My friend David Boaz of the Cato Institute has a new blog at the Guardian, and it's off to a great start. David's first post attempts to explain why conservatives love Bush so much, even though his economic policies are anything but conservative:
As a nominating speech for President Grover Cleveland once put it, "They love him most for the enemies he has made." Conservatives love Bush because the left hates him. If the New York Times would run a front-page story headlined "Bush Delivers the Big Government Clinton Never Did," and the lefty bloggers would pick it up and run with it, maybe conservatives would catch on.So here's your challenge, lefty bloggers: If you don't like the tree-chopping, Falwell-loving, cowboy president--if you want his presidency fatally wounded for the next three years--then start praising him. One good Paul Krugman column taking off from that USA Today story on the surge in entitlements recipients under Bush, one Daily Kos lead on how Clinton flopped on national health care but Bush twisted every arm in the GOP to get a multi-trillion-dollar prescription drug benefit for the elderly, one cover story in the Nation on how Bush has acknowledged federal responsibility for everything from floods in New Orleans to troubled teenagers, and maybe, just maybe, National Review and the Powerline blog and Fox News would come to their senses. Bush is a Rockefeller Republican in cowboy boots, and it's time conservatives stopped looking at the boots instead of the policies.
I made a similar point a couple of years ago in a post called "George Bush, Liberal Darling," which provoked a storm of reaction from the left blogosphere.
UPDATE: Kieran Healy is entitled to his opinion, but his implication that David Boaz and I were once Bush supporters who have now turned on him for "the sake of their own conscience," is simply wrong. I've never been a fan of the president's, though of course I don't disagree with him on everything. I criticized him rather severely in 2004, and managed to find a far better candidate to vote for, and I didn't vote for Bush in 2000, either. And, though I don't want to speak for Boaz, I suspect that he has been even less of a fan than I have.
FURTHER UPDATE: The basic point of Boaz's post, it seems to me, is not that Bush is a liberal, or that liberals always support government spending. Rather, it's given that the Left will seemingly attack Bush for whatever he does, regardless of whether it promotes a conservative or a liberal agenda [see, e.g., the persistent attacks on the prescription drug benefit plan, the largest entitlement program since the Great Society, as a "giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry" because it doesn't fix drug prices. Food stamps don't control food prices, a giveaway to Big Ag? Student loans and grants don't control tuition prices, a giveaway to Big Education? Medicare originally did not control doctors' fees, a giveaway to doctors and hospitals? Section 8 vouchers don't control rent prices, a giveaway to landlords? Since when does the government's failure to include price controls with subsidies lead to so much indignation on the left?]. Under those circumstances, conservatives believe either (a) Bush is not being attacked for his policies, but for being a Republican, and thus good Republicans should defend him; and/or (b) If the Left were in power, they would outspend and outwaste and outnationalize Bush on entitlements, education, health care, etc., so better to support Bush than undermine him and let the Left take over.
We saw a similar phenomenon on the right with Clinton, with conservatives irrationally attacking him even when he pursued conservative policies, and the left, as a whole, swallowing their doubts and defending him. It wasn't so irrational, I suppose, if the object was to regain power, but it was if the object was to promote conservative economic policies. The right (barely) succeeded in winning the 2000 election, but also destroyed the national political commitment to fiscal restraint that had survived from Reagan to Clinton.
Falsely praising someone as a matter of reverse psychology is an awfully hard sell, too--not only is it dishonest, it's risky. (Bush would--rightly--turn it around and use it to show "bipartisan support".)
Ok, one more time: Liberals don't like government spending or big government or whatever you like to call it. Liberals like the government to fulfill certain roles which they believe the government is best suited for (healthcare, schools, consumer protection, etc.), and liberals accept that this requires a certain level of taxation to fund these services. Liberals, much unlike conservatives, want government to work well and to deliver these services as efficiently as possible. The current train wreck of an administration is a nightmare for liberals since it mindlessly squanders resources which will be urgently needed in the future.
"Oh, please. Sure, let me be the first to step up and say people on the left think Bush is great because of all the damage he’s done. After all, “the left” and the Democratic Party are all about ruining America. Thanks but no thanks. Both Davids labor under the belief—geniune or disingenuous, who can say?—that “lefty bloggers” and their ilk are all in favor of irresponsible government spending, economic mismanagement, ham-fisted responses to security threats and natural disasters, gigantic handouts to energy and pharma companies disguised as environmental and health policy, phenomenally botched foreign policy interventions, and so on. If, after all that, schmibertarian fellow-travelers now feel that, for the sake of their own conscience, someone needs to smear the GOP faithful as rubes more impressed by cowboy boots than good government, let them go ahead and do it themselves."
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/17/do-your-own-dirty-work/
Yes, you may want this to happen, but unfortunately it doesn't. So the difference then is that conservatives realize that government won't work well and can't deliver these services effectively, thus we spend our time thinking of solutions rather than saying "I want the government to do it". I want a Ferrari
Just because you seemingly don't know anybody "on the left" shouldn't lead you to the misguided belief that these people don't exist.
Spend a few weeks reading Krugman, DeLong, Yglesias, Collender and Drum as well as the people they link to and all your questions would be answered many times.
Tell me more about this private fire department of yours. And about your army. How's your highway system doing?
They must all be in great shape, and clearly so much better than anything the government could ever deliver.
Absurd. Liberals objected to abolition of the Education Department on ideological and practical grounds. Just because practical concerns often outweigh economic ones does not mean that liberals never care about spending. This is such an obvious red herring, it is laughable. If Ralph Nader calls for the abolition of the US military (hey, it would eradicate the deficit entirey), and conservatives (and liberals) object to that idea as idiotic; does that meant they don't care about "fiscal responsibility"? I'll leave it to the LawProf Commentator to ponder this. . . .
Compare the fiscal record of Bill Clinton to that of George W. Bush. Case closed. Funny how conservatives love to ignore that good old conservative value: looking to the actual facts on the ground rather than what people supposedly say. The "big spending, fiscally irresponsible liberals" is a construct, which was been well-developed by decades of Republican talking points and bought into by the "liberal MSM." Give me a break -- if this commenter is really a law professor, I now understand why conservative law profs are indeed in short supply.
I am afraid you are missing my point.
The silly argument advanced by the two Davids is that liberals should like Bush because he has grown the federal government. This meme comes up from time to time, and every time it does liberals patiently explain that we don't actually like big government per se (who does?)- it may be an unpleasant side-effect of certain things we like, but the less of the side-effect we get the better.
Your point is that there are more conservatives than liberals who are strongly (fanatically?) in favor of shrinking / abolishing / drowning the federal government. This is (a) obviously correct and (b) has nothing to do with the point I was making. Said differently, just because most conservatives are more anti-government than most liberals doesn't make liberals in favor of big government as an end in itself.
Other than reading the liberal bloggers I listed above, you may also want to try reading a newspaper.
You have a tough time finding any leading democrat who hasn't denounced Bush's reckless fiscal spending. Dean, Kerry, H. Clinton, pick whomever you like.
" if this commenter is really a law professor, I now understand why conservative law profs are indeed in short supply."
This statement seems to be based on the premise that Law Profs are of superior intellect. Can you give supporting evidence?
LawProf, the statement "you are spending too much on x" is only sensible relative to some facts about your income. If you cut your income (e.g. through tax cuts) then it is not surprising that you will suddenly find you are spending too much, even if the level of your spending has not changed.
"It’s time Washington got back to good old fashioned fundamental fiscal responsibility.
We must impose spending restraints so no one can propose or pass a new program without a way to pay for it. And we should enforce budget discipline with spending caps. During the 1990s, we had spending caps. We cut the deficit in half and then balanced the budget. And along the way, we created 23 million new jobs, increased family income across the board, and gave middle class families a tax cut. Because we limited the growth of government’s budget, family budgets were able to grow.
It’s time to return to a concept known as ‘pay-as-you-go.’
It’s time to have the courage to reduce or eliminate government programs that don’t work. For example – why not freeze the federal travel budget, reduce oil royalty exemptions for drilling on federal lands, and cut 100,000 contractors now employed by the federal government? We can streamline government agencies and commissions and reduce out-of-control administrative costs by five percent. And when we’re done, the federal government would be smaller but smarter, more effective and less expensive.
We can’t restore fiscal responsibility unless Washington leaders are willing to bring our divided parties together – and ready to be straight with the public about what we can and can’t afford."
Wow, you really don't understand basic economics do you, Mr. LawProf. A Tax Cut on higher income earners (or on anyone) IS spending, e.g., it is a give-away to the rich. There is NO difference between cutting taxes on the rich and giving money to the poor. Either way, they drop the bottom line from where it was under President Clinton. Further, Clinton, et al, HAVE attacked reckless spending of this President, including the absurd prescription drug benefit which is no more than a give away to big corporations.
To answer another commenter's question, This statement seems to be based on the premise that Law Profs are of superior intellect. Can you give supporting evidence? No, I cannot and I do not buy into the premise. My comment was more directed to the reasoning used by the LawProf, which would make a second-year law-student at any decent law school laugh out loud --- the assumption that because "liberals" did not oppose abolition of the Dept of Education (DOE, by the way, Mr. Law Prof is commonly understood to be Energy) means that they don't care about spending. It was third-grade reasoning.
As to the good LawProf's comment that the analogy between abolition of the military and abolition of the Dept of Education does not work. . . . gee, yuh think??? More to the point, it does not work well based on your (and my) policy preferences, i.e. to have a strong unified national defense. If we did not believe in that strongly and thought spending concerns were more important, the analogy would work. This is all so freaking basic that I can't even believe I have to waste my time. If this guy is really a law prof, I'd really love to know where. . . . I'd also love to see a law review article of his . . . He makes Instapundit's blog read like the Yale Law Journal.
Moreover, it's hardly true to suggest that liberals merely want government to fulfill these roles because liberals believe government is "best suited for" them; liberals want government to fulfill these roles because liberals believe, ideologically, that these represent what government should do.
Yes, and I want peace on earth, $0.10/gallon gasoline, and the Yankees to be 0-162. But let's live in the real world, okay?
In the real world, that isn't one of the options. To paraphrase Milton Friedman, you're looking for a barking cat. But when you can't find one, you'll always choose the cat that meows over no cat at all.
It's not that hard to find out this information.
Well, actually, that's not "economics" at all. That's bookkeeping, and it's true only in a P&L sense. The budget deficit may be the same whether you spend more or tax less, but that in no way makes them the same. There is a huge difference between them.
The tax cut is not "giving" anything to anybody, rich or otherwise. The rich already have that money. The tax cut is the decision not to take it at all.
I suppose Boaz's post is based on what the left believes in some fantasy world in his head. That's fine as far as I'm concerned--but you really shouldn't be surprised that lefties like Kieran cheerfully return the favor, assuming that you've been part of the Bush borg.
Umm, that's an ideological contention not a factual one.
LawProf, I like the way you have no response. You're a clown.
"I don't know anything about liberals or democrats, so let me just make some stupid sounding stuff up and then argue against it."
I want the time back I wasted trying to argue with you. As an academic, I sincerely hope that the LawProf is no such thing.
"David, anyone who supported the Iraq War on the utopian dream of spending a trillion bucks and countless lives to impose democracy on the world, and that such an imposition would solve all our problems is no libertarian. They are idologues, not very different from the communists of decades past."
It seems clear you and Boaz have gotten a certain amount of glee out of the rage Bush has inspired in his left-leaning opponents over the years. And yet both of you also actually believe that many of Bush's policies are terrible —- you hate his hunger for power and his courting of the religious right, and Boaz, I believe, disagrees with the war in Iraq. The natural thing would be to critique these policies yourself. But you don't really want to do this regularly, as it would bring you too close to the moonbat leftists who also make you come out in hives. So you want the moonbats to do the job for you, by the bizarre means of praising the President for his spendthrift ways in order to erode his support amongst mainstream GOP voters.
I said "for the sake of your conscience," then, not because I thought you once supported Bush and now do not, but because you don't want to admit that much of "the left's" critique of Bush has been (a) right and (b) not much different from your own in many respects. So, for the sake of your conscience, you and Boaz seem to prefer to retreat to the absurd belief that "the left" ought somehow to support Bush because they are happy to see the size of government grow through carefree spending for whatever reason. This would give you license to say that the President wasn't a true conservative because — look! — Paul Krugman or whoever said isn't it great that he has spent buckets of money. Of course, this isn't going to happen. As Mark Kleiman points out today, being a bad conservative does not make you a liberal, however much Messrs Bernstein &Boaz might want to believe otherwise.
I also suspect that Boaz is being more tongue in cheek with this post than actually attempting to give the left useful political advice in how to get Bush’s supporters to turn on him.
Again, I could be off base with my take on the post, but I think people are taking it far too literally.
you committed the fallacy of the excluded middle then, and you're committing it again. just because GWB is spending money like a drunken sailor doesn't make him a fan of liberals. As to why he isn't a fan of liberals, well, if you really need it explained to you at this point then you really are beyond help.
David, you just got owned.
If the rich don't already have all that money, Greedy Clerk, why exactly is it that the government needs to levy taxes in order to get it? Not much point in taxing people to obtain something they don't have, is there?
Sorry, the contention that levying lower taxes is "spending" is nothing more than a rhetorical ploy intended to make taking less of people's money look to be the moral equivalent of porkbarreling.
"from Reagan to Clinton?" No. From GHW Bush to Clinton.
whaaa? So deficits are meaningless? The post-baby boomers can default on the bonds owned by the Chinese central bank without consequence?
please tell me that the "davidbernstein" who authored the comment is not the David Bernstein who wrote the post.
btw, last i checked reagan spent 22% of gdp, and gwb is spending 20% of gdp. of course, the latter is only collecting taxes at 17.5% of gdp. hmmm. what could be the consequences of such a policy?
You should check the figures. Try this.
You'll see that during the Reagan years outlays were generally over 22% of GDP, very high by historical standards. For virtually all of the postwar period outlays had been under 20%, with 1946, unsurprisingly, the major exception, at 24.8%. This figure gradually declined through the 90's, dropping below 20% again in 1997.
As to Friedman, while he has a point, the quote hardly tells the whole story. Deficits can create problems also, and I hardly think the phrase "fiscal restraint" can be defined with Euclidean rigor to refer only to the level of government spending.
Indeed, even if spending is your only concern (a rather foolish view, I think), you should recognize the political fact that "borrow and spend" is generally worse than "tax and spend" because "tax and spend" requires actually figuring out where the money to be spent is going to come from, rather than passing the debt on to someone else. That's a constraint in itself.
If Congress says, "You know what? Last year we took 30%, but this year we're only going to take 20%," that's not "giving" him $100,000. That $100,000 came from his employer, or from the stock he invested in, or from the uncle's estate. IT DID NOT COME FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
That's a factual statement.