While I endure the last days of the Bush Administration, watching a final acting-out of the President’s "daddy issues" as he attempts to escape the shadow of his war-hero father in one last visit to Iraq, I think I’ve finally made sense of the needless trauma of the past eight years: Bush was a deep-cover sleeper agent – a Manchurian Candidate – for progressivism.
Laura Bush, after all, was raised as a Democrat. George and Laura were married in 1977, just before the "Reagan Revolution." Instead of George converting Laura into a Republican, maybe Laura converted George into a confirmed progressive Democrat? Already with a substantial cover in the flawless Republican pedigree of his family, George W. Bush then bided his time, running for Congress to build credibility as a reliable conservative, eventually being elected as the Republican Governor of Texas, one of the least powerful Governorships in the country. There, Bush could clinch a convincing "deep cover" as a conservative Republican without doing much actual harm (except to the 152 inmates whose executions he approved, a sad, but necessary sacrifice to establish credibility on the Right).
By 2000, the time had come for Bush to move. Running as a moderate "Compassionate Conservative," Bush positioned himself in the White House and then 9/11 provided him with the key moment to thoroughly discredit conservatism for a generation and maybe longer.
His core tactic was so brilliant that it went unnoticed by most conservatives themselves until it was too late: he ignored the contradictions of conservative positions and took them all literally. In a clever ruse that only enhanced his support on the Right, President Bush pretended not to understand the inconsistencies of conservatism, staunchly refusing to explain or defend his administration’s policies beyond repeating talking points in a louder voice.
Through this simple technique of taking conservative principles at face value, Bush was far more effective in cutting down each right-wing shibboleth than if he had argued against them as a progressive Democrat: (1) the fantasy of war without sacrifice and American military omnipotence was discredited in the quagmire of Iraq; (2) the idea that we don’t need effective government was swamped and washed away with the floodwalls of New Orleans; and (3) the dogma of unregulated financial markets evaporated with trillions of dollars of capitalization in the stock market and the partial nationalization of major banks and insurance companies. Bush acted to discredit conservatism where others only talked.
Of course, the other, less psychotic explanation is that Bush was simply incapable of understanding that conservative dogma can’t be applied literally. A more skilled and motivated politician, who better understood how to make necessary compromises and make his positions attractive, might have extended the life of the Reagan Revolution a bit longer. Who would be President-elect today if Bush had simply followed the advice of the Iraq Study Group in 2006 and begun a withdrawal of troops from Iraq?
I suppose, then, in a perverse way, we should all give thanks, in the waning days of his Administration, for Bush’s lack of skill and imagination. Maybe we were a "center-right" country and maybe we are no longer thanks, in part, to George W. Bush.