George W. Bush was a terrible president. By Matthew Yglesias

Looking back at the last — disastrous — era of efficacious conservative policymaking

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

APR 24, 2024.

If you’re in the DC area, I’m hosting a book talk for Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld about their new book “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.” I wrote about it last year after I read the manuscript, and it’s the best book on politics I’ve read in several years. We’ll be at Johns Hopkins’ DC building, 555 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, on May 7 from 5:30 to 7:00pm in Room 422. I’ll ask them some questions, we’ll get some questions from the audience, and hopefully everyone will learn something. Official event flier here. Sign up here. I hope to see you there!

George W. Bush was elected president in the flukey, unfair election of 2000.

Not only did Al Gore (like Hillary Clinton) win the popular vote, but the median voter selected Gore (this was Gary Johnson in 2016), and Gore clearly would have won in a runoff system (this is less clear for Clinton in 2016). And though people remember the infamous litigation around a Florida recount and continue to disagree over who would have won had the Supreme Court let one take place, that leaves out the larger issue of the Palm Beach County ballot design. As Nate Cohn reviewed recently, the evidence is overwhelming that Gore lost a critical margin of votes because people who intended to vote for Gore accidentally checked the box for Pat Buchanan.

Which is just to say that the election was, in every possible way, a moral victory for Gore.

Earlier, Bill Clinton moved to decisively moderate the image of the Democratic Party. He won two elections, and he was popular and effective as president. His chosen successor suffered from a less charismatic personality, from the standard third-term curse that hurts incumbents, and from the fact that the dot-com bubble was unraveling. What’s more, Bush made efforts to moderate the GOP’s image, preaching a gospel of “compassionate conservatism” and ditching the hard-edged anti-immigrant policies of Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich.1

Still, in the face of all those headwinds, Gore was the candidate that the American people preferred, and he should have been president.

Instead, Bush won, and the immediate reaction of many elite commentators was that the accidental and unfair nature of his victory meant he would need to redouble his efforts at moderation and run something resembling a grand coalition or national unity government. This is not what happened. Instead, Bush took the reins of government and acted like every other modern newly elected president, charging ahead with an ideological agenda and rapidly losing standing in the polls. But then came 9/11. His approval rating shot up. The GOP scored an anomalous midterm victory in 2002. A bunch more conservative policy passed after the midterms. And then Bush got re-elected fair and square in 2004, winning the only GOP popular vote victory of the modern era.

The wheels fell off Bushism relatively rapidly after its triumphant reelection, but the period between Bush’s inauguration and the 2006 midterms is a striking and important one.

It’s the only time since Reagan that the conservative movement was truly governing the country. It also falls into a weird kind of gap where the Bush presidency is too recent to be history but too distant to be vividly remembered by many. And I think it’s worth taking a look back and trying to genuinely assess his administration’s major initiatives.

An effective Republican president

When I say the conservative movement was genuinely governing the country, I mean to draw a contrast with the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

He was, obviously, in office. And he enacted some policies. But despite the persistent fears engendered by Trump’s clear aspirations to dictatorial rule, he was in practice a remarkably weak and ineffectual president.

My sense is that Trump benefits politically from this inefficacy. Contemporary political parties are not like the patronage machines that dominated the Gilded Age. Those parties tried to win elections primarily in order to reap material rewards from running the government. That meant, in turn, they made policy with the primary aim of winning elections and maintaining power. Today’s parties are dominated by people with much more sincere policy motivations who want to “hire” presidential candidates who will get things done. But the public generally doesn’t favor large policy changes. So you end up with the Biden administration complaining that they don’t get the credit they deserve for all that they’ve accomplished, when I think the problem is mostly that voters don’t actually want an effective president.

And with Trump, they got what they wanted.

A president who was better at his job probably could have repealed the Affordable Care Act, but that would have generated political backlash. Trump postured a lot about ending NATO and massively scaling-up the interior enforcement of immigration laws, but didn’t actually do either. The largest policy impact of his administration, overturning Roe v Wade, is toxically unpopular, and he benefits politically from confused low-information voters not realizing that he is responsible for it. In the eyes of a crucial swathe of swing voters, Trump is an inept blowhard who ran a chaotic clown show of an administration — which they see as better than government dominated by effective polarized elites.

Bush, though, wasn’t like this. He had a lot of charisma, he was good at giving speeches, and a bit like Biden, he was good at the interpersonal schmoozing aspect of policymaking and was often underestimated because he wasn’t a detail-oriented policy wonk.

But a lot of Bush’s efficacy was a matter of circumstance — 9/11 gave him a uniquely commanding political position and a lot of latitude to try stuff. And I will say that to his credit, Bush seems to have correctly understood the relationship between political opinion and doing things. After his re-election, Bush said that he had “earned political capital” by winning and intended to spend it down in his second term by deliberately tackling a Social Security privatization campaign he knew would be unpopular. The other presidents I’ve covered all seem to have believed, erroneously, that their achievements would be additive. Bush understood that doing stuff only hurts you politically, that the reason to do it is you believe in it.

A bunch of terrible ideas

Unfortunately, the ideas Bush believed in were mostly catastrophically bad.

The invasion of Afghanistan, for example, made sense as a punitive raid against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. And Bush’s initial reluctance to get deeply involved in a long-term project of Afghan governance also made sense. But then Osama bin Laden escaped, which was embarrassing, and Bush reacted to that embarrassment by denying that it was a big deal and insisting that actually American troops weren’t there to punish the perpetrators of 9/11 at all, thereby backing the country into an unwinnable, open-ended war that spanned multiple administrations. By forcing his successor’s successor’s successor to be the one to take the political hit for admitting that this was all pointless, Bush hoarded his political capital. But tons of people died and vast sums of money were spent as a result.

And then there’s Iraq, which was supposed to unleash a domino effect of pro-American regime changes in the region but instead — at great direct cost to the United States — created a pro-Iranian arc.

I am less critical of the prior bipartisan decision to open American markets to Chinese imports than the current bipartisan consensus — an underrated part of the “China Shock” paper says Americans benefitted on average — but there’s just no excuse for the fact that the Bush administration made zero effort to take meaningful action on behalf of the people who were harmed by it. The way this argument played out in progressive circles is someone would say “we shouldn’t trade with low-wage countries, it hurts workers.” Then someone else says “sure, it hurts some workers, but it helps Americans on average — we should use that additional prosperity to help the vulnerable.” But then the first person says “well, but in practice we’re not actually doing that — just stop the trade.” And the second person says “okay, but your plan leaves most people poorer.”

It’s a frustrating situation, and Bush was the guy who was in a position to do something about it. But there was no Marshall Plan for the Midwest. Instead, fiscal capacity was blown on two rounds of regressive tax cuts and failed wars that somehow managed to leave us without a defense industrial base. His policy initiatives around marriage-promotion and faith-based institutions totally failed. In reviewing the Bush presidency, you’re supposed to be high-minded and acknowledge how effective PEPFAR was, and it absolutely was effective. That said, PEPFAR was a small amount of money relative to Bush-era initiatives. And I think it mostly underscores how plastic the political environment was, especially in 2002-2004, and how sad it is that the political capital was mostly spent on bad ideas.

Two big mixed bags

The partial exceptions to this, I think, are No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act.

I already wrote a four-part series on the rise and fall of the education reform movement, so I don’t want to go on at much length about NCLB. I’ll just say briefly that a lot of the specific things that went into NCLB were good, in my opinion, and that in particular, the much-criticized push to get schools to give kids standardized tests so that we can assess how much learning is taking place was correct and important. On the other hand, the further removed in time we are from the episode, the crazier it sound in retrospect that the whole thing was framed around eliminating “achievement gaps” between socioeconomic groups rather than just raising performance levels. That’s just an obviously impossible goal. It was a good way for a Republican Party president to get over on the teachers unions, but it’s been a delayed-fuse mechanism for some bad left-wing ideas in a way that should have been incredibly foreseeable.

The Medicare bill, meanwhile, is style of conservative politics that has been very influential in world history but that we haven’t seen much of in recent years.

When Medicare was created, it didn’t include any prescription drug coverage. Over time, this omission became more and more glaring, and the idea that Medicare should include prescription drug coverage was one of Gore’s best issues in 2000 and one of Democrats’ best issues in 2002. Bush, even though he won those races, decided that he should accede to the basic progressive demand (give seniors drug coverage) but do it in a conservative way. That had two prongs. On one, he created a drug plan that was less generous to patients than what Democrats wanted, but also more expensive because it didn’t allow the government to negotiate bulk purchasing discounts. On the other, he greatly expanded the “private option” inside Medicare, renaming it Medicare Advantage. That’s great branding — who wouldn’t want the more advantageous form of Medicare? This was a big battle, featuring both bipartisan negotiations and legislative chicanery. And it ultimately became the last piece of legislation of its kind. A conservative bill passed the House, and a bipartisan bill passed the senate, and then a conference committee wrote a compromise bill that was closer to the House vision. It passed the senate with fewer than 60 votes because Democrats felt it would be inappropriate to filibuster a conference report.

The prescription drug benefit worked out pretty well. A lot of seniors got access to coverage and outcomes for things like congestive heart failure improved. Pharmaceutical R&D spending increased.

Democrats have since modified the prescription drug benefit to be more generous (this was part of the ACA) and also to include lower prices for a handful of drugs (this was part of the IRA), so it’s drifted a little closer to the Democrats’ original vision. But it’s still basically Bush’s policy and it’s fine. Of course, if Democrats proposed a major expansion of the welfare state, people would ask how they planned to pay for it, and even if they planned to pay for it by taxing the rich, people would still complain that somehow that doesn’t count and they’re making the debt situation worse. Bush just straightforwardly financed the program with borrowed money, and people still think of Republicans as the deficit hawks.

Speaking of which, the Medicare Advantage part of this mostly seems like a waste of money.

Bush promoted this aspect of the plan to skeptical conservative as part of a long-term strategy to reduce entitlement spending. And you can find studies from the American Enterprise Institute that claim it’s working. But the basic problem with having the government pay insurance companies to provide elderly people with insurance rather than providing the insurance itself is that the insurance company needs to find a way to make money. You could do that by making the coverage worse, but then who’s going to want to enroll? Well, what if you made the coverage a good deal worse, but then invested some of the savings into marketing and some into nice-to-have features that primarily appeal to younger and healthier seniors? Then you might end up with a client base that has below-average health expenses, and that creates your profit margin. But the margins basically just come from ripping off the government.

Policymakers aren’t totally naive; the amount of money a Medicare Advantage provider gets is supposed to be based on the health profile of its client base. But it’s still the case that the dominant strategy here is to find ways to game the system. What we find in practice is that as seniors get sicker, they drop out of Medicare Advantage, so the MA “savings” come from having clients who don’t have extensive health care needs. This is disputed territory, of course, but I think the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget is a credible arbiter of questions like “what policies reduce government spending,” and they say Medicare Advantage has $100 billion per year in overpayments.

The fire next time

I bring all this up because I think Americans are under-concerned about the “normal” risks associated with a GOP electoral win this fall.

That’s not to say that I’m not concerned about the risk that America will slip into quasi-fascist rule — Trump’s lawless and authoritarian behavior is very worrying. But it’s also covered extensively, and I think it’s worrying in the sense of “there’s a five percent chance this could happen and that’s way too high” rather than in the sense of “this is likely to happen.”

What is likely to happen if Trump wins is that he’ll have a senate majority at his back that is larger and more conservative than the one he had in 2017. And while his skills operating the levers of power are still sub-par, he’ll be better at this aspect of the job than he was the first time around. What’s more, corporate America and the other normal bulwarks of conservative politics no longer regard Trump as an aberrant figure who is likely to depart the scene. He’ll have what Bush had: solid backing from all the usual forces of conservatism.

What will a freshly empowered conservative coalition actually do in power?

I have no idea, in part because Trump doesn’t like to communicate about public policy ideas, in part because Trump is a huge liar, and in part because there’s very little journalistic interest in this question.

But I’ve seen very little to suggest that conservatives have reckoned in any meaningful way with why Bush-era decision making was so bad or tried to figure out how to do better. There’s a vague sense that the upshot of all this is that “neocons” are bad and so we should let Russia conquer Ukraine. Maybe they’ll flip from embracing free trade while lazily refusing to do anything to address the downsides to just embracing the most blinkered and fallacious defense of protectionism. But the conservative movement seems to have lost the brainpower and capacity required to analyze issues on the merits. Their stated governing agenda is to walk into a situation with high interest rates, increase inflationary pressures, and create a huge fiscal crisis. I’ve written an entire article on Bush screwing everything up, and I didn’t even get to the huge recession that ended his term. I’m worried!