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In celebration of his 68th birthday on Sunday, the Republican National Committee website sold t-shirts that read “I Miss W” alongside a picture of George W. Bush
The purpose, obviously, was to fundraise for the RNC.
I hope they didn’t raise one dime.
The best thing to happen to conservatism in the last decade has been the tea party. To remind us why, a brief history lesson is in order.
In 2013, National Journal’s Michael Hirsch chronicled the tea party’s origins and evolution:
(T)he rebellion against Big Government that the tea party has come to embody really began more than a decade ago with a growing sense of betrayal among conservatives over Bush’s runaway-spending habits. Conservatives were angered by his refusal to veto any spending bills, especially in his first term, not to mention what happened during the nearly six years of GOP control of the Senate and House from 2000 to ’06, when federal spending grew to a record $2.7 trillion, more than doubling the increase during Bill Clinton’s two terms. The final outrage that lit the brushfires of tea-party fervor was Bush’s sponsorship of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program in the fall of 2008, just before he left office, in order to bail out Wall Street.
In 2008, when Bush “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” and Republican presidential nominee John McCain rushed back to Washington to help usher along TARP, conservatives had had enough.
The GOP establishment was put on notice and the tea party started to become a revolutionary force in American politics. Obama wasn’t even president yet.
And that was the point.
What made the tea party special was that it was the first time in, well… forever, that a sizeable majority of conservatives were willing to admit that Republicans were really no better than the Democrats. What made it so important is that they were willing to form a grassroots movement determined to do something about it.
Before Barack Obama, George W. Bush was most big government president in American history. Bush gave us the largest entitlement expansion since Lyndon Johnson with Medicare Part D, he doubled the Department of Education with No Child Left Behind, he started a war in Iraq and carried on a war in Afghanistan for far too long, both of which combined cost us somewhere between $4-6 trillion.
And with that price tag, Bush nearly doubled our national debt.
If conservatives now “miss” George W., it basically means they’d be comfortable, yet again, returning to government growth and reckless spending so long as it was a Republican president doing it.
It would be as if the tea party never even happened, something I’m sure many members of the Republican National Committee would be fine with.
Conservatives “missing” Bush also poses another significant problem for those who truly desire a more limited government.
The ugliest aspects of conservatism today focus not on Obama’s policies, but his person. A cottage industry has sprung up in the last eight years on the right, in which many people have made a lot of money portraying the president as a secret-Kenyan–Muslim–communist–lacking a birth certificate—or worse. Some say he hates America. Others get their jollies in taking potshots at his wife.
It’s all in bad taste. Perhaps worse, it’s really bad for conservatism.
When criticism of a political figure drifts from policy disagreements into personal vitriol, the opposite also becomes true.
If Barack Obama is the devil incarnate to the right, then George W. Bush is obviously wonderful by comparison. That is the overriding message of the “I Miss W.” t-shirt.
If the problem is entirely the person in the White House, as many conservatives now insist, then the next Republican president, no matter how awful he might be, will get a pass even if he implements policies that differ little from Obama’s.
When you make politics all about the person, you forget about the policies.
The tea party was the remedy to this madness because it zeroed in on the reckless spending of both parties. The tea party discredits itself today when it reduces its important critique of big government to little more than a personal vendetta against Obama.
I personally like President Obama. But his policies are destroying this country.
I also personally liked George W. Bush. But I don’t like what he did to my country.
No conservative should.
