Eric wrote:

P.S. Robyn is a staunch liberal, so if anyone manages to submit a picture that incorporates Bush campaign material (or other Republican or conservative items), I will personally donate $49 to the boobie-thon this year.

This seems to assume that Bush is a conservative and I see nothing to indicate that this is the case. His policies certainly don't reflect what are allegedly conservative values. This is the man who brought back farm subsidies to the tune of $50 billion a year, launched the largest new entitlement program since the Great Society (and lied about its true cost), put tarrifs on steel and many other products, signed a campaign finance reform bill that he had declared unconstitutional in his campaign (and then went to court to ask a judge to push that bill even further so it would cover the 527 organizations and ban them from buying advertising time), claims as one of his major achievements a bill that vastly increased Federal funding and control of education (remember when conservatives wanted the Dept. of Education eliminated?), and has presided over the largest expansion in the size and scope of the Federal government in decades. Other than empty rhetoric, by what practical measure is Bush a conservative?

I think this is the difference between what I call "pedestrian conservatives" and intellectual conservatives. Intellectual conservatives recognize that Bush has been anything but a conservative. Pedestrian conservatives view politics as a game, with "conservative" and "liberal" just labels to be attached to the two teams on the field, regardless of whether their actual behavior merits it.

Ed,

I don't think anyone would dispute that Bush is socially conservative. (Nor do liberals like him, which was really my point about teasing Robyn a little.)

Eric wrote:

I don't think anyone would dispute that Bush is socially conservative.

In rhetoric more than in reality, I would say. More than anything else, he is a creature of politics who knows (or at least is advised) that appeasing the social conservatives is the key to winning the White House as a Republican. But he doesn't appear to be consistently committed to actually doing much of anything in that regard aside from more symbolic gestures like the anti-porn stuff going on at DOJ (which has very little political or practical cost, and will do virtually nothing to reduce the availability of porn, and they know it).

Here's a good example. In 2004, during an election campaign, he was actively campaigning for the Federal Marriage Amendment, obviously highly favored by social conservatives (with some exceptions, of course, but all of the major organizations were screaming for it and still are). In 2005, with the election over, he suddenly backed away from it and didn't push for a vote in the Senate, despite having picked up 5 seats in the election. He said that he didn't want to bring it up because the Senate wouldn't pass it, but the Senate was a lot more likely to pass it after the election than they were before the election, yet he pushed to have it brought for a vote multiple times in 2004. Why? Because he's more interested in it as a political issue than as something he actually wants done.

Bush talks like a social conservative, and he's all for mostly symbolic gestures of support for that agenda as long as they don't have high political costs attached to them. And I would agree that he probably is in at least tacit agreement with most of the social conservative agenda. But in terms of actions, he hasn't done much to make it happen. He's a politician first, and ideas for politicians are only things to be spun for maximum effect. It's identical, in my view, to Clinton, who was a political creature first, last and always. Ideas didn't really matter, only political expediency did. It really does make me long for leaders on both sides who care more about ideas. Give me Jack Kemp or Daniel Patrick Moynihan over Bush and Clinton any day.

As a follow up on my last comment, I offer this quote from John Derbyshire in the National Review Online three days ago:

"What surprises me is how many of my conservative friends are still hot'n'heavy for W. Some of them are born-again Christians, and Bush is a born-again Christian, and that's what does it for them. Fair enough, I suppose, if that's the most important thing in your life, but what about the rest of us? What about us benighted folk who aren't born-again Christians, but are nonetheless conservative, believing in small government, self-support, fiscal prudence, individual liberty, national security, orderly immigration, judicial restraint, traditional values, and equal opportunity? W doesn't really offer a whole lot to us, does he? Sure, John Roberts was a good pick for SCOTUS, but who's the next pick? Alberto 'La Raza' Gonzalez? No thanks. Sorry, George, the bloom is off the rose. I can't even imagine voting for a Democrat, and I’m not a third party sort of guy, but… is this really the best we can do?"

Ed, I think that this particular comparison is not fair to Clinton. Clinton had sincere political objectives that he was willing to wrangle for, and if at the end of the day he was always willing to settle for half a policy victory and three-quarters of a political one, at least there still were real policy goals in there. Also, keep in mind that for most of his presidency, he was struggling with a deeply hostile Congress in the hands of the other party; obviously, Bush has no such excuse. (Contrast the scale of wonkishness of Clinton's health care plan with Bush's social security plan, and you can see that the former was at least really trying to be a policy guy, in the way that the latter can't even drum up the slightest interest in being.)

I suspect, Ed, that your willingness to lump Clinton and Bush together in this regard is at least in part due to your liking Clinton's actual policy goals a whole lot less than you like some of Bush's nominal ones. I don't expect you to like Clinton more than Bush -- but in terms of being creatures of pure politics, it's the Bush administration, not Clinton's, that has been staffed with nothing but 'Mayberry Machiavellis'.