No more Mr. nice guy: the death of George W. Bush's 'compassionate conservatism'.

IN his first presidential campaign, George W. Bush had a number of campaign themes. The candidate said that he was a "reformer with results" and that he would "restore honor and dignity to the White House." The two most consistent themes, however, were associated with the catch-phrases "compassionate conservatism" and "changing the tone." As the president prepares to start his re-election campaign, it's fair to ask: What ever happened to this duo?

For Bush's Democratic opponents, the answer is simple: Bush's promises to govern compassionately and to change the tenor of American politics were misleading to the point of being lies. He has proven, in their view, to be a madly right-wing partisan. In truth, however, Bush's style of governance has been consistent with both promises. It has also revealed their limits.

Some of the confusion stems from disagreement about what compassionate conservatism is. Whether the phrase denotes a marketing slogan or a coherent philosophy of government has been disputed from the beginning. In some quarters, the phrase was taken to suggest that Bush stood for a less conservative, or at least less controversial, conservatism. This explains some of the grievance felt by liberals who discovered that President Bush had no intention of moving leftward on abortion or guns. He might not crusade for the unborn--neither had any of his predecessors as leaders of the Republican party--but he would not retreat from longstanding Republican positions either.

The idea that Bush would retreat from these positions was largely an invention of the national media. Because most journalists assume that most Americans share their views on social issues, and that the Republican positions are therefore political poison, they read the phrase "compassionate conservatism" as the opposite of a judgmental or moralistic conservatism.

"Compassionate conservatism" was an attempt to distance Bush from Newt Gingrich's Republican "revolutionaries"--but not with regard to social issues. The real contrast was that Bush was less hostile to federal activism, especially activism in behalf of minorities and the poor, and less inclined--here the "changing the tone" business came into play as well--to sharp ideological argument. The Bush Republicans, in short, were turning away not from conservatism's moral strain but from its libertarian one. Bush, in his best moments, was proposing not a surrender to the liberal definition of "compassion" but rather an attempt to wrest the moral high ground away from liberalism. Bush, according to his more philosophical supporters, was committed to using national power to promote choice, accountability, and other conservative themes--disrupting ossified programs and defeating entrenched interests that oppose reform, such as the teachers' unions. By abandoning limited government as an ideal, Bush would be able to stitch together a national majority capable of sustaining these reforms.

DO THE PROGRAMS WORK?

Many unreconstructed conservatives, who rejected the compassionate label for various reasons, did not look forward to Bush's attempted ideological remaking of the party. Most of them ended up supporting his candidacy anyway. If Bush would not himself shrink the federal government, perhaps his reforms would make it possible to shrink it in the future. That gamble may still pay off in a second Bush term, especially if a re-elected Bush tackles Social Security. But compassionate conservatism, both as a strategy and, especially, as a philosophy, is faring poorly these days.

The primary evidence for this condition consists of the political fate of the two major legislative accomplishments that were supposed to mark Bush as a different kind of Republican. These were his education bill and his Medicare bill. The first was supposed to differentiate him from the Dole-Gingrich Republicans, who had sought to abolish the Department of Education: Bush would instead impose standards and accountability on the nation's public schools, and the Department of Education would become an instrument of reform. The second was supposed to move a major entitlement in a free-market direction. Both were supposed to cement a national Republican majority.

It has not quite worked out. True, Bush was able temporarily to erase the Democrats' historic advantage on education issues by promising a bold reform. But now that his bill has been enacted, it is proving unpopular. So is the Medicare reform. As they survey the public reaction, many congressmen who voted for the education and Medicare bills are regretting their votes. Nobody who voted against them regrets his. The reforms have lost Bush conservative support without gaining him compensatory support from the center. They have thus flunked the superficial test of short-run popularity.

The deeper test would be whether these reforms will, in the long run, affect voter behavior in salutary ways. In theory, one might expect parents of schoolchildren, having learned--as a result of Bush's accountability standards--that their schools are subpar, to demand improvements. One might also expect that senior citizens, once exposed to a more market-friendly Medicare, will be less entitlement-minded in the voting booth. But these hopes are so far proving hollow, too. It turns out that middle-class parents who have invested serious money in getting their kids into schools with good reputations--and all such parents know what research confirms, that these reputations are factored into the price of homes--do not enjoy learning that their schools are not so good after all. Under the circumstances, shooting the messenger does not seem to them at all irrational.

Conservative supporters of the education bill claim that it has at least shifted the national debate from questions of spending to questions of standards. But the spending has hardly ceased its upward spiral. If President Bush's latest budget proposal goes through, federal spending on grade schools will have shot up by 66 percent in his first term. That spending, moreover, seems to have created a demand for still more spending rather than for higher standards. The political reaction to Bush's education standards has been a) to denounce them as too strict and b) to say that states need more federal money to meet them. It is not obvious that the ensuing debate has been an improvement on earlier ones.

The Medicare bill contained some elements that might in time make bolder conservative reforms possible. Chief among these elements was the introduction of health savings accounts, which may make health-care consumers more conscious of costs. But here, too, the immediate political reaction has been to complain that Bush's program is too stingy and to demand higher levels of subsidy. At least in the short run, the bill has done nothing to create a compassionate-conservative majority.

Two other proposals meant to identify Bush as a different kind of Republican--his "faith-based initiative" and his guest-worker proposal--have not yet passed Congress. The faith-based initiative was the policy that Bush highlighted as the centerpiece of compassionate conservatism. But Bush has had to retreat from legislation on the initiative in the face of objections from both liberals and conservatives. Bush has been left to do what he can through executive order. The immigration proposal has also faced a left-right buzzsaw. Worse, the public seems to oppose it. Since Bush announced his proposal in January, he has said little about the subject--which suggests that this bit of compassionate conservatism has also fizzled.

AN IDEA STUMBLES

Compassionate conservatism has hardly fared better as a philosophy than as a legislative program. There are still politicians who describe themselves as "compassionate conservatives," as there were such politicians before Bush came along. But hardly anyone who so describes himself means to associate himself with a particular philosophy, as opposed to a warm sentiment. President Bush himself uses the term less than he once did. And even those writers who tried to defend Bush's conservative credentials have not bothered to revive the phrase. Some of them, indeed, have resorted to the franker phrase "big-government conservatism."

And these people are clearly in the minority of conservative intellectuals. The vast majority of conservative writers, think-tank scholars, and activists have criticized the Bush administration's record on spending, sometimes harshly. Compare the attitude of the conservative movement today to its attitude eleven years ago. In 1993, the conservative world was debating whether to go with Jack Kemp or William Bennett: optimism or sternness; a focus on economics or one on culture. Neither one of them was particularly associated with the cause of limited government, and to some degree each of them seemed to be urging conservatives to reduce their emphasis on that cause. Very few small-government conservatives pushed back until, in 1994, two things happened. First, David Frum's book Dead Right, criticizing Kemp, Bennett, and other conservatives for forgetting the virtues of government-cutting, was published. Second, the Republicans won control of the House and Senate, seemingly on a small-government platform.

The effect of that second event was to instill a sort of libertarian giddiness in Republicans, which they soon came to regret. But the point remains: Contemporary conservatism has not reconciled itself to an ever-growing welfare state. President Bush's spending is facing resistance from conservatives. That resistance may not prove effective. But its mere existence means that compassionate conservatism has not conquered the Right, let alone the polity as a whole.

One reason that Bush does not talk about "compassionate conservatism" as much as he used to is the same reason that one does not read much these days about "the feminization of American politics." The reason is 9/11. After the attacks, as David Brooks wrote, Bush's public persona morphed from "compassionate conservative" to "courageous conservative." The same events changed the salience of the promise to "change the tone." The appeal of that promise was twofold. The public wanted leaders who are public-spirited and not prone to bicker mindlessly. That desire is as strong now, in wartime, as it was then; probably stronger. The public also wanted, especially after the Lewinsky scandal, for Washington to go away. After the attacks, however, the appeal of the fantasy that the nation could tune Washington out faded.

Democrats say that Bush's Washington is more sour than ever before. The Republican response is that it's the Democrats' fault: Bush extended his hand, and they bit it. Recent weeks have yielded two examples. On same-sex marriage, the president made his case and said that it was important for all Americans to show respect for people on all sides of the debate. John Kerry said that Bush was trying to divide people and to write discrimination into the Constitution for political purposes. Bush called Kerry to congratulate him for winning the primaries. Kerry, a few days later, said that Bush's campaign aides were a "crooked" and "lying group."

The president has been unusual in his reluctance to attack Democrats explicitly. He is much more likely to criticize "the Senate" for holding up his judicial nominees than to accuse "Senate Democrats" of doing so. Congressional Republicans have expressed some annoyance at this feature of the Bush presidency. Democrats think that he has merely hidden his partisanship: He may make few attacks in public, but he does everything he can to hurt the Democrats. But Bush did not promise to ignore the interests of his party, nor to put the interests of the nation as defined by liberals before those interests. He promised to "change the tone," and a change in presidential rhetoric is a change in tone. President Clinton responded to the Oklahoma City bombing by denouncing conservatives. This president has acted in a different way, even to the point of exasperating his allies. A certain irenicism can also be seen in Bush's reluctance to veto bills.

So can we conclude that Bush's promise has been kept? Not quite. The public could reasonably have interpreted his promise to mean that there would be more bipartisanship in Washington. Bush could not, by himself, make that happen even if he wanted to. If the Democrats want to obstruct him and deny him successes, there is not much he can do to change their behavior. But that is not an excuse for his failure to keep the promise so much as it is a criticism of him for making it in the first place. He should not have promised what cannot, in the nature of things, be delivered. So far, the fruits of compassionate conservatism and change-the-tone have been different forms of disillusionment among liberals, centrists, and conservatives.

Bush abandoned the compassionate-conservative theme twice during the 2000 campaign--both times in political extremis. After John McCain trounced him in the New Hampshire primary, Bush beat back McCain's insurgency by portraying himself as the more authentic conservative, period. In September, when Bush was behind Gore, he gave up the attempt to portray himself as beyond the old arguments of Left and Right and pounded Gore for being a big-government liberal. As the 2004 campaign gets underway, Bush again finds himself behind. If he comes back, I suspect it will have little to do with compassionate conservatism and more to do with negative attacks on John Kerry's liberalism.