LET’S QUIT WHILE WE’RE BEHIND
By Christopher Buckley (son of William F. Buckley)
“The trouble with our times,†Paul Valéry said, “is that the future is
not what it used to be.â€
This glum aperçu has been much with me as we move into the home stretch
of the 2006 mid-term elections and shimmy into the starting gates of the
2008 presidential campaign. With heavy heart, as a once-proud—indeed,
staunch—Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my
party loses; on both occasions.
I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to
pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John
Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very
much
less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert
Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I
wish
he’d won.
Bob Woodward asked Bush 43 if he had consulted his father before
invading
Iraq. The son replied that he had consulted “a higher father.†That
frisson
you feel going up your spine is the realization that he meant it. And
apparently the higher father said, “Go for it!†There are those of us
who
wish he had consulted his terrestrial one; or, if he couldn’t get him
on the
line, Brent Scowcroft. Or Jim Baker. Or Henry Kissinger. Or, for that
matter, anyone who has read a book about the British experience in Iraq.
(18,000 dead.)
Anyone who has even a passing personal acquaintance of Bush 41 knows
him to
be, roughly speaking, the most decent, considerate, humble, and
cautious man
on the planet. Also, the most loving parent on earth. What a wrench it
must
be for him to pick up his paper every morning and read the now-daily
debate
about whether his son is officially the worst president in U.S. history.
(That chuckling you hear is the ghost of James Buchanan.) To paraphrase
another president, I feel 41’s pain. Does 43 feel 41’s? Does he, I
wonder,
feel ours?
There were some of us who scratched our heads in 2000 when we first
heard
the phrase “compassionate conservative.†It had a cobbled-together,
tautological, dare I say, Rovian aroma to it. But OK, we thought, let’s
give
it a chance. It sounded more fun than Gore’s “Prosperity for America’s
Families.†(Bo-ring.)
Six years later, the White House uses the phrase about as much as it
does
“Mission Accomplished.†Six years of record deficits and profligate
expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The
actual cost of the President’s Medicare drug benefit turned out, within
months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated
price.
Weren’t Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at
accounting? All
those years on Wall Street calculating CEO compensation….
Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism†meant bigger
government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in
personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster
relief?
Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six
years
later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?
A more accurate term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be
incontinent conservatism.
On Capitol Hill, a Republican Senate and House are now distinguished
by—or
perhaps even synonymous with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy
Cunningham (bandit, 12 o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million
Bridge to Nowhere, Jack Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate
Majority Leader who declared, after conducting his own medical
evaluation
via videotape, that he knew every bit as much about the medical
condition of
Terry Schiavo as her own doctors and husband. Who knew that conservatism
means barging into someone’s hospital room like Dr. Frankenstein with
defibrillator paddles? In what chapter of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or
Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is that principle enunciated?
The Republican Party I grew up into—Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F.
Buckley
Jr., Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan—stood for
certain
things. It did not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we
Republicans said in the pre-Dominique de Villepin era—often, it fell
flat on
its face. A self-proclaimed “conservative,†Nixon kept the Great Society
entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls.
Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes
three
times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to historic
highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone called it
“Voodoo
economics.†You could Google it.
There were foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the ’69-’75
chapters), Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were
compensating triumphs: Eisenhower’s refusal to bail out France in
Indochina
in 1954, Nixon’s China opening, the Cold War victory.
Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in
its
heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or
execution.
Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the
swagger-mometer,
that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit
chastened
by their debacles.
George Tenet’s WMD “slam-dunk,†Vice President Cheney’s “we will be
greeted
as liberators,†Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist
military
doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves
“neo-conservative†(not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a
military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East;
alienated
the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea,
Iran, and
Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been
cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives
of
2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another
15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the
march in
the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons—bright people, all—are
now
clamoring, “On to Tehran!â€
What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back?
One place comes to mind: the back benches. It’s time for a time-out.
Time to
hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe
Biden and
Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce
sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the
heck, Al
Gore. I’m not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking
the
man might be on to something.
My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to
“Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for
a
change.â€
(Or was it Federalist 78?)
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