Back in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton was running for re-election, he was given the “welfare reform” bill to sign. He was between a rock and a hard place because, as a liberal, he of course did not want to sign a bill that undercut the ability of the federal government to provide welfare to people it deemed “needy.” At the same time, Clinton had won the Presidency largely on promises that he would end “welfare as we know it.” When he signed the bill, he was reported as making comments that even though he didn’t particularly like the bill that the conservative Republican Congress had sent him, once elected to a second term he would hopefully be able to do something about overturning some of it. It was said that he signed the bill, but with a “wink” or a nod towards fellow liberals that he didn’t really mean to sign it.
This is the kind of open two-facedness that President Clinton was famous for, and why so many people didn’t respect him. For years now, conservatives have been claiming that President Bush is just the opposite; that he says what he means and he means what he says. I never thought this to be the case, and now we can see just how right I was. He has nominated for the Supreme Court his personal friend and lawyer, Harriet Miers. Little is known about Ms. Miers’ record, viewpoints or ideology–things that used to matter when appointing a Supreme Court justice, but evidently do not matter to President Bush. We do know that Ms. Miers is associated with Focus on the Family, a militant Christian religious organization in favor of curbing the breach between church and state even more than President Bush has attempted to do. Bush, like his predecessor Clinton, is openly and brazenly trying to have it both ways. He’s reportedly telling religious conservatives that given Ms. Miers’ membership in such an organization–which he considers a good thing–she can be counted on to vote against abortion rights on the high court. In the same breath, he’s telling liberals and others who kind of like the separation of church and state the way that it is that they aren’t to worry, Ms. Miers is not an ideologue of any kind–meaning that she has no ideas and therefore no positions, the same argument made in defense of John Roberts, the man recently appointed to be Chief Justice.
President Bush is a lot more like President Clinton than most people realize. He’s a politician to the core, but the point is much deeper than that. President Clinton, like his wife, craves power. He wanted to be in office and to have power, no matter what. Yes, he’d prefer to be a liberal–and even a socialist if allowed to get away with it–but in the end he’d do whatever he had to do in order to win. That’s why he signed welfare reform, but with a wink to his core supporters that he would try to overturn some of it. Try to imagine, for a moment, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson signing the Constitution, with a wink to the British Royalists that in a few years they’d try to change it.
President Bush wants power, but I don’t think power is his primary motivating force. His primary motivating force is to be liked by people who hate him–people who hate him for being “conservative,” i.e., for holding ideas that they dislike. The truth about President Bush is that he has no ideology or ideas of any kind. He came into office to cut taxes and avenge his father in Iraq by unseating Saddam Hussein. He has done both, and beyond these two policies he, and his Republican Congress, have engaged in the biggest domestic spending spree since the founding welfare state days of the New Deal and the Great Society. Now that taxes have been cut, the economy continues its expansion into deeper and deeper welfare statism and regulation; now that Saddam Hussein has been unseated, our soldiers take hits in Iraq every day as our commander in chief all but admits he has no clue what to do except “have faith.” With respect to his latest nomination to the Supreme Court, the President wants to have his fundamentalist religion, and eat it too; that is to say, he wants to appoint a religious zealot, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a religious conservative, because this will make liberals dislike him.
Ideology will get the blame for President Bush’s behavior, but in reality his contradictory behavior stems from the same source as President Clinton’s a decade earlier: lack of ideas. President Bush desperately wants to be seen as a moderate. He has made liberals foam at the mouth for daring to use military force against enemies of the United States and for daring to cut taxes; consequently, he has to spend the rest of his Presidency showing liberals how he’s really a moderate. With the appointment of a religious fanatic disguised as a bland attorney to the Supreme Court, Bush has been caught with his political pants down. He thought he could appoint the equivalent of Pat Robertson and have it be perceived as a harmless appointment by those concerned about abortion being kept legal, and government staying out of the bedroom. Clinton likewise wanted to show conservatives that he wasn’t really a liberal even though of course he was.
The core of this problem lies with the American people. American people, on the whole, don’t know what their ideas are.
They want religion, but they want to retain separation of church and state–even though all religion, at its core, places the supernatural notions of god and faith above the secular demands of freedom and productivity. (Just ask the Islamic terrorists, who understand this issue better than most).
Most Americans want low taxes, but they also want unlimited demands met by the welfare state–“free” health care, health insurance, child care, quality schooling, and all the rest.
They want to live by the sea or the river, but they also want the government to somehow protect them from the forces of nature.
They want the United States to be safe, but they don’t want military force to be used unless the rest of the world is comfortable with it–which it never is, even when the U.S. repeatedly rescues them.
I’m not saying all Americans are contradictory in this way, but I am saying that most are. That’s why our national elections are so close and that’s why we end up with “conservative” Presidents trying to show how liberal they are, and “liberal” Presidents trying to show how conservative they are. Politicians reflect the intellectual and moral state of a culture. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are no Adolph Hilters; but they are no Thomas Jeffersons either–not by a long shot. They stand for little to nothing, and in the end they crave what all neurotics crave: power, and to be liked by those who dislike them. More and more Americans are scared to think and consequently scared to commit to ideas of any kind–for fear of being disliked, or for fear of not getting “free” medical care; this is why they end up with the likes of Clinton and Bush as their leaders. Most are getting exactly what they deserve, and exactly what they asked for, whether they allow themselves to know it or not.
