In today’s Friday interview the John Locke Foundation’s Mitch Kokai chats with Bruce Bartlett, author of Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. The interview aired on Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you).
Kokai: Before we get into the book Impostor, remind us about the situation in which you develop your conservative credentials and how you came to your philosophy about the way that government should operate.
Bartlett: Well, I’ve been pretty much conservative, a libertarian, since I was in college. And, in the mid-‘70s, I went to work on Capitol Hill and one of the people I worked for was Jack Kemp, then a congressman from Buffalo, New York. And I was very involved in the development of the tax-cut campaign that was culminated when Ronald Reagan got his tax cut through in 1981. And, later, I worked at the Heritage Foundation, and I worked on the White House staff at the end of the Reagan administration. And then, I worked at the Treasury Department all during the George H. W. Bush administration. And after that, I worked for various think tanks.
Kokai: So, you worked in the administration in the Reagan era and the first Bush administration. Now, you’ve written a book called Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. How did you come up with that title?
Bartlett: Well, you have to blame the publisher for that. My title was simply “How George W. Bush Bankrupted America,” but the publisher added the other stuff. But I think it’s an appropriate title. I think that, you know, Bush does go out of his way to try to pretend, I think, to be part of the intellectual conservative tradition that Ronald Reagan was certainly a member of. But I think it’s just phony; it’s just not true. I don’t really think that Bush has a conservative bone in his body. That’s not to say that he’s a liberal, but whatever conservatism he has is purely, you know, gut instinct. I don’t think he has any notions of — or any understanding — of the most rudimentary conservative intellectual concepts. He certainly doesn’t believe in the free market, for one thing. He doesn’t believe in small government. I mean, to me — the turning point for me, really, in terms of when I decided to write the book, was when he rammed through this massively large expansion of Medicare for prescription drugs at precisely the moment when we should have been trying to reign in the cost of that program before the Baby Boomers retire and the costs begin to go through the roof. And I was just appalled by that, and on top of lots of other things, like the No Child Left Behind Act and the campaign finance reform, and various other things. I just said, “This guy ain’t one of us.” And that was why I wrote the book.
Kokai: There are some apologists for the president who would say, “Okay, look. He’s a politician. You’ve got conservatives. You’ve got Republicans. The Republicans in office, even if they think conservatively, are going to take some steps and make some votes that aren’t conservative.” Why is that something that we should not just take at face value and accept?
Bartlett: Well, it goes without saying that all presidents are politicians, and I’ve always been willing to give a pass to a politician who does things because he had absolutely no choice — the wrong things. I mean, for example, Ronald Reagan signed into law a number of tax increases during his administration, but he had Democratic control of the House all during his presidency. And he was under a lot of pressure to do these budget deals. And he didn’t really have any choice.
But I think a lot of the bad stuff this president has done, from a conservative point of view, were things that he led with — that is, that wouldn’t have happened without his support. I mean, with the No Child Left Behind Act, for example, [it] was one of the first initiatives he proposed after being elected in 2000, and it seems to me to have been just a transparently phony effort to buy the votes of the soccer moms and the teachers unions. But he hasn’t had any success in doing that. I mean, if you’re going to buy somebody’s votes, you need to make sure they stay bought. And I think that I don’t know why he supported campaign finance reform, which every conservative I know thinks is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court’s ruling not withstanding. And he had campaigned in 2000 saying he would oppose that kind of legislation. The Medicare drug benefit, as far as I can tell, was done for no other reason other than to buy the votes of the AARP, and I don’t think they’ve — he’s had any success in making any of those people who weren’t already Republicans become Republicans. So, basically, my view is that if he had done the right thing in those cases, he would be no worse off politically than he is. So, to say that he did these things for political reasons is to either argue — is to argue he was a really, really bad politician, I guess.
Kokai: Given what George W. Bush has done in office and the perceptions, at least among some, that he represented conservatism — for the true path of conservatives, has he set the movement back?
Bartlett: Oh, I don’t think there is any question that he’s set the conservative movement back many years. Part of it is that he’s corrupted the Republican Party to where even the members of Congress now, who used to be fairly conservative…they seem to be out there, you know, just using the government to buy votes any way they possibly can. And, you know, these pork barrel projects, they get a lot of publicity, are just the tip of the iceberg, and there’s not a single Republican that hasn’t taken advantage of these things. I mean, Republicans used to say, “We need to cut this stuff and not build unnecessary roads and bridges just because some politician wants them.” And I think his immigration policy, whatever you think about the substance, has certainly hurt the Republican Party, I think. And, you know, not to mention a lot of just mistakes that have been made along the way, such as the way Katrina was handled. I think one — I think even conservatives — a lot of conservatives — have doubts about the way the war in Iraq has been handled, even those who agree with that it was, basically, a good idea. It’s hard to find anybody who will say a good word about the way it was done. So, I think that he’s really eroded a lot of the support that conservatives used to have, made them look like they’re just pandering politicians rather than people who stand for principles. And I think that’s going to have some long-term consequences.