Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (29 page)

Some endorsement. And yet Maxey went on: “This place can be very mean. It can be very mean-spirited. There are many of us who are so pleasantly surprised that he’s AWOL on issues that could be so detrimental to Texas.” Far better to be AWOL than nasty.

Here’s Bush in one of his TV ads of the time: “Whether for government or individuals, I believe in accountability and responsibility. For too long, we’ve encouraged a culture that says if it feels good, do it, and blame somebody else if you’ve got a problem. We’ve got to change our culture to one based on responsibility.” Those who hated the 1960s loved this stuff, yet it was not at all Pat Buchanan’s culture war.
I heard Bush say over and over that he wanted to be “a uniter, not a divider” because “dividers can’t lead.”

This was the music of compassionate conservatism to which Gerson would provide the words. Rove traced Bush’s embrace of the idea to an interview during the 1998 governor’s race when Bush had described himself as a “conservative with a heart,” unconsciously echoing the old Nixon line that had vexed Goldwater. The phrase, Rove recalls in his memoir, caught the interest of his other top aide, Karen Hughes. In preparing Bush’s 1998 election night address—he’d win 68 percent of the vote against Mauro—Hughes “refined” Bush’s words “into ‘compassionate conservative’ and repeated the alliterative phrase in his draft victory speech—four or five times.” Bush, Rove recalls, “said it just once that night and then repeated it in response to a question at a news conference the next morning.”

“Still,” he added, “we had our mantra.”

Later in his book, Rove records proudly that “Bill Clinton later told Bush that when he heard the Texas governor first use the term, he knew Democrats were in trouble.” It says something about Clinton’s standing as a master politician that Rove would brag on winning the Clintonian imprimatur.

Rove may remember compassionate conservatism as a late entry into the Bush
lexicon, but, as his own account suggests, Bush was beginning to work with the idea long before it went into his victory speech. What Bush told me when I interviewed him then made clear he was thinking a good deal about how to win back moderates who had strayed to Clinton and Ross Perot.

When I asked him what the Republican Party had done wrong since 1994, he had a ready answer. “It hasn’t put a compassionate face on our conservative philosophy,” he replied during an interview in his uncluttered wood-paneled office in the state capitol in Austin. “People think oftentimes that Republicans are mean-spirited folks. Which is not true, but that’s what people think.”

Notice: Bush said his party needed to put on a compassionate
face
. That’s not the same as transforming it. His message was that there nothing wrong with the Republican Party that a different face wouldn’t cure. He had a certain face in mind.

At the time, I was trying to figure out how Bush could be all things to all people, whether it was really true that he lacked deep beliefs or whether, instead, he was hiding something from somebody. I was also fascinated by his open talk about his religious faith. It seemed quite authentic, yet it could also be viewed skeptically, as his very personal way to get right with the religious conservatives without sounding scary to the less religious.

He was very aware of such dangers as he spoke that day. He wanted his listener to realize that he knew how embarrassing it would be if he laid his faith on too thick. He suggested that his religious experiences were not something he liked to talk about—and then willingly talked about them at length.

“First of all, I generally don’t spend a lot of time talking about my religion unless I’m asked,” he says, “or unless there’s a purpose.” The nice reluctance. Then: “I was raised in a Christian household by a mother and father who really gave me the greatest gift of all, which is unconditional love.

“But I think everybody has to come to terms with their own religion,” he continued. “And I always say God works in mysterious ways and I renewed my spirit. It means precisely that I’ve accepted Christ as my savior, that’s what that means.”

The language was deeply evangelical, and evangelical Christians always regarded Bush as one of them. They stuck with him much later when he was tumbling in the polls after Iraq went sour and his response to Hurricane
Katrina was widely panned. His was an old-fashioned ethic that emphasized self-improvement through self-discipline. Faith seemed to have a very functional, twelve-step-program quality for a man who acknowledged he once had a drinking problem.

“For me, it means understanding and accepting whatever comes with life,” he told me. “I mean, it helps prepare me for my own daily struggles and my own thinking. I believe in prayer. I read the Bible. It helps strengthen me as a person. It helps me understand the priorities in life of family and faith.”

In talking about his sense of responsibility, he managed to take an oblique but tough shot at Clinton. There is, he said, “a certain maturation that happens when you assume the responsibility of being a father and a husband. . . . I mean, I take solemn oaths very seriously and I can remember when our twins were born. I remember feeling how much my life changed the moment they were born and in anticipation how much it was going to change over time. And there’s no question that if you assume your responsibility as a dad as seriously as we should, it changes your life.”

From there Bush moved easily to answering questions about his brand of compassionate conservatism. “In terms of government policy,” he said, “probably the most profound impact that religion has had on me has led me to help, in our state, forge this relationship between church, synagogue and mosque and people who need help . . . and [we] have welcomed people of faith into the public arena to help people. I mean, the theory is that let’s change your heart first, and good results will follow.”

The way Bush talked about his religious faith solved three problems at once. In speaking with compassion about the poor, he made conservatism sound softer and more moderate. His faith talk allowed him to relate easily to Christian conservatives without talking about any of the specific issues that had a downside on the left and in the center. And discussing his conversion allowed Bush to draw a sharp line between his self-described “young and irresponsible” past, and his presidency-seeking present. He cast himself as the prodigal son, the repentant sinner, the transformed man.

When I put this suspicious view to him—it bordered, admittedly, on the downright cynical—Bush got testy for the only time in our chat and dismissed the idea. “People will see through that in a minute,” he said.

Over the years, no one I have encountered who knew Bush ever doubted the sincerity of his faith, and this was true even among his staunchest political opponents. Nor did anyone question that his life did seem to change when he turned forty in 1986. But the content of his faith has always been much harder to pin down. The evidence, especially of his own words, was that it was less an intellectual calling than a matter of feelings and the will. When I asked him about favorite passages in the Bible, his answers were vague and general—“Well,” he said, “the Beatitudes are great. I mean a lot of the Bible.”

“Religion is a very personal matter to me—as it should be to everybody,” he explained. “I also understand that everybody comes to have religion different ways. All I know is—I know the pathway for me is what I know. And I’m not going to try to tell you the pathway for you.” It was very nonjudgmental, end-of-the-century, good-vibes religion.

Compassionate conservatism Bush-style was clearly rooted in personal experience, in the notion that religious faith offered the most effective path to solving problems—very much what David Kuo was talking about. It could be parodied as a kind of New Religious Deal: government would, somehow or other, help every American who wanted one to have a religious experience. Nonetheless, Bush conveyed great sincerity when he talked about his hopes.

“I ask the question, ‘Does it work?’ ” he said. “And to answer your question, from firsthand knowledge I know that changing your heart can work. It’s worked for me. Will it work for everybody? Probably not. But, for example, if in fact we’ve reduced recidivism by changing hearts first, the state of Texas and, for that matter, America ought to say, ‘Thank you, Lord, let’s do more.’ ”

Religious language enabled Bush to move hard, controversial political questions to the more comfortable ground of personal obligation and faith. He didn’t talk about social justice, minimum wages, unions, or monopoly power. He simply preached everybody’s obligation—well, to be kinder and gentler, to create a thousand points of light.

“Getting tough on crime is easy, compared to loving our neighbors as ourselves,” said the man who presided over 152 executions, more than any previous governor in American history. (His successor, Rick Perry, would break that record.) “The truth is,” Bush went on, “we must turn back to God and look to Him for help.” Bush’s compassion talk was never about the failure of
the economic system, or the rights of those who are poor, or systematic injustices. He always came back to individuals.

Those who saw Bush as unsophisticated might pay close attention to what he said next. “I know many conservative thinkers and people who adhere to the notion of heralding the individual and individualism and less federal government are people who really do care about the future,” he said. “Because they know what I know: Government can’t make people love one another. There have really been a lot of false promises over the last 30 years as well: ‘Oh don’t worry, you know, we’ll make you love each other.’ Well, unfortunately it doesn’t happen that way. Love comes from a more powerful source.”

What’s fascinating here is how Bush justifies a fundamentally libertarian view in the name of compassion. Social justice brought about by government action—or, for that matter, by the needy organizing themselves in their own interest—recedes as an issue. Love, of both the human and divine sort, becomes the key to change.

With this move, Bush made it easy to parody liberalism as a creed that proposed to use government to “make people love one another.” Never mind that liberalism was about a different, more achievable, and less abstract claim: that government could make the world a bit more just and ease the burdens on those down on their luck or short of opportunity. What Bush was doing here was squaring the circle between Gersonian and Olasky-style compassionate conservatism. He had plenty of compassion, but the dig against liberals was just what small-government conservatives wanted to hear. He seemed to be proposing God, not government. Or, at the least, religious charity would make smaller government possible.

And government in Texas, under Bush and since, was very small. In 1999,
National Journal
magazine had ranked Texas as 50th among states in total per capita government spending, and 35th in per capita education spending. At the time he was governor, Texas had a minimum wage of $3.35 an hour, one of the lowest in the country and $1.80 lower than the national minimum.

Bush’s words underscored the ambiguities of compassionate conservatism and its divided character. I tried to get at this tension by asking Bush about his take on Olasky’s ideas. He did not defend his adviser’s every proposition but he did embrace him in a more general way. “I think that our society can
change one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time. That’s what I believe,” he said. “And I believe that Olasky understands that, and I believe that many people of faith understand that, and I’m proud that Olasky wants to try to figure out ways to make society respond to the call.”

Bush was certainly more aggressively antigovernment before he announced his candidacy for president than he was afterward.
In April 1996, for example, he declared: “As government did more and more, individuals were required to do less and less, and they responded with a vengeance. Dependency and laziness are easy when someone else is to blame. We became a nation of victims. Blame it on the parenting, the Prozac, the bossa nova—take your pick.” And he picked up on a favorite theme of the right by going back to the Founders and the Tenth Amendment. “We must reduce the role and scope of the federal government,” he said, “returning it to the limited role our forefathers envisioned when they wrote the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, giving the states all power not specifically granted to the federal government.”

Compassionate conservatism was always a work in progress and had the capacity to be different things to different people. At times Bush genuinely seemed to struggle between Olasky-style antistatism on the one side, and Gerson’s more state-friendly thinking on the other. Nine months after I talked to him, he gave his definitive speech on compassionate conservatism in Indianapolis. His address in July 1999 was largely Gerson’s work, and it tilted more in his direction.
Bush memorably proposed to unleash the faith-based “armies of compassion,” but he was far more careful to defend a role for government and to insist that his private legions could not fully substitute for the state. “There are some things that government should be doing—like Medicaid for poor children,” he said, adding that “government cannot be replaced by charities.”

By turns attacking and defending government, Bush managed to straddle the entire field. He was ingenious at devising formulas that could be read as friendly by pro- and anti-government voters alike. “My guiding principle,” he once said, “is government if necessary, but not necessarily government.” Those words might, in principle at least, be spoken as easily by Ted Kennedy as by Jesse Helms.

But for all of Bush’s warm invocations of “mercy” and “love,” there
remained a hard—or, if you prefer, tough-love—side to his compassion. I asked Bush why people are poor, and he spoke almost entirely about their shortcomings. “Oftentimes people are poor because of decisions they make,” he says. “Oftentimes people are poor because they didn’t get a good education . . . [and aren’t] making right choices and staying in school and working hard in school.”

Were there any social reasons for poverty, I asked? “I think if you grow up in an impoverished world that’s full of drugs and alcohol, it makes it very hard to break out of the environment which you’re in,” he replied.