenda to include revitalizing charity rather than just railing against federal spending.
So it isn’t surprising that the federal government expanded on Bush’s watch. Bush clearly hoped, though, that his presidency would turn the country more conservative. The people would reward Republicans for governing successfully, he thought.
By midway through his second term, it was clear that this strategy was a dead end. The US military was losing in Iraq, and Republicans weren’t willing to admit it, let alone change policy. (Eventually, Bush did change course, with the surge, but by then the public had made up its mind.)
The economy wasn’t delivering rising wages for most people. The government wasn’t demonstrating competence in responding to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Republicans in Congress were more concerned with staying in power — and covering up scandals — than in reforms to address any of these issues. No wonder they got the boot in the 2006 elections. When a recession and then a financial crisis hit before the 2008 elections, voters punished the Republicans a second time.
The failure of the Bush project led many conservatives to think that what Republicans needed, above all, was to purify their resistance to big government. The events of 2008-2010 — bailouts, huge deficits, Obama’s health-care overhaul — reinforced this idea. In 2010, it seemed to work: The public reacted against unchecked Democratic power in Washington by giving the House back to Republicans.
Yet the political circumstances that moved Bush to adopt his strategy hadn’t fundamentally changed. Voters were willing to give Republicans the ability to act as a check on big government in 2010 as they had been in 1994. But in 2012, as in 1996, voters wanted Republicans to stand for more than hostility to government before they would trust the party with a governing majority.
The public doesn’t primarily see Bush’s failure as a matter of overspending. Republicans turned on Bush’s spending but never reckoned with the Iraq debacle or the middle-class stagnation of the past decade.
Conservatives rejected Bushism without showing any understanding of why it was adopted in the first place, or why it was rejected. That’s W’s political legacy: a weakened Republican Party unable to face its flaws.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review. © 2013, Bloomberg News