Conservatives against Bush becoming louder

Bush is losing support on right

Startribune - Saturday, September 20

The criticisms of President Bush aren't surprising: He's bungling the war in Iraq; his budget deficits are disastrous; he's trampling civil liberties; his spending plans are misguided.

But the source of those criticisms is: They're increasingly coming from conservatives.

Think tank studies, op-ed columns, talk radio callers and opinion polls show conservatives' disenchantment with Bush's policies and priorities has been climbing, although nowhere near as much as it has among liberals. And although those dismayed conservatives might rally round him in next year's presidential election, his campaign aides are keeping a close eye on the trend.

"I hate to say they've got nowhere else to go, but I think most conservatives will stick with the president," said former Rep. Vin Weber, who is co-chair of Bush's reelection campaign in Minnesota and four other states. "Conservative voters across the country will conclude backing the president is imperative. Of course, it's impossible not to have a few dissident voices."

One of those voices belongs to Daniel Cragg, a college student from Eagan who in June launched a Web site called conservativesagainstbush.com "to propound the conservative principals this administration has forsaken."

The site has been averaging about 200 hits a day, Cragg said. "The idea is to get the word out about how far off track he's gotten," he said. "A lot of people are mad about what's going on."

Evidence of grumbling on the right can be gleaned from recent polls.

A Star Tribune Minnesota Poll this month found that 31 percent of self-described conservatives gave Bush a thumbs down for the way he's doing his job. That was up from 9 percent who disapproved in April, days after the fall of Baghdad. The current disapproval rate among conservatives is the highest the Minnesota Poll has recorded in Bush's presidency.

Conservatives' displeasure has been growing nationally too. A recent ABC News poll found that 23 percent of conservatives nationwide disapprove of the job Bush is doing, up from 14 percent in April.

Such sentiments (along with considerably higher disapproval ratings by moderates and liberals) shouldn't be surprising, Weber said. "We've come off a summer of difficult news, what with the economy and the post-war," he said. "If those things were to continue and deepen, you'd start to worry. But the opposite is true."

Besides, no president satisfies every member of his political base all the time.

Minnesota conservatives' disapproval of Bush's performance has seesawed, from as low as 3 percent immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks to 18 percent 10 months later. (And it's a bipartisan phenomenon: Witness the fact that a month after Bill Clinton became president, 19 percent of liberal Minnesotans disapproved of his performance.)

"Every successful Republican president, including Ronald Reagan, ends up criticized by a number of voices on the right who complain he's not pure enough," Weber said. "Any compromise is unacceptable to them, but it's impossible to govern the country with rigid ideological principles."

A similar point was made by Mitch Pearlstein, who heads the Center for the American Experiment, a Minneapolis-based conservative think tank. "There are indeed conservatives out there who will complain about any officeholder who's not doing precisely what they want him to do," he said. "These are early seeds of disgruntlement, but they're still very faint."

Fuming

Conservatives universally praise Bush's relentless tax cutting but have little good to say about the growth in government programs, spending and budget deficits.

Pointing to this year's projected $455 billion budget shortfall and proposals for a Medicare prescription drug benefit, Club for Growth president Stephen Moore wrote this month: "Imagine that Al Gore and a Democratic Congress were doing all this profligate spending. Would conservatives stand for it? . . . Fiscal sanity is in retreat, under a solidly Republican regime."

Federal spending last year grew by 7.9 percent, the highest in a dozen years. Much of that is because of increased military and homeland security spending in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but a double-digit increase in Medicaid spending has contributed to the growth.

Cato Institute president Edward Crane fumed to the New York Times this summer that Bush's "fiscal record is appalling -- spending is out of control. The fiscal record of the Bush administration makes Clinton look downright responsible."

Research recently published by the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning think-tank, showed that the true size of the federal workforce stood at 12.1 million in October 2002, up from 11 million in October 1999.

Despite the Bush administration's claim that it has shrunk the federal workforce, reductions have been more than offset by "off-budget" jobs paid for with federal contracts and grants, the study found.

An analysis last spring by the Cato Institute compared spending during the first terms of Bush and Reagan and found that spending grew in 11 categories under Bush and four under Reagan. While spending on education, training, employment and social services shrunk by 32.6 percent under Reagan's watch, it has grown by 26.8 percent under Bush's.

Assessing Bush's record, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan recently wrote: "The Bush administration is actually a big government liberal administration on fiscal policy. It likes spending money; it takes on big projects; it's quite content to borrow 'til the fiscal cows come home."

Some conservatives have blasted Bush for his quiet acquiescence in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent ratifications of affirmative action and gay rights. Others have complained that he has not attempted to restrict the number of abortions performed in the United States.

Conservatives of a libertarian bent have railed against the Patriot Act and what they see as its threat to trample civil liberties. And conservatives with isolationist beliefs have blasted the war and occupation of Iraq.

Prominent among these is erstwhile Republican and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. Now editor of the American Conservative magazine, his lead editorial in the current issue concludes that "the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terror has gone terribly, terribly wrong."

Twin Cities talk show host Jason Lewis has occasionally gotten an earful from conservatives fed up with one or another of Bush's policies.

"It's uneasiness, not open revolt," he said. "There's a limit to conservatives' patience, but I don't think it's going to be a huge problem in the election."

In many ways, Lewis said, Bush's domestic policies resemble his father's, who was famously unable to hold onto conservatives' allegiance.

The saving grace for the younger Bush is his tax-cutting zeal and his war on terror, Lewis said. "Without the specter of war right now, Bush would be getting many of the same criticisms his dad got," he said. "Plenty of criticisms on the spending side are warranted, but the war on terror trumps all of that."

Bob von Sternberg is at vonste@startribune.com

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