A Case of Deficit Thinking

IMPOSTOR

How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy

By Bruce Bartlett

Doubleday. 320 pp. $26

A few years ago, a journalist who writes for a conservative Washington magazine told me he had judged George W. Bush to be a "failed president" a mere nine months into his first term. But after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the journalist concluded that his opinions on Bush's domestic agenda were unimportant. After Sept. 11, 2001, he told me, he wanted President Bush to do one thing and one thing only: "kill bad guys."

Now, 9/11 didn't Change Everything, as some would have it, but it most certainly did Change Some Things, one of which was the relationship between Bush and his conservative base in the Republican Party. Nominated in large part because of his father's name, his establishment ties and his triangulating, tweak-the-Congress electability, Bush became a figure worthy of devotion, even adoration, among movement conservatives only after the terrorist attacks. No person writing about Bush's place in the conservative movement could ignore the crucible of Sept. 11.

Yet Bruce Bartlett has done exactly that. "Impostor" is not a bad book. It's a fairly devastating indictment of the current administration's economic policies from a conservative-to-libertarian perspective, and although there's little in it that will surprise anyone who follows politics relatively closely, Bartlett does add interest by quoting almost exclusively from conservative journalists and pundits to make his case. A syndicated columnist who worked in the White House under Ronald Reagan and in the Treasury Department during George H.W. Bush's term, Bartlett knows this territory well. (Too well, in the eyes of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based conservative think tank that fired him for writing "Impostor.")

At times, it seems as if he has collected every conservative criticism of Bush's domestic policies and compiled them in one handy volume. ("Bartlett's Quotations"? Never mind.) The list of items that drew conservative complaints is familiar but worth revisiting: campaign finance reform, the Medicare prescription drug bill, steel tariffs, a "proposed amnesty for illegal immigrants," No Child Left Behind, pork-barrel spending, the deficit. But a book that focuses exclusively on President Bush's domestic programs feels a bit like a book on Abraham Lincoln's tax policy. It's surely important, maybe even interesting, but it also misses the point.

To be fair, Bartlett acknowledges being "deeply concerned" about the war in Iraq, but he says he sticks to economic policy "because that is my field of expertise." Fair enough, but the decision to restrict his areas of inquiry turns out to be unusually frustrating, because he hits upon a persuasive unified field theory of Bush failures but declines to pursue it.

On the economy, Bartlett writes, policy analysis in the Bush White House is completely subordinate to the vagaries of "short-term politics." The administration has "a disregard for established economic agencies and total reliance on a small cadre of White House staffers, many with no substantive economic backgrounds." The economic team has "almost nothing" to say "about the substance of their responsibilities. They were only following orders handed down from the White House inner circle, acting mainly as salesmen who increasingly didn't believe in the product they were selling." Sound familiar?

None of this is earth-shattering: Bartlett himself cites the remark of former faith-based czar John DiIulio about the reign of the "Mayberry Machiavellis" in Bushworld. But the parallels with certain other policies become overt when Bartlett dredges up a quote from then-Deputy Commerce Secretary Samuel Bodman saying in 2003 that economic policy was "totally stovepiped" and that, in Bartlett's words, "administration appointees had very little big-picture policy information to guide them." Bartlett clearly doesn't mean for the connection to prewar intelligence to go unnoticed, and he bangs out roughly a page of perfunctory paragraphs noting similar thematic criticisms made by other White House observers about the administration's dysfunctional foreign policy, science policy and its response to Hurricane Katrina.

But in general, he appears uninterested in how the economic policy failures he discusses relate to the rest of the Bush presidency. For example, he mentions that Bush (who he says "may have the worst record on international trade of any president since Herbert Hoover") has "treated the World Trade Organization with contempt." But Bartlett doesn't connect the president's disdain for the postwar economic order of treaties and international organizations that has served U.S. interests for half a century with -- well, you get the idea. Even in trade policy, Bush prefers unilateral action, as the administration assembles "coalitions of the willing" for its trading partners, negotiating bilateral agreements that economists believe are ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive at increasing world trade. Surely there's a trend here worth fleshing out.

Despite its narrow focus, Bartlett's case against Bush is well argued, and he even throws in a compelling conservative defense of President Bill Clinton's economic policies. Democrats won't like Bartlett's universal dislike for government programs and regulations, but he says he's out only to persuade his fellow Republicans to return to the true faith before it's too late. "If the American people conclude" that the Republican Party "stands for nothing except payoffs for those on its team," Bartlett writes in the book's final line, "it will have lost something precious that, like one's virtue or good name, is awfully hard to get back once lost."

I doubt that many conservatives will be surprised by Bartlett's indictment on matters of economic policy. I suspect that most of them decided on Sept. 11, 2001, that there were more important things to care about. By ignoring foreign policy almost completely, Bartlett will have trouble influencing the many conservatives who made this bargain.

But now that the president's approval ratings have plummeted and the House looks at least within reach of the Democrats this November, conservatives might be more open to the political argument that Bartlett makes: President Bush is killing the Republicans. To Bartlett, that means he's killing the good guys.