Gerson's War on Conservatism Threatens Bush Legacy

Michael Gerson became the latest former Bush operative to escalate the post election war on the tea party and Sarah Palin in his Washington Post column “The GOP’s Sarah Palin Problem.” He mangles the facts terribly, even blaming Palin and Senator Jim DeMint for Sharon Angle’s ill-fated nomination in spite of the fact neither endorsed Angle until after she won the nomination. Doug Brady dismantled effectively the rest of Gerson’s specious argument at Conservatives4Palin. But most ironic was his closing statement that “the leading figure of the Tea Party movement seems increasingly indifferent to Republican fortunes and increasingly tolerant of disturbing extremism.”

I wonder how it comports with President Bush that just as he comes forth from seclusion to begin his book tour and rehab his image with the public and perhaps with conservatives, a number of his former operatives like Gerson have been reminding everyone of their war on the tea party and Sarah Palin. While Bush’s big government policies might be excused, generously, given his wartime presidency and small mandate as the best conservatives could have hoped for at the time, those who once believed he was only compromising conservatism out of circumstantial necessity have become rapidly disabused of such notions. The risk for the president is that conservatives become much less generous in those presumptions and excuses the more his operatives refuse to allow the Republican Party to move on.

First of all, recall that Sarah Palin identified Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt as the individuals who undermined her during the 2008 campaign – both borrowed high level Bush operatives. Similarly Karl Rove, Schmidt’s mentor, clearly sabotaged Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell’s campaign. Not only did he obliterate O’Donnell’s post primary honeymoon by eviscerating her before she had even given her victory speech, but he then had the audacity to wonder why she wasn’t “grabbing the imagination of the people of Delaware and moving ahead in the polls like these other candidates did around the country” after her “stunning upset.” It goes without saying that former Bush speechwriter David Frum has spent the last two years trying to destroy Palin and the tea party. Lastly, the New York Daily News reported last week that Bush himself has strongly disparaged Palin among his friends, and the Financial times reported today that Bush told Gordon Brown and other British dignitaries in 2008 that he would probably vote for Obama over McCain.

All of these highly public and ferocious attacks on conservatives seem to verify everything Matt Latimer has said about the Bush Whitehouse’s efforts, particularly Rove’s, to purge the Republican Party of conservatism, but Michael Gerson’s post-Whitehouse efforts might be the most incriminating of all.

Gerson has developed a manner of employing far left tactics against conservatives that resembles a more erudite and magniloquent Meghan McCain. While the Republican Party has been huddling closer and closer to the fulcrum of the Political seesaw trying to counterbalance the Democrats’ move to the far left, Gerson disproportionately focuses his attacks on the supposed dangerous radicalism on the right. Whether he is denouncing conservatives for “refus[ing] to police the excesses of their own,” equating O’Reilly with Olbermann, decrying “Tea Party Jacobinism” and their “Bolshevik approach,” or accusing conservatives of “nativism” and of proposing to “undertake a multiyear effort to feed racial conflict in America,” he is validating the left’s narratives about the supposed dangerous radicals and influences among conservatives.

Perhaps the worst leftist narrative Gerson promotes about conservatives is that conservatives are “anti-government,” which is where Gerson really reveals that he simply isn’t conservative at all regardless of how many times he labels himself as such. In 2007 Gerson denounced backlash against Bush’s “efforts to redefine the Republican Party” as an effort to “adopt a mean, anti-government message.” In his book released that year, Heroic Conservatism, Gerson wrote that “anti-government Republicans saw Katrina as an opportunity to cut off medicine to old people” confirming “the worst image of Republicans as the party of shriveled hearts.” He also explained “traditional conservatism has a piece missing — a piece that is shaped like a conscience.” Gerson has also been highlighting and warning of the dangerous “faux-revolutionary” language of conservatives. Worst of all, in his September 27, 2010 column, Gerson suggested conservatives “have their own consistency problems. A misty-eyed patriotism is difficult to reconcile with anti-government radicalism. How can you love your country and hate its government?”

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I could go on for a while, but given the libelous drumbeat from liberal media warning of the conservative or tea-party domestic terrorists that have never existed, this last suggestion by Gerson that conservatives claim to “love” their country but “hate its government” is a particularly low blow. It is awfully close to the Timothy McVeigh narrative that suggests McVeigh’s problems with the FBI, a government institution, must mean that he was a conservative anti-government radical. Conservatives aren’t “anti-government” at all, the disparaging term Gerson chooses; they just support different parts of the government than the left, among which is the FBI.

Conservatives believe, as Milton Friedman advocated, that government should get out of industries and endeavors that can be handled by the free market to focus on the chores that government alone can do, including law enforcement and the defense of the nation. Leftists believe the opposite, as summarized neatly by Robert Gibbs when he explained the “professional left” would only be satisfied when “we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.” Polling reflects the same. How is “misty-eyed patriotism” in any way difficult to reconcile with conservatism to Gerson, particularly in comparison with the left’s position? What does it say about Gerson that he is intent on smearing conservatism, consistently using leftist terms like “anti-government radicalism” and “anti-immigrant” when he knows full well conservatives only oppose big government and illegal immigration?

It is hysterical for Gerson or anyone from the Bush camp to accuse Palin of being “increasingly indifferent to Republican fortunes” given her success and the deliberate efforts of Rove and other Bush loyalists to undermine conservative Republicans at every turn, not to mention the obliteration of both the party and conservatism that occurred on their watch. Regardless of the affection and respect many conservatives accord to the Bush legacy, that generosity will dry up the more they try to protect their redefining of the party not merely by constructive argument but by undermining conservatism. The tactics used by Gerson, Rove, and other Rove disciples in this struggle will eventually redound on the former president, and if this is their notion of “saving conservatism from itself,” they may find themselves needing a life raft.