Peggy Noonan sounds the trumpet

President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder

The whole column is a gem, a hard polished jewel that makes the conservative case against Bush. She wants it known that, however, that conservatives are not deserting Bush. On the contrary, Bush and his White House have decisively broken with conservatives.

What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The immigration bill is the great clarifier. Noonan homes in on the key points-the White House's hubris and its bad temper when faced with opposition.

If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.
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The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed .

Last year I suggested that the Bush political style was antithetical to party leadership:

The Bush style is to placate his enemies and ignore his base. (It may be a family trait.)

Now we see that in extremis, GWB will go beyond ignoring his base to attacking and demonizing his most loyal supporters. Noonan also wonders if a family style is at work here:

One of the things I have come to think the past few years is that the Bushes, father and son, though different in many ways, are great wasters of political inheritance. They throw it away as if they'd earned it and could do with it what they liked.

Why is this so? One possibility is that the Bush ethos disdains party politics. They do not merely want to rise above politics: in their view, a statesman is the enemy of the politician. A president (as a statesman) is powerless against the politicians of the other party. He can, therefore, only attack his own party and his own core supporters. Political failure and low approval ratings become a mark of moral distinction.

In the case of GWB, his training at the Harvard Business School may have reinforced this attitude.

Noonan overstates one point of her indictment. It is not Bush's fault that the conservative coalition is being ripped apart. Bush's problems only became conservatives's problems because we identified so closely with him and his administration. This was a departure from the past when the Right was frequently and vocally critical of Republican presidents. In his first term Bush was spared the criticism which the Right poured down on the heads of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and even Reagan. There were good reasons for this truce (see here), but it was unnatural. It was a historical accident.

Bush cannot destroy the "conservative movement" because a principled movement is beyond the reach of political hacks like Karl Rove. Conservatives will still be fighting for their causes long after GWB leaves the Oval Office. We might as well start fighting for them now.


See also:

Bush and his MBA


The Bush-Rumsfeld legacy


Bush as party leader


Bush and conservatives