Buried With Bush

As the Bush presidency implodes, some of its worst policies mercifully will go, too -- including, we can hope, the torture and unregulated detention of alleged enemy fighters that have so discredited the country throughout the world.

But valuable strands of policy also may end up strewn in the wreckage, victims (in varying combinations) of President Bush's ineptitude, inconstancy and unpopularity. Among these are what Bush called compassionate conservatism, now moribund; American promotion of democracy abroad, now flailing; and accountability in elementary and high school education, losing ground as it approaches a major test in Congress.

Bush most likely lost his last chance to weave compassion into domestic policy last week when he could not persuade his party to put people ahead of fences in immigration reform. And while a shard of compassionate conservatism survives in his foreign-aid budgets and support for AIDS patients in Africa, these will come under increasing pressure from the fiscal squeeze that Bush has designed.

Overall, in fact, compassionate conservatism was an early casualty of Bush's fiscal policy, which tilted the tax code toward the wealthy at a time of rising inequality, forced the government to devote increasing sums to pay interest on the national debt and ensured that less and less would be available for social programs for the vulnerable.

Unlike compassionate conservatism, democracy promotion was of no interest to Bush when he ran for president. He embraced the idea after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he has had little success: Iraq and Afghanistan remain at war, tentative gains for democracy in the Mideast have been reversed, and autocracies in the former Soviet Union, China, Iran and elsewhere are emboldened. Not surprisingly, polls show increasing skepticism about democracy promotion, particularly among Democratic voters.

In fact, democracy was not the primary goal of U.S. invasions in Afghanistan or Iraq, and elsewhere Bush has not matched strategy or consistency to his soaring rhetoric. Two leading political scientists, Francis Fukuyama and Michael McFaul, argue in a recent paper for the Stanley Foundation (" Should Democracy Be Promoted or Demoted?") that the policy could be carried out far more intelligently.

The promotion of freedom has long been a tenet of American foreign policy, they write, and should remain so: "No country in the world has benefited more from the worldwide advance of democracy than the United States." This isn't a question for the military -- force "is the rarest used and least effective way to promote democratic change abroad," Fukuyama and McFaul argue -- but of setting priorities, reorienting the bureaucracy and enlisting allies.

But they worry that Bush's failures will instead lead the next administration to give up on the idea. "The tragic result" of the mismatch between rhetoric and results, they write, is that "Americans are starting to view this goal as no longer desirable or attainable."

That leaves what seemed until recently an unshakable pillar of the Bush legacy: accountability in education, as enshrined in the No Child Left Behind Act, enacted with bipartisan support in 2002.

The idea was simple: Schools should prepare their students for college or the modern world of work; they should be measured by their success in doing so; the measurement should apply to all children -- including minorities, the disabled and those learning to speak English; and shortcomings should trigger improvements. Who could argue with that?

Plenty of people, it turns out. Imperfections in the law, and administration inflexibility in administering it, turned some supporters into doubters. More fundamentally, powerful constituencies such as teachers unions and school boards and bureaucracies did not want to be measured and judged, and state legislatures did not want attention called to their inadequate support of education.

Now Congress must decide whether to reauthorize NCLB. With Bush weakened, politicians on the left and the right are responding to those constituencies and -- hiding behind the excuses of inadequate federal funding (on the left) or states' rights (on the right) -- threatening to kill accountability rather than fix it.

The result would be a return to a world in which high schools can comfortably turn out one illiterate after another, and no one would be the wiser. Only the kids themselves will know.

fredhiatt@washpost.com