Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (32 page)

This was not the only tax cutting Bush would do. The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 cut the main capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 15 percent, and reduced taxes on dividends, preciously treated as
ordinary income, to 15 percent.
The second tax cut was tilted even more heavily toward the wealthy than the first and
cost the Treasury another $350 billion in revenue over a decade. Liberals were not alone in being enraged by a tax cut for the rich in the middle of a war. John McCain was also at full throttle. Ridiculing claims that the law would promote economic growth, McCain said that “the only thing growing . . . will be the tax breaks for the wealthiest citizens of this country.” Adding to the liberal rage was Dick Cheney’s sense of entitlement in pushing ahead with more tax cutting. Since Republicans had won the 2002 midterm election, he was quoted as saying, “it’s our due.”

In the long run, as David Frum observed, “the Bush domestic economic program really doesn’t work as advertised.”

“There was a big tax-cut, but it doesn’t ignite the level of growth that was hoped for,” he said. “The level of growth does not translate into rising personal incomes, which is an even bigger problem, and then inadvertently, you generate this huge debt bubble as consumers facing stagnant income try to increase their consumption by taking extra debt. . . . [T]he credit markets become ever-more willing to provide credit in lieu of income for people.”

“All the ingredients are in place for this epic disaster in 2008.”

But even in the short run, Bush did not get the political jolt out of his first tax cut victory that he had counted on. It was immediately overshadowed by what was, in Washington terms at least, a monumental political event. The tax cuts passed on May 23, 2001, and the next day, Senator James Jeffords of Vermont quit the Republican Party, declared himself an Independent, and announced that he would be caucusing with the Democrats. The Senate had been split 50–50, with Vice President Cheney’s vote giving Republicans the right to manage its business. Jeffords switch gave the Democrats 51 seats and control of the Senate. Immediately, committee chairmanships switched parties and Democrats were in control of what happened on the floor.

Jeffords, who in 1981 had been the only Republican to vote against the Reagan tax cut, joined the long line of moderate and progressive Republicans who had abandoned the GOP because they felt abandoned themselves in its steady journey rightward. He explained that he had finally accepted the GOP for what it had become and could no longer be part of it.

“Increasingly, I find myself in disagreement with my party,” Jeffords said.
“I understand that many people are more conservative than I am, and they form the Republican Party. Given the changing nature of the national party, it has become a struggle for our leaders to deal with me and for me to deal with them.”

Conservatives denounced Jeffords in bitterly personal terms for abruptly upending Republican control of the Senate.
“Why isn’t everyone talking about what a big baby Jeffords is?” complained the
Wall Street Journal
’s editorial page in a snappish tone that was typical of reaction on the right. The
New York Post
portrayed the senator in colonial garb under the headline: “Benedict Jeffords.”

Still,
National Review,
the guardian of conservative orthodoxy, recognized the logic of Jeffords’s position. After all, it was the same logic the magazine had embraced since its inception to argue for purifying the Republican Party of progressives and the followers of Dwight Eisenhower.
“He is a liberal,” the magazine said of Jeffords, and his conversion “makes it clear that the Republicans are the conservative party and the Democrats are the liberal party.” His choice,
NR
added, was “clarifying.” And so it was.

Two other major pieces of domestic legislation enacted under Bush underscored the philosophical and political ambiguities of the Bush-Rove project.

The No Child Left Behind Act, passed at the end of 2001 and signed into law in January 2002, was the most genuinely bipartisan achievement of the Bush years. It was enacted not with stray votes from a handful of moderate and conservative Democrats, but after extensive negotiations between the Bush administration and two of Congress’s leading liberals, Ted Kennedy in the Senate and George Miller in the House. John Boehner, the chair of the House Education Committee, was closely involved in the negotiations. This fed hopes later on—largely disappointed until his final act as Speaker in the fall of 2015, by which he avoided another shutdown through a budget and debt ceiling agreement—that he would be a deal maker.

The later transformation of Boehner from the No Child Left Behind committee chair to the Republican leader who lived in fear of a Tea Party rebellion is one of the most powerful indicators of the acceleration of change within the party. Boehner eventually gave up in the fall of 2015. The chaos involved in
trying to replace him put an exclamation point on the party’s radicalization.

The new education law was an authentic achievement consistent with Bush’s past. It combined ideas popular among Republicans, to hold schools and teachers accountable, with the Democrats’ insistence that reform cost money and that the federal government needed to provide more of it for poor school districts.
The law passed the House overwhelmingly, 381 to 41. It’s telling that 33 of the “no” votes came from conservative Republicans, many of them concerned about federal interference in state and local education decisions. These concerns would grow as the party marched rightward.

And as was the case with the tax cut, this Bush policy triumph also failed to have the enduring effect he and Rove had hoped for. It did not take long for Democrats and Republicans to begin battling over the matter of money. By October 2003, as Jim VandeHei reported in the
Washington Post
,
Democrats were already blaming Bush and congressional Republicans “for shortchanging the law by billions of dollars.” This allowed Bush’s foes on the left to pick up on a favorite Republican talking point: that Washington was “slapping unfunded mandates on states that cannot afford them.”

Bush’s tax cuts also had unintended consequences for the states. Since many of them linked their tax rates to those of the federal government, VandeHei wrote, the Bush-sponsored federal reductions thus cut tax rates in these states and “drained revenue from state coffers that otherwise would have helped fund education.”

VandeHei cited the findings of David Winston, a pollster for congressional Republicans, showing them trailing Democrats 50 percent to 36 percent on the education issue, “a 14-point drop since the measure was signed in January 2002.” Bush’s reversal of the Democrats’ advantage on the education issue, so prized by Rove, proved to be short-lived.

The prescription drug benefit under Medicare, signed into law in December 2003, was the most intricate piece of policy politics Bush engaged in, and it divides the right to this day. As a simple matter of policy, covering prescription pharmaceuticals was a long-overdue and logical step in modernizing Medicare, a program established long before the age of expensive (and essential) drugs. Politically, the drug plan delivered a valuable benefit to the elderly, a key, high-voting constituency, and reflected another Bush foray
into ground traditionally held by Democrats. Medicare was a proud Democratic achievement and had been a key issue in helping Clinton defeat the Gingrich Congress. Neither Bush nor Rove was prepared to leave the drug issue to the Democrats, especially at a time when the passing of the New Deal generation made senior citizens increasingly open to the Republican Party.

But where Bush wanted his benefit to be structured in a free-market way that would also appeal to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, liberals wanted drug coverage paid for directly by Medicare. Because the government represented so many beneficiaries, it would be able to bargain with the pharmaceutical companies for lower prices. Bush, by contrast, pushed a plan that would provide Medicare subsidies to support the purchase of private insurance for drug coverage, offering insurance companies the opportunity to create scores of plans geared to different groups of seniors.

The Medicare Modernization Act was thus crafted to divide Democrats while bringing around enough conservatives to secure its passage. And it accomplished exactly that, though toward the end of the winding legislative process, the approach proved to be almost too clever. Extraordinary and highly controversial legislative tactics were ultimately required to push it through because so many conservative Republicans continued to believe that their party should
never
be in the business of expanding a major Federal entitlement program.

The Democratic split was real and could hardly have been more dramatic, pitting the party’s two leading experts on health care—and two of its historic figures—against each other.
Senator Hillary Clinton strongly opposed the bill and summarized the Democrats’ dilemma in a June 2003 speech on the Senate floor: “Do we support legislation that we know is not the best for our seniors, but view it as a step in the right direction? Or do we vote it down because it fails to deliver more promise than perils for our seniors?” Democrats, she insisted, should oppose Bush’s design and fight for a better bill. Ted Kennedy reached exactly the opposite conclusion on the basis of Clinton’s logic. If a Republican president and a Republican Congress were willing to back off grand plans for Medicare privatization and were also prepared to put $400 billion on the table as a “down payment” toward solving the prescription drug problem, Kennedy reasoned, Democrats should grab the deal.

As the Republican leadership kept adding provisions aimed at satisfying
conservatives still uneasy over such an expansive measure, Kennedy’s doubts about his initial approach deepened. In its final version, the bill included Medicare privatization experiments, big subsidies for HMOs, and Health Savings Accounts. These and other changes pushed Kennedy to withdraw his support and he led a last-ditch fight against the final version of the bill. In the end, to the fury of most of their Democratic colleagues, Senators Max Baucus of Montana and John Breaux of Louisiana broke off from their party and negotiated a final deal with Bush. Strategery in this case dictated legislative maneuvers at odds with those Bush had pursued to pass No Child Left Behind: when he lost the chance to deal with the Democratic mainstream, Bush was happy to split the Democratic Party and do business with its most conservative members. It was indicative of a long-term challenge for Democrats, particularly in the Senate, and a reason why the Democrats would maintain a substantial moderate wing even as the Republican Party became more homogeneous. Democratic politicians, particularly senators from conservative states, were under far more pressure to cooperate with Republicans than Republican politicians were to deal with Democrats. Democrats worried more about losing general elections to Republicans; Republicans feared losing primaries to more conservative fellow Republicans.

The bill finally went through the House on November 22, 2003, on one of the most dramatic and bitterly contested evenings in the body’s history. In the early hours of the morning, the bill appeared to have lost by two votes at the end of the customary fifteen-minute roll call. Rather than accept defeat, House Whip Tom DeLay kept the roll call open for an unprecedented two hours and fifty-one minutes.
After much arm-twisting, cajoling, and at least one charge that a vote was virtually purchased, the bill passed 220 to 215.
“I don’t mean to be alarmist,” thundered Representative Barney Frank, “but this is the end of parliamentary democracy as we have known it.” Among the “no” votes were 189 Democrats, mostly liberals, the independent socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont—and 25 of the most conservative Republicans in Congress. One of the ironies of this episode is that the structure of the drug benefit, relying heavily on the private insurance market, resembled what would become Obamacare.

To this day, many conservatives regret voting for the bill. One of them is Chris Chocola, then a member of Congress and later president of the Club
for Growth, which would support many conservative challenges to more moderate Republicans that would make big news in the Tea Party years. Chocola told me in 2014 that he voted for the bill because, at the time, he regarded Bush’s approach as “the most conservative alternative” to providing the benefit. Now he cannot be more emphatic in declaring his vote a mistake. “It was a bad vote, it was a wrong vote, I regret that vote today,” he said.

Chocola’s retrospective judgment is an instructive marker on the GOP’s post-Bush road to the right. Although only twenty-five House Republicans actually voted against the drug benefit, it became increasingly common for conservatives to look back on the program as a budget buster—even if, in practice, conservative legislators have not actually tried to take this benefit away from the older voters who dominate their coalition. On prescription drugs for the elderly, Republicans politicians were conservative in theory but liberal in practice.

The combination of a tax cut, an education bill that drew support from liberals, a market-oriented drug benefit, and a steady flow of compassionate rhetoric defined the median point of the center-right that Rove was trying to create. It was an amalgam that had the potential of disorienting Democrats while creating sufficient unity on the right to give Bush room for continuing maneuver. Yet Democrats would eventually find their voices. And what began as quiet doubts on the right about Rove’s strategery would become louder as Bush’s position became weaker.

In 2007, Princeton University Press republished Barry Goldwater’s
The Conscience of a Conservative
and asked conservative columnist George Will to write a new foreword. Bush’s program gave Will the ammunition he needed to offer a reverie on “the impotence of books.” Will wrote:

This edition of
The Conscience of a Conservative
comes after a Republican-controlled Congress, abetted by a Republican President, passed in 2001 the largest federal intervention in primary and secondary education in American history. And in 2002 enacted the largest farm subsidies.
And in 2003 enacted the largest expansion of the welfare state—the prescription drug entitlement added to Medicare—since Lyndon Johnson, the president who defeated Goldwater in 1964, created Medicare in 1965.