It's the conservatism, stupid

Yesterday Bush vetoed Congress's appropriations package for education, health and labor programs, as promised and expected. What that all about?

"Legacy." As we know, our president is seized by a monomania that, as Fidel Castro once said, history will absolve him. We hate him now. We'll love him when we come to our senses, decades hence—just like ol' Harry Truman.

The problem being, he's marinated so long in the stewpots of conservative ideology that he's actually convinced that their word on such things is golden: that "the people" adore a conservative, and conservatives adore he who refuses to "overspend."

And so, despite the insult to even conservatives' intelligence—the notion that the deficits he ran up alongside six years of a "conservative" Republican Congress will all be forgotten—he vetoes perfectly sensible spending packages even though the difference between them and his own budget targets amounts to, as Bob Borosage likes to say, a "rounding error" in the grand budgetary scheme of things.

And what will these stunts mean for the ongoing wellbeing of American civilization? Likely they will be disastrous. He doesn't care; devil take the hindmost. And thus the ongoing record of conservative failure, the legacy of their little experiment running all three branches of government and obstructing the public will on progressive legislation once they lost the Congress, will be compounded, unto our children's and grandchildren's generations.

But from the looks of the House Democratic leadership's response, the political damage to the idea of "conservatism" will be nugatory. Speaker Pelosi has said: "Democrats have offered to work cooperatively with the President to address the priorities of our nation; we believe our differences are not so great that compromise cannot be reached."

See how she's let the President define the battlefield? He's saying Congress is spending too much. She says she's sure they can all meet each other halfway. No apparent sense whatsoever of the long-term strategic situation: that Bush, playing to conservatives, keeps presenting Democrats with once-in-a-generation opportunities to get across the message that conservatives can't govern—in the same way the Republicans worked concertedly to sell the idea that "liberalism" was incompetent to govern over the last several decades (the difference: we're right; they were wrong).

Greg Anrig, author of the important new book The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, summed up the problem as a general one for top Democrats in an excellent post on the last Democratic presidential debate, noting

here are a few that weren’t uttered once: “conservative,” “conservatism,” “ideology,” and “right-wing.” (“The right” was used a lot, but only as a modifier for “track,” “signal,” and “idea.”). In the October 21 Republican debate, in contrast, the word “liberal” was used a total of seven times by four different candidates. For example, Mitt Romney said, “And, you know, Democrats also love America. As Ronald Reagan used to say, it's not that liberals are ignorant. It's just that what they know is wrong.”

To continue to shy away from attacking conservative ideology, which is the root cause of almost all of the Bush administration’s failures, amounts to political malpractice.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future