Last Night’s Debate Over Bush’s Speech

its a speech

It means nothing. It’s empty promises. Go back and read it in a year, and see how little of it pans out.

I’m skeptical, particularly of this:

As for Bush, the rest of his term will be dominated by one of the biggest domestic spending programs in our history.

As Meteor Blades’ diary points out… this might insead be perhaps the biggest period of looting in history.

Bush’s real “base” should love it!

As for the “victory”, if you’re right and it does turn out to be one, please don’t forget that the price was very high.

Too bad every day is opposite day in Bushworld…

Perhaps one could argue that Bush’s speech is a victory for liberal rhetoric, i.e. the reason Rove and Hughes put those words in his mouth was because they recognize the popular appeal that using government to lift fellow Americans from poverty and despair holds. After all, it was simply the addition of the “compassionate” to the conservative that proved the winning advantage for Bush over the scary convention of 1992 with Pat Buchanan scaring the shit out of Americans with his hard-edged speech.

Unfortunately, Bush has no intention of letting all that juicy cash get into the hands of poor people. It is yet another opportunity for Bush and Cheney to funnel US tax dollars into their own private bank accounts.

First, the concession of the progressive agenda:

“As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. And that poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality.”

I gasped in disbelief at this statement coming from Bush.  This comment undermines the central argument (“individual responsibility”) conservatives have been making for 20 years.  Bush just eloquently made the argument for affirmative action and other poverty fighting measures.  This should be the lead in every newspaper article in the country.  (I won’t hold my breath waiting for the corporate media to pick up on it).

This is triangulation in reverse. Instead of picking bits and pieces of the opposition in order to launch your own side’s plan (think Medicare prescription drug plan), Bush basically offered a liberal, big-government solution, with only a handful of conservative bits (enterprise zones, etc.). After a while people are going to start asking: Do you want real Democrats to run a progressive program, or do you want fake ones who run the program just to make the Republican Party appear like it cares? This is what kills Democrats on national security all the time. Republicans say, “Do you want a real Republican that cares about national security, or a peacenik Democrat dressed up in military garb?” And they win on that every time. Seems like we’ll win on this one.

I think a number of posters questioning

Bush’s motives in this thread are missing the point of the diarist.  Think of politics as a conversation where there are unspoken rules governing what can be said and what cannot be said.  There are certain things that if said change the rules of the entire game.  For instance, if I’m involved in a romantic relationship with someone this relationship can proceed for quite some time without commitment or even referring to itself as a relationship.  However, if one evening I happen to say “I love you”, the rules of the game between me and this other person suddenly changes and certain things that previously were excluded from our communication now become possible to say.  It doesn’t really matter whether I meant it, whether it was a moment of weakness, whether it was off the cuff, whether I was calculating in saying it.  Things now have changed.

The diarist seems to be saying that something similar happened with Bush’s speech last night.  Regardless of Bush’s intentions, regardless of whether he’s being cynically manipulative (no doubt), regardless of whether or not he’ll follow through, what Bush said last night had the effect of changing the political landscape and of redefining what it’s possible to say and not say, and what the American people are entitled to expect and not expect.  What’s important here is not whether or not Bush will follow through (I find it unlikely that he will), but that he’s opened a door for those of us on the left and Democrats to put certain things on the table, to reformulate issues, and to reformulate the basic assumptions governing American politics today.  This is an opportunity, and the far more effective strategy is not to dismiss Bush’s proposals, but to take him at his word an hold him up to what he’s said.  Clearly he’ll fail in living up to what he’s said.  That opens the door for democrats to follow through where the right fails.

Bush has been forced into an almost Johnsonian ideological concession here to activist government, and not just a momentary capitulation, but an ongoing activist approach to government which will foment divisions within his base leading up the next elections, and which will provide a long waited for reemergance of the basic importance of New Deal style government.  Bush has finally been forced to make a huge ideological concession–I think the first of his presidency.  And it will drive a big stake through the ideological rationale for the conservative movement.