Not So Keene

Will George W. Bush suffer defections from his conservative base this fall?

Fret not, says American Conservative Union president David Keene, in his recent essay published in The Hill: Unlike with his father 12 years ago, conservatives will stand firmly behind this President Bush.

"There was no talk of a primary protest against the current president this year for the simple reason that, while we might oppose such things as his Medicare prescription drug program and believe he could do far more to cut government spending, few believe he's abandoned us or the principles we like to believe we represent," Keene writes. "No president is perfect, but most conservatives believe that this is one who deserves another term."

That's right, Mr. Keene. Or more aptly, that's the Right -- willing to compromise on niggling matters of principle, like small government and fiscal responsibility, in the interest of the broader conservative agenda of...well, what, exactly?

Conservative crack-up

The indictment that any true conservative could issue against Bush is manifold. Let's take a quick timeout to examine the bill of particulars, including as it does the following:

• He has endorsed altering his own proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to permit civil unions, a position now virtually identical to that of almost every Democratic presidential candidate this year -- save for the reckless approach of tinkering with the Constitution to establish the marriage v. union distinction.

• He hasn't shown the guts to back a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, and is curiously quiet about abortion, an issue he says the country "isn't ready" to address. (And here I thought this president leads from his heart, regardless of polls or popularity.)

• He first supported protectionism for the steel industry in 2001, angering steel purchasers, then flip-flopped on the tariffs issue in 2003, angering steel producers.

• He championed the extension of farm subsidies to the point where the federal government now doles out more money to agribusiness than the industry generates in tax receipts, making it a net-loss industry on welfare that's supported by the taxpaying public.

• He opposes the re-importation of prescription drugs made by U.S. pharmaceutical companies, a position that conflicts with the very free-market principles he pretends to espouse.

• He supported attempts by the Federal Communication Commission to consolidate the major media, a position that is both anti-competitive for the media markets as well as the marketplace of ideas broadcast by those media.

• His No Child Left Behind education-testing initiative epitomizes the sort of federal mandate that normally gags the "states' rights" crowd, a boondoggle for testing companies that does little more than force state administrators to learn what they already know -- namely, which schools in their state are performing well, and which are not.

• His Medicare prescription program represents the largest expansion of the fastest-growing portion of the federal budget -- so large, in fact, that the Administration had to lie to its Republican allies in Congress about the measure's actual cost estimates to get them to vote for it.

• He seriously underestimated the costs of the Iraq war, and the oil revenues that were supposed to pay for a reconstruction that our taxpayer dollars are instead subsidizing, forcing him to ask for an additional $25 billion in war funding beyond the $87 billion previously appropriated.

• As a collective result of several of these actions, this year Bush proposed the largest budget deficit in American history.

Now, try this fun little experiment, Mr. Keene: Imagine Al Gore were president right now, and had taken these positions and actions. You'd be writing a column about what a big-government, anti-market, fiscally-irresponsible, reckless, myopic, liberal socialist Gore is. And yet every one of these items is on Bush's resume.