Oct
31
And this is supposed to make Cheney look bad?
October 31, 2007 | 1 Comment
Michael Gerson, compassionate big-government conservative liberal, is pimping his new book. And he’s got the solution to the GOP woes: spend more money, and get rid of the big, mean, nasty people like Dick Cheney.
For Michael Gerson, the pattern became discouragingly familiar. A proposal to help the poor or sick would be presented at a White House meeting, but Vice President Cheney‘s office or the budget team or some other skeptical officials would shoot it down. Too expensive. Wrong priority.
By the time he left the White House as President Bush‘s senior adviser last year, Gerson by his own account had grown weary of the battle, becoming an irritable colleague disillusioned by the conventions of a political party and a government that seemed indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden. Now he is back with a new book and a publicity tour intended to fight for the identity of the Republican Party.
I’ll prepare you for the next paragraph, because it’s not for people with weak stomachs or allergies to sappy political cliches.
"Traditional conservatism has a piece missing — a piece that is shaped like a conscience," he notes in "Heroic Conservatism." His ambition, he says, is to help "save conservatism from its worst instincts" and build "a conservatism elevated by a radical concern for human rights and dignity."
Umm, yeah. I think Baseball Crank has it about summed up perfectly.
Remember the scene in Wedding Crashers where Owen Wilson tells a woman he’s trying to seduce, "You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts"?
Read everything Michael Gerson says to yourself in Wilson’s voice and imagine he’s saying it to get a girl in bed. It makes so much more sense that way.
That is just so . . .pathetic. But it gets better.
"Right now, there’s a significant backlash against these ideas," Gerson said in an interview at his office at the Council on Foreign Relations last week. "If Republicans adopt a mean, anti-government message, they’re not going to be able to win."
That’s right, Republicans shouldn’t be mean. We should do the truly compassionate thing and make sure that as many people as possible are enslaved by the government’s largesse. Clearly the GOP’s penchant for belt tightening was what got the party in trouble the last election cycle.
Gerson clearly has it out for Cheney.
Gerson writes that he urged Bush to fire Rumsfeld after the 2004 election, but that Cheney opposed the move. He recounts meetings in which Cheney’s office tried to kill proposals to increase training of death-row defense lawyers, transition assistance for prisoners and aid for Hurricane Katrina victims.
"The storm had also revealed a political and moral chasm in the Republican Party," he writes. "The president and I saw Katrina as an opportunity to open a debate on race and poverty. Anti-government Republicans saw Katrina as an opportunity to cut off medicine to old people. It confirmed the worst image of Republicans as the party of shriveled hearts."
Wait, I thought this was supposed to make Cheney look bad. I also thought Cheney had morphed into a neo-con over the past few years. Funny, but it seems that Cheney remains the one true champion of traditional conservatism in the White House.
Of course Gerson’s demagoguery (cut off medicine to old people, shriveled hearts) plays right into the hands of leftists who see conservatives as nothing more than mean-spirited Scrooges out to starve the poor. That Gerson does this and then has the audacity to call himself a conservative is a complete joke. It’s small comfort that this man no longer has the President’s ear, but the damage done by big-government "conservatives" to the party may be irreperable.
Comments
1 Comment so far
I agree with your basic theme. However, I’m still not a fan of Cheney’s. But I think there is a much better approach for criticism than Gerson’s.
I’ve read from other sources that Cheney was the leading voice pushing Bush in the direction of standing behind Rumsfeld and a minimalist approach to Katrina. So I don’t doubt that. And I think he ought to take heat for it. However, I agree that it cheapens the argument to say that Cheney merely isn’t compassionate enough. So what? What does that really matter. Doing right should be the ultimate yardstick anyway.
I think what Gerson is trying to get at is that folks like Cheney don’t understand that, like it or not, in American politics of the 21st century symbolism really matters. Maybe in a pefect world it wouldn’t. Substance would be the be-all and end-all. But this world ain’t perfect. And often substance takes a baskseat to symbolism. Instead of complaining about that or pretending it’s not the case, the real winners in the game will use it to their advantage.
Today we can both learn of and analyze almost every move a politician makes. This wasn’t true only a generation ago. However, the public will really never have time to care about 90% of it. So a successful conservative will make ground using that 90%. But as for that other 10%, Bush has learned the hard way, you can’t ignore the importance of symbolism that sends the message to the American public, “I get it.” Firing Rumsfeld weeks before the election likely would have been enough to keep the Senate GOP. Same with Katrina. The mere words “Heck of a job, Brownie” by themselves were more damaging to Bush than the rest of the Katrina response or lack of combined.
Making the point complete, Ronald Reagan knew this and mastered this almost 30 years ago. And that’s what the GOP needs. Not another backroom elitist like Cheney. Not another tumbleweed blowing in the wind like Bush. And not another compassionate bleeding heart like Gerson. We need a leader who knows how, when, and what to communicate. That has become most important and will determine the 2008 election.