Rethugs eating each other again; this could be a good year

Published on Monday, February 13, 2006 by Knight Ridder

Bush-Bashing on the Rise within GOP

by Dick Polman

WASHINGTON - Conservatives love to quote Ronald Reagan at every opportunity, to invoke him as the exemplar of their ideology. But in their winter of discontent, many on the right are breaching Reagan's 11th commandment, which decrees that no Republican shall ever speak ill of another. And the target of their ire is President Bush. At the dawn of a crucial election year — and with all the polls indicating that the Democrats are poised to make gains in the House and Senate — the Bush White House is banking on a big, enthusiastic conservative turnout in November. But that will happen only if the Bush base calls a halt to its Bush bashing. The bashing has been intense in recent days. Commentator Jonah Goldberg, miffed that Bush has piled up record deficits and boosted the size of government, writes that Bush "is spending money like a pimp with a week to live." Another, Fox News analyst Tony Snow, says that Bush's decision to shelve his Social Security privatization plan is "an act of surrender." Yet another, former Reagan domestic-policy adviser Bruce Bartlett, is releasing a book this month titled "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." The vibes here late last week at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) were particularly toxic. Normally, the thousands who attend spend most of their time trying to ensure that liberalism is a dirty word in American politics. This year was different. Bush was painted as another Bill Clinton (the ultimate insult) or Jimmy Carter (almost as bad), because he is pushing a downscaled domestic agenda — no Social Security plan, no tax-code overhaul this time — and because he wants to pump taxpayer money into alternative energy. Even Rick Perry, who succeeded Bush as governor of Texas, rebuked Bush for failing to secure the borders against illegal immigrants, thereby questioning Bush's national-security record. The ongoing influx of illegal immigrants, and the nation's porous border with Mexico, have become major grievances for the Bush base. The issue now threatens to undercut Bush's '06 strategy, which is to stump for a big November turnout by touting his war-on-terror credentials (an intended reprise of '02 and '04). Indeed, Republican strategist Marc Rotterman warned here that unless Bush gets tough on immigrants, "we risk alienating our conservative base and the 'Reagan Democrats' who have helped us secure our electoral majority. ... Our conservative movement right now is at a crossroads." Mike Krempasky, a veteran activist and prominent conservative blogger, said: "I know so many people who care deeply about immigration. It has become increasingly frustrating for conservatives to see their leadership refusing to secure the borders. And how will this affect the army of election volunteers that Republicans normally rely on?" The immigration issue is especially sensitive because it threatens to split the Republican coalition, dividing the grass-roots conservatives (the campaign workers) from the business lobby (the big donors). Within the grass roots, there is great hostility toward Bush's "guest worker" plan, which would allow illegal immigrants to stay in America for three years. Many conservatives dismiss that plan as a back-door amnesty and an invitation to terrorist infiltration; Bush's big-business allies like the plan, because they see the illegals as cheap labor. Last week, that GOP fault line ruptured. It happened when Rep. Tom Tancredo showed up at the CPAC event. The scourge of illegal immigrants, he's a Colorado Republican who flaunts his rebel status. In 2002, he said that if terrorists struck America after slipping across the unsecured border, "the blood of the people killed will be on this administration," a remark that (as Tancredo tells it) prompted Bush strategist Karl Rove to ring him up, chew him out and call him a "traitor." Tancredo was the CPAC rock star. He triggered howls of appreciation when he said that, on immigration, "it is the president, not Tom Tancredo, who is out of step with his party." Then he took on the Bush guest-worker plan and said: "It is the employer community which sees profits from cheap labor, and the hell with the (impact on) the American taxpayer. The conservative movement can either be the voice of principle ... or it can be the voice of the Chamber of Commerce, but it cannot be both." But Randel Johnson wasn't howling. A senior U.S. Chamber of Commerce official, he took the podium shortly thereafter, looking as if he'd just been punched. "Look," he said, "I'm a lifetime Republican, I worked in the Reagan administration, I worked on (Capitol) Hill when the Republicans took over in 1994. Immigration is a tough issue for some of us, like me, and we hate to see a split like this in the Republican Party." Thousands sat in silence, but he plowed on: "We in the business community provide millions of jobs, and all of a sudden, we become the bad guy in this debate." More silence. Nor does harmony reign on other fronts. There's a big conservative faction that thinks Bush is wrong for believing he can bring peaceful democracy to Iraq and the rest of the Middle East (case in point: Palestinians have chosen Hamas). There's a conservative faction that believes Bush is wrong to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans; ex-Rep. Bob Barr, who led the early fight for Clinton's impeachment, suggested here that the Bush plan violated federal law and argued that "we can't allow our convictions to be dimmed or tarnished or confused by the fog of war." And there's a big conservative faction that is alarmed about lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who pleaded guilty last month in a bribery-and-corruption scandal. They see Abramoff as a symbol of the special-interest establishment, and they want Bush to separate himself from that orbit and lead as a small-government outsider. And, maybe most importantly, there is an outcry over Bush's big spending and record deficits. Even Grover Norquist, one of the top conservative architects in Washington, points out that Bush's non-defense spending has outpaced Clinton's — and that this issue could demoralize conservatives on Election Day. In his words, "the troubles of 2005 could yet snowball to disastrous proportions in 2006." Copyright 2006 Knight Ridder