Peter Beinart looks at the stirrings of economic populism among prominent Republicans and sees compassionate conservatism 2.0, which he argues wasn’t particularly politically successful in its original incarnation:
First, it didn’t even help Bush all that much. Let’s remember, he won less than 48 percent of the vote in 2000. Between them, Al Gore and Ralph Nader won more than 51 percent. Exit polls that year found that of the 10 qualities Bush voters cited as reasons for voting for him, “cares about people like me” was number seven. In 2004, pollsters asked the question differently. As Ben Domenech has noted, Bush won only 24 percent of voters who said their top priority was a candidate who “cares about people.”
… The big reason Bush won in 2004 isn’t because he wowed voters with his compassion. It’s because he won 86 percent of those who said their number one concern was “terrorism” and 80 percent of those who prioritized “moral values.” Since then, national security has faded as a political issue and the GOP’s historic advantage on it has disappeared. Something similar has happened on the culture war, which has shifted in the Democrats’ direction because gay marriage—which Bush won votes for opposing in 2004—is now far more popular.
Ramesh Ponnuru has a response up arguing the policy merits of this analysis, in which he makes the point that the current conservative attempt at a populist agenda has a somewhat different valence than Bush’s compassion-focused effort, because it potentially offers more to the middle and working class than did, say, faith-based initiatives or No Child Left Behind. To this I’d add that the “cycle of compassionate conservatism” that Beinart identifies is a recurring phenomenon (see this fine Steve Teles essay on the subject) in part because there isn’t a permanent constituency within the G.O.P. for policies that are narrowly tailored to the interests of the poor, so you tend to have brief flurries of G.O.P. interest in those areas (often associated with a specific figure, from a Jack Kemp to a Michael Gerson) that then melt away when the political weather changes. The hope with “reform conservatism” — and of course it’s just a hope — is that by tying safety-net reforms into a broader middle-class agenda, you can build a stronger coalition within the party (as well as outside it, eventually) for right-of-center economic populism, which would then make this attempt at reform more politically durable than compassionate conservatism proved to be.
Then, by way of a further response to Beinart’s point about the political limits of Bushism, I’ll make one concession and one riposte. The concession is that, yes, there have been cultural and demographic shifts since 2000 (or even since Bush’s second term, when these issues became of particular interest to yours truly), particularly on social issues, that have narrowed the potential appeal of a message that offers an economic populism rooted in social conservatism, which is one potential interpretation of what reform conservatism is selling. It’s possible, in this sense, that “reformocon” ideas that have slightly missed their political-demographic moment, and that the more thorough ideological blowing-up — involving major shifts on every issue, social and economic —that liberals see as necessary will have to take place before the Republican Party can compete consistently at the presidential level again. I’m of course skeptical and resistant, but this is a possibility that can’t be ignored.
But at the same time, it’s worth noting that George W. Bush fought two presidential elections in the shadow of the most popular Democratic presidency of — well, given where L.B.J. and Truman’s poll numbers ended up, arguably of the entire post-Roosevelt era. In the first week of November, 2000, when voters went to the polls to choose between Bush and Gore, Bill Clinton’s job approval rating was 58 percent, and throughout the Bush presidency voters had a solid reason to associate Democratic control of the White House with peace, growth, and broadly-shared prosperity.
This is not necessarily the scenario that will obtain in the next two presidential cycles. Perhaps President Obama’s ratings are destined to improve, but it is not particularly surprising than in an imaginary re-run of the 2012 election, Mitt Romney now bests him … by nine points. So to Beinart’s point about the potential shrinkage of the G.O.P. coalition, I would just counter by noting the potential fissures that a presidency as unpopular as this one could open within the Democratic Party’s current majority, and by suggesting that if the next Republican nominee will face more demographic headwinds than Bush in 2000, he may have more political opportunities as well.
Except, of course, that he’ll probably face Hillary, who still looks to me (yes, notwithstanding the book tour, and the book sales) like the one Democrat who could hold it all together.