Gerson's world: the president's chief speechwriter turns columnist.

IF Karl Rove is "Bush's brain," as he was dubbed years ago, Michael Gerson is Bush's soul. Bush's brain may tell him that he needs to sign a bloated farm bill in the run-up to an election, or give in to congressional Republicans' demands that Medicare reform be watered down. His soul has loftier ambitions. As Bush's chief speechwriter during his presidential campaign and most of his administration, Gerson had the job of expressing those ambitions.

No one doubts that he did his job exceptionally well. Nor does anyone doubt that the speechwriting team Gerson headed had more prominence in the administration than most of its predecessors. Bush's spokesmen and press conferences have not done much of the work of defending his most important policies or defining his central themes. His prepared speeches took on that task, and Gerson, more than anyone else, wrote them.

Since he left the White House in 2006, Gerson has written a column, first for Newsweek and now for the Washington Post. He has not been a voice for Bush, if by voice you mean "shill." He is, most of the time, no propagandist. His column reflects a breadth of interests--he has written about AIDS in Africa, the evolution of evangelicalism, mosque-state relations in Turkey, and online role-playing games--that go far beyond the Beltway preoccupations of the moment. (No columns have dealt with the Scooter Libby case.)

Gerson has, however, been a voice for Bushism. His column reveals some of the moral and intellectual impulses that have animated this presidency. There is a lot that is admirable about those impulses, and you don't have to search too far to see it: Bushism admires itself. Gerson's columns also help explain why this administration has gone so sour.

"My low point with the Republican party came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina," Gerson wrote in December 2006. "[T]he response of many Republicans was to use the disaster as an excuse for cutting government spending, particularly the Medicare prescription-drug benefit for seniors." That's one way of putting it. In their own minds, what "many Republicans" were trying to do was cut some government spending in favor of other government spending. The notion was that the federal government, when it encountered a critical need, should prioritize its spending rather than raise its total. Gerson's comment indicates not only his disagreement with but also his lack of sympathy for traditional conservatism.

Gerson followed the administration line on its spending. He noted that discretionary spending unrelated to national security has merely "increased at 3.9 percent a year on average." But "discretionary spending" is a term of art, and most of the budget--the expensive prescription-drug benefit about which Gerson was so solicitous, for example--falls outside it. Besides, if national-security spending had to rise after September 11, shouldn't domestic discretionary spending have been cut to make room for it?

The conservatives who complained about Bush's spending were not conservatives at all, Gerson maintained, but libertarians:

   The old conservatives had some concerns about that creed,
   which Russell Kirk called "an ideology of universal selfishness."
   Conservatives have generally taught that the
   health of society is determined by the health of
   institutions: families, neighborhoods, schools,
   congregations. Unfettered individualism can
   loosen those bonds, while government can act
   to strengthen them. By this standard, good public
   policies--from incentives to charitable giving,
   to imposing minimal standards on inner-city
   schools--are not apostasy; they are a thoroughly
   orthodox, conservative commitment to the common
   good.

Each sentence is true in itself, so you hardly notice that by the end of the passage Kirk and "the old conservatives" have somehow become proponents of an expanded welfare state.

To campaign against big government in 2008, Gerson explained, would be both a moral and a political mistake.

   What does antigovernment conservatism offer to
   inner-city neighborhoods where violence is common
   and families are rare? Nothing. What achievement
   would it contribute to racial healing and the unity of our
   country? No achievement at all. Anti-government conservatism
   turns out to be a strange kind of idealism--an idealism that
   strangles mercy.

Who does Gerson think came up with school choice? Some of us think that tuition tax credits would do rather more for inner-city kids than the No Child Left Behind Act and the faith-based initiative.

BAD DATA AND SENTIMENTALITY

Gerson's conservatism--Bush's too, really--has no friends to its right. Witness Gerson's treatment of immigration. In May, Gerson lamented that "anti-immigrant sentiments are very much alive." Most of his column was devoted to showing that such anti-immigrant sentiments are a political dead end for Republicans. To support this thesis Gerson invoked bad data and sentimentality. He claimed that it was crucial for Republicans to get more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, and that Bush had shown it could be done in 2004. Actually pollsters think he got less than that: somewhere between 33 and 40 percent of the vote, below Gerson's hurdle. Gerson also said that Hispanics are "natural entrepreneurs, with strong family values, who are focused on education and social mobility," and therefore ripe for Republican plucking. Hispanics, it turns out, are better than the rest of us: They go to church more, and have lower divorce rates.

It is not necessary to dislike or look down on Hispanics to observe that the statistics belie this depiction of them as plaster saints. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America have much lower than average rates of self-employment. Cubans are the only Hispanic group with a higher than average rate. Hispanics' "strong family values," meanwhile, seem to be compatible with an illegitimacy rate that is significantly higher than that for non-Hispanic whites. Their focus on education does not keep them from dropping out of high school at higher than average rates.

Even if Gerson's assertions were better grounded in fact, however, they would hardly prove that Hispanics are natural conservatives in politics. Nor would they prove that expanded immigration is the best way to make them into Republican voters. It might be that a reduced immigration flow would cause them to assimilate, and to vote Republican, faster.

Gerson concludes,

   The Christian faith teaches that our common humanity is
   more important than our nationality. That all of us, ultimately,
   are strangers in this world and brothers to the
   bone; and all in need of amnesty. This belief does not dictate
   certain policies in a piece of legislation, but it
   does forbid rage and national chauvinism.
   And this is worth a reminder as well.

All of us may be in need of amnesty, but I'm sure that after reading that some of us were in more pressing need of an airsickness bag. The Christian faith does not, as a matter of fact, teach that our common humanity is more important than our nationality when it comes to making policy on citizenship. One cannot help suspecting a little, well, bad faith in Gerson's concession that he does not mean to suggest that his little sermon dictates any particular government policy. Of course that is what he is suggesting. The whole column is designed to show that opposition to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 is wrongheaded, and this religious note is how he has chosen to end that column.

Gerson came back to immigration a few weeks later, at the end of a column praising John McCain:

   After recounting the arguments for reform, he mentioned Maria
   Hernandez Perez, nearly 2, with "thick brown hair and eyes the
   color of chocolate," and Kelia Velazquez-Gonzalez, 16, who "carried
   a Bible in her backpack." Both died terrible deaths in the
   Arizona desert.

   For McCain, they were not "illegals," they were human beings,
   with names. "We can't let immigrants break our laws with
   impunity," he said. "But these people are also God's children who
   wanted simply to be Americans."

   This is not moral exhibitionism; it is just morality.

To recognize our common humanity with illegal immigrants is indeed a moral imperative. To imply that one's opponents in a political debate do not recognize it is, exactly, moral exhibitionism. One way to prevent these heartbreaking desert scenes, after all, is to build a high wall along the length of our southern border.

GOODBYE, HAYEK?

In between the column on immigration and the one on McCain, Gerson wrote about how both parties had abandoned the center. The Democrats had abandoned Clintonism on trade and national security. As for the Republicans:

   President Bush ran and won in 2000 as "a different kind of
   Republican"--meaning the kind that isn't libertarian or
   nativist. Bush was orthodox on tax cuts and moral values. But
   from the earliest days of the nomination contest, he set out
   policies--a federal role in improving education, humane immigration
   reform, Medicare prescription drug coverage--that
   borrowed more from Roman Catholic social thought than from
   Friedrich Hayek ...

   Today, in both parties, fundamentalism is again the fashion....
   Talk-radio conservatism assaults the most obviously Catholic
   elements of Bushism--a role for government in compassion and a
   welcoming attitude toward immigrants. "Purity" is defined as
   the empathy of Tom DeLay and the racial sensitivity of Tom
   Tancredo.

Gerson is engaged in a slight bit of revisionism. Bush made a big point of being less hostile to federal activism than other Republicans--read: Newt Gingrich--but did not play up his support for immigration nearly as much. And while many things have been said against Catholic social thought over the years, it can hardly be blamed for the massive expansion of a bankrupt entitlement. (Any more than Russell Kirk can.)

All that said, it is true that Catholic voters have tended to look more positively on federal activism than Protestants. Backing away from Gingrichite anti-statism helped Bush to win in 2000 and 2004, in part because it increased the Republican share of the Catholic vote. The standard conservative critique of Bush assumes that he could have won in 2000 without promising a prescription-drug plan and won again in 2004 without delivering on that promise. Gerson is right to question the political realism of that critique. He is right as well to say that voters will not reward a party that "elevates abstract antigovernment ideology above human needs." No successful Republican presidential candidate has won purely on a platform of shrinking the government (although Ronald Reagan succeeded in part by explaining how "abstract antigovernment ideology" met "human needs"). It is a point that free-market idealists probably need to hear.

By restoring the perception that federal activism helped people who "work hard and play by the rules"--and above all, by signing welfare reform--President Clinton revived the political majority for such activism. The Bush administration began with the public more eager to see government benefits expanded than to see taxes cut. Conservatives cannot wish these circumstances away.

But there are several possible responses to those circumstances, two of which have played out in this administration. One response, associated most with Rove, is to dole out those benefits necessary to win elections while also looking for what he calls "game changers": policies that change the political landscape and make bolder free-market reform possible. Cutting farm benefits doesn't change the game; enacting health savings accounts does. Or so goes the theory.

Another response, however, is to make a virtue of big government and devise putatively conservative justifications for it. The Gersonian tendency is to create a Christian social democracy in this country. Libertarian critics of that tendency go too far when they call it theocratic. But it is not in keeping with the distinctive genius of America, or of American conservatism.

The administration has pursued both visions at once--they rarely conflict on a day-to-day basis--with its special brand of incompetence. To build a socially conservative, statist majority, Republicans would have had to be trusted to get the job done; they aren't. To change the game, if it was ever possible, would have taken more political creativity than Bush's generally second-rate domestic-policy staff possessed.

If speechwriting took on an outsized importance in this White House, it was also, in a way, less influential than ever. Bush never really took control of his own administration: Witness the policy wars between the State and Defense Departments in the middle of a real war, or the battles between the CIA and the vice president's office. Speeches were made announcing new policies that were never quite implemented. The president's words did not matter. Perhaps that even made a kind of sense. In Gerson's columns, what is most important for the country to do is stand for the right moral position; actually accomplishing something is secondary. That would require empiricism, which is nearly absent from those columns. Hispanics are natural entrepreneurs, just as Iraqis are natural democrats. To think otherwise would be wrong.

In his column on the forsaken center, Gerson paused only briefly to ponder why Republicans are abandoning his philosophy. If you have no friends to the right, there might come a day when you need friends on the right and can't find any.