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Bush's shifting ideology
In his second term, the US president moved away from long-standing positions on foreign and domestic issues
- By Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen/Lat-WP
- Published: 00:04 September 22, 2008
- Image Credit: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
US President George W. Bush's decision to shore up the financial markets with massive government intervention is the latest sign of a broad ideological transformation of his presidency.
After a first term in which he largely adhered to conservative - or neoconservative - principles, Bush has moved away from long-standing positions on a range of foreign and domestic issues.
In the final year of his second term, he has reached out diplomatically to North Korea and Iran, engineered a dramatic midcourse correction on the Iraq war and increased the government's role in the daily workings of the economy to a degree that would have seemed unimaginable when he first pursued the nation's highest office.
For a president who toppled two foreign governments and slashed taxes dramatically in his first term, the policies of his second term are striking, particularly to those who had hoped his presidency might usher in enduring conservative rule in Washington.
Some leading conservatives seemed stunned last Friday by the turn of events that has left the federal government in control of one of the world's biggest insurance companies and the two largest financiers of home mortgages.
"I believe that the president is exhausted and the vice president has been marginalised, and what you now have is the Washington interests ... dominating the administration," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview last Friday.
"We have now launched big-government Republicanism. If we saw France do this, Italy do this, we would have thought it was crazy. We would have had pious speeches about the folly of bureaucrats running businesses."
Given the gravity of the financial crisis, others in the political world did not begrudge Bush his deviation from conservative purity on economic policy.
Some in both parties considered the administration's moves a welcome abandonment of ideology to cope with a global economic slowdown, instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the ongoing war in Iraq and nuclear ambitions of Iran.
"He has become overcome by hard realities, including his weaker political base and intractable problems," said Fred Greenstein, a leading presidential scholar at Princeton University. "That makes him more like a garden-variety pragmatist and less like a mission politician who is driven by a creed."
John Gardner, a speechwriter and consultant who served in Bush's first administration, said he saw the president's recent moves on the economy as less driven by an ideological shift than a reaction to unusual events.
Bush has always been less ideologically rigid than his critics have granted, embracing a dramatic expansion of the Medicare programme with a new prescription drug programme (albeit one tailored along free-market principles) and pushing, unsuccessfully, for a liberalisation of immigration rules.
He also presided over a dramatic increase in federal spending, disappointing many conservatives.
Longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie argues that Bush moved away from conservative principles long ago, saying the president did not fight hard enough to limit the growth of government and defend conservative social positions, such as opposition to same-sex marriage.
"He did betray us, just like his father did," said Viguerie, who has written a book that sharply criticises the current president's tenure.
"He promised he would govern like a conservative, and it just hasn't been the case." Few outside analysts disagree that Bush moved to the centre, especially after Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, much as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did after they confronted political setbacks.
The changes are reflected in an overhaul of personnel at key Cabinet agencies, particularly State, Defence and the Treasury, where secretaries pursued - or were allowed to pursue - much more pragmatic policies than their predecessors.
Peace process
At State, for instance, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has tried to restart a Middle East peace process that had been largely abandoned in the first term, and was given more flexibility by Bush to pursue a diplomatic deal with North Korea over its nuclear weapons programme.
Defence Secretary Robert Gates has been open to different approaches on Iraq and sought to defuse the tensions between civilian leaders and uniformed officers that endured at the Pentagon under his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.
The change was also pronounced at Treasury, where Paulson was delegated extensive powers over economic decision-making and has used them in a wide-ranging effort to avert economic collapse.
"What's going on is learning - it does happen in the light of the experience," said John Lewis Gaddis, a diplomatic historian at Yale University who has been friendly to the administration.
"I think the second term is quite different than the first term, particularly in foreign policy and now it is happening on the economy. ... There is a far greater degree of pragmatism and less ideological rigidity."
In a roundtable interview with White House reporters last Friday, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley took issue with this sentiment, saying basic elements of Bush foreign policy remain in place - such as an aggressive effort to fight terrorism - even while circumstances have changed over the course of the administration.
"The basic principles are the same, the fundamental approach is the same, but we have tried to be flexible and entrepreneurial and creative about how we carry out those policies," Hadley said. "We've tried to learn as we've gone forward in this situation."
"I see a lot more continuity, certainly in terms of who this president is, what he stands for, what his values and principles are," Hadley said.
"I mean, I think you've heard him, you've been listening to his speeches over the last eight years. This is a man who is remarkably unaffected by eight years as president, in terms of who he is, what he stands for, how he thinks of himself."
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