QUESTIONS OF GREATNESS.(The Talk of the Town)

Folder: The Campaign Trail

In 1997, William Kristol and David Brooks, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offered a critique of the Republican Party of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole. "What's missing from today's American conservatism is America," they wrote. "The left has always blamed America first. Conservatives once deplored this. They defended America. And when they sought to improve America, they did so by recalling Americans to their highest principles, and by calling them forward to a grand destiny. What is missing from today's conservatism is the appeal to American greatness." The forefathers the authors claimed for what they termed "national-greatness conservatism" were Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and in the 2000 primary campaign its champion was Senator John McCain. It was never entirely clear what kind of grand destiny Kristol, Brooks, and McCain had in mind; the anti-government ideology of the modern Republican Party doesn't leave much room for crusades as ambitious as ending slavery and trust-busting. Still, the rhetoric suggested a turn away from the Party's reflexive hostility to government. Then McCain lost to George W. Bush in the primaries, and national-greatness conservatism looked like an idea that would never make it off the op-ed page.

But, a year later, because of historical circumstance and personal character, President Bush embraced half the idea, in the realm of international affairs. His foreign policy inspires comparisons, from admirers and detractors alike, with such Presidential heavy hitters as Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. When he talks about America's role in the world, his eyes light up and his manner grows calmer and his language turns clear and lofty. Until the war in Iraq began to deteriorate, he consistently had his opponents on the defensive--all the more because they so often failed to recognize the attractive power of his vision. During the campaign's final debate, last Wednesday night, on domestic and economic policy, the President's most resonant moments came when he was able to talk about things other than domestic and economic policy: his religion, his women, and his notion of a world transformed by American power. "As we pursue the enemy wherever it exists, we'll also spread freedom and liberty. We've got great faith in the ability of liberty to transform societies," he declared in his closing statement--an idea that was once expressed, with a bit more eloquence, by Lincoln.

Here at home, Bush has governed more along the lines of Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, bewhiskered and now forgotten Republicans of the Gilded Age. Like them, he has devoted his energy to keeping his party's most powerful constituents happy, providing them with regular feedings, opening the White House to business lobbies, and turning his congressional majority into a patronage machine at the expense of fiscal sanity and simple fairness. His legislative agenda projects nothing like the ambitious idealism of his foreign policy; at home, the global crusader remains a crony capitalist. In last week's debate, Bush's solution for the most pressing domestic problems of his Presidency was a kind of verbal shrug. What to do about the steep drop in the value of the minimum wage? "Listen, the No Child Left Behind Act is really a jobs ...