Spring Break
Bush Betrays Base
Pankaj Prakash
Issue date: 10/13/05 Section: Commentary
Two days after winning re-election last fall, President George W. Bush declared he had earned plenty of political capital, and "now I intend to spend it." As the events of the last six months suggest, he might have already spent this capital.
Mismanagement of a national disaster, soaring gas prices, a series of investigations and indictments, a failed initiative to reform social security, a quagmire in Iraq and now his worst nightmare - his recent appointment of his crony, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. Bush's second term is on a downward spiral. His approval ratings have hit a new low of 37 percent, according to a recent CBS news poll.
Bush has become a "trust me" president whom nobody trusts. Democrats never trusted him on anything anyway. But now even his own base, the conservatives, doesn't trust him anymore. All for good reason, though. They trusted him on fiscal responsibility but what they got was a president who is a spendthrift. A president who has done more discretionary spending than even Lyndon Johnson and who hasn't vetoed a single spending bill in his entire tenure. They trusted him to fight and win the War on Terror, but got a war fought with incompetence and complete lack of planning, resulting in the endless meandering in Iraq. They also trusted him to hire competent people, and above all, to appoint more justices in the mold of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who can move the highest court of the land decisively to the right. Instead, what they got were sometimes purely incompetent and sometimes just mediocre cronies, at every place in the government from FEMA to the Supreme Court.
Last week, after Miers' appointment, Charles Krauthammer, an arch-conservative, wrote in his weekly syndicated column, "If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the President of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her. Nominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America's constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom." Harsh words indeed - especially when coming from his own troops on the right.
Mismanagement of a national disaster, soaring gas prices, a series of investigations and indictments, a failed initiative to reform social security, a quagmire in Iraq and now his worst nightmare - his recent appointment of his crony, Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court. Bush's second term is on a downward spiral. His approval ratings have hit a new low of 37 percent, according to a recent CBS news poll.
Bush has become a "trust me" president whom nobody trusts. Democrats never trusted him on anything anyway. But now even his own base, the conservatives, doesn't trust him anymore. All for good reason, though. They trusted him on fiscal responsibility but what they got was a president who is a spendthrift. A president who has done more discretionary spending than even Lyndon Johnson and who hasn't vetoed a single spending bill in his entire tenure. They trusted him to fight and win the War on Terror, but got a war fought with incompetence and complete lack of planning, resulting in the endless meandering in Iraq. They also trusted him to hire competent people, and above all, to appoint more justices in the mold of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who can move the highest court of the land decisively to the right. Instead, what they got were sometimes purely incompetent and sometimes just mediocre cronies, at every place in the government from FEMA to the Supreme Court.
Last week, after Miers' appointment, Charles Krauthammer, an arch-conservative, wrote in his weekly syndicated column, "If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the President of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her. Nominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America's constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom." Harsh words indeed - especially when coming from his own troops on the right.