Stand Up Fight Back (eBook)

Chapter 1. Put on a Compassionate Face

How an Idea Got Bush Elected and Got Him into Trouble

President Bush -- you'll enjoy this -- he says he needs a month off to unwind. Unwind? When the hell does this guy wind? Come on!

David Letterman, August 20, 2001

Everything depends on whether he is seen as taking charge when there's something to take charge of. But there is a view of Bush that he's a total lightweight. This makes it an easy shot, so it was a risk for him.

Richard E. Neustadt, author of Presidential Power, quoted in The Washington Post, August 29, 2001, on that long Bush vacation

The day before planes piloted by terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania countryside, George W. Bush was, if not a failed president, then a floundering leader who had lost the initiative and faced a miserable autumn. David Frum was serving at the time as a White House speechwriter. Frum admitted in The Right Man, a book as friendly to Bush as its title suggests, that he was planning to leave the White House before the events of 9/11 happened because he did not want to watch as the Bush presidency 'unraveled.'

Bush was in trouble courtesy of a problem that will always plague his presidency: having persuaded many Americans during his campaign that he was moderate in spirit, he governed from the right. His deep, instinctive conservatism and his impatience with moderate Republicans led to the great debacle of his first months in office, the defection of Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont from the Republican Party. On May 24 -- just four months after Bush took office -- Jeffords flipped control of the Senate to the Democrats. It was the most important political moment of the Bush presidency before 9/11.

The Jeffords switch was, in retrospect, a logical response to how Bush chose to manage his presidency. After the disputed election of 2000, Bush faced the choice of governing as a moderate and healing the wounds left by the Florida debacle, or governing as an uncompromising conservative and bulling his way to a series of ideological victories. He chose the aggressive strategy. It worked reasonably well until Jeffords decided he had had enough. Jeffords's defection was a rebuke not only to Bush's strategy but also to a conservative movement that assumed for many years that it could trash, ridicule, intimidate, and denounce Republican moderates -- and still count on their votes at crucial moments.

The strategy had succeeded for at least a decade, and it ultimately succeeded on Bush's big tax cut when most moderates (including Jeffords) fell into line. Because the moderate Republicans rarely rebelled when it mattered, conservatives could overlook the inconvenient fact that without the progressives from the Northeast and Middle West, the Republican majority in Congress would disappear.

The funny thing is that Jeffords did exactly what conservatives, for years, had told him he should do. Over and over, they denounced him as a crypto-Democrat who had no business wearing the Republican label. Even as Jeffords was preparing to leave, conservative leaders and their supporters were saying, 'good riddance.'

'Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont is not a moderate,' declared National Review in an editorial e-mailed around the land. 'He is a liberal.' The magazine that guards conservative orthodoxy said the party switch 'makes it clear that the Republicans are the conservative party and the Democrats are the liberal party.' Jeffords's decision, they said, was 'a clarifying one.'

Indeed it was. Jeffords realized it made no sense to serve in a...