Conservatives like myself are speaking out due to poorly negotiated trade deals by both parties. To call us Isolationist and racist only shows we are right you have no argument. We are also upset about the out of control spending driven by lobbyist clients needs and not the American people. Bob, you are a smart guy, to attack conservatives , by distorting their positions and life work is wrong.

I will give you the difference between Tom Price and I.

He feels that we can out tax structure,regulate and tort reform countries like communist China to fix the trade in balance. I think we need to level the playing field, and if we do not we will destroy the middle class. If you read Pete Peterson former Republican Treasury Secretary book “Running on Empty” he claims that we used this strategy while he was in office.

On spending , Tom Price has voted and or supported pork bills Highway, Energy, No Child Left Behind, Drug Bill……. Instead of blaming everyone in Congress for forcing him to sign the pork bills, Why not just vote NO.

Pete Peterson is right, a tax cut is not a tax cut unless you are willing to cut spending at the same rate. If you cut taxes and do not deal with spending all you are doing is deferring the bill in the future with interest. Bob if you keep supporting guys like Tom Price do not complain about 9 trillion dollar debt or interest rates going up.

I will be happy to deal with the UAE deal after you have time to deal with this last post. Thanks jk

WASHINGTON – From the moment George W. Bush began campaigning for the Oval Office in 1999, White House watchers have wondered what kind of president he would be: The Ronald Reagan of his generation? Like his father, the first President Bush? Perhaps even, in some ways, similar to Bill Clinton?
This year’s State of the Union address, which was panned by a chorus of conservative commentators, has intensified the debate about Bush’s political philosophy.

In the Monitor
Monitor, 03/27/06

Paradoxes of immigration hit US Senate

Latin leaders balk at US ‘wall’

Israeli right nips at Kadima

A joint obligation

Editorial: Universal preschool, universal benefits

More stories…

Get all the Monitor’s headlines by e-mail.
Subscribe for free.

E-mail this story E-mail this story

Write a letter to the Editor

Printer-friendly version

Permission to reprint/republish

The Wall Street Journal editorial page accused President Bush of playing “miniball,” code for a Clintonian love of “small political ideas.” Robert Novak reported private concern among congressional conservatives that Mr. Bush was moving toward bigger government. George Will called Bush’s most memorable line – that America is addicted to oil – “wonderfully useless.”

“He’s conservative by temperament; many of his policy positions, such as cutting taxes, are on the right side of the political spectrum,” says John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron in Ohio. “But he doesn’t have a consistent set of conservative principles. That’s what a lot of the complaint has been about, especially after the State of the Union.”

Specifically, Bush’s education initiative, No Child Left Behind, and the expensive new prescription-drug benefit for seniors have left many conservatives wondering whatever happened to the party’s commitment to small federal government. Bush’s immigrant guest-worker program also divides Republicans. And as the Iraq war drags on, so, too, are conservatives increasingly conflicted.

Columnists, of course, aren’t usually running for election, or trying to protect their party’s slim majority in Congress, as Bush is doing. And they often don’t represent the views of rank-and-file voters. A Gallup poll of State of the Union watchers, two-thirds of whom were Republicans, showed a 75 percent positive rating, including 48 percent who were “very” positive.

But pundits can also be the canary in the coal mine. When Bush nominated his counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, conservative columnists raised doubts about her reliability on key issues. Her nomination was withdrawn.

Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail guru who helped fuel the Reagan revolution of 1980, asserts that Bush’s inconsistency as a conservative has alarmed many of the most active members of the party – the donors, fundraisers, and grass-roots activists who drive turnout on election day. A recent online poll by Mr. Viguerie of more than 1,000 conservative activists found that 67 percent say Bush is not governing as a conservative, and 64 percent give him a D or an F on government spending.

Even though Bush won’t be on the ballot, conservative disappointment in him could hurt the Republican Party in this November’s midterm elections, he says.

“The party has been hijacked by big-government Republicans,” says Viguerie, hinting that it might be good for the party to lose congressional power later this year. “The importance of losing elections is greatly underrated,” he adds. “There’s not any way Ronald Reagan would have been elected in 1980 if [Gerald] Ford had been elected in ’76.”

Among conservative columnists, perhaps one of the president’s staunchest admirers is Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard. In his new book, “Rebel-in-Chief,” he delves into the tricky terrain of defining Bush’s philosophy as president. “Big-government Republican” doesn’t capture Bush, he suggests, nor do comparisons to recent presidents.

“His strategy is to use government as a means to achieve conservative ends,” Mr. Barnes writes. Thus, instead of trying to abolish the Department of Education, the Reagan-era position, Bush has sought to achieve the conservative goal of accountability in public education by requiring testing and then sanctions for schools that fail to meet standards.

Mr. Barnes separates presidents into two categories – those who govern and those who lead. He places Bush in the latter category, observing his penchant for far- reaching initiatives. Looking at the issue of presidential temperament, Barnes writes, “Bush is actually a mixture of FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] and TR [Teddy Roosevelt], with FDR’s cool optimism and TR’s pugnacity and determination.”

Drawing any sort of comparison between Bush and the Roosevelts strikes some presidential historians as off-base, but on one score, at least, even Bush’s critics credit him with a level of political pragmatism that keeps him in the game. Take the failed initiative to partially privatize Social Security. While conservative columnists scolded Bush for taking his top domestic priority of 2005 and reducing it to a call for a bipartisan commission on entitlements, other analysts say he was just being realistic.

“He’s going to go back and try pushing his Social Security idea again?” asks historian Robert Dallek. “It won’t go anywhere. It was a political blunder.”

Another factor that may hurt Bush somewhat in the eyes of conservatives is the memory of Reagan, which grows more positive as time passes. Even though Reagan never actually succeeded in shrinking the federal government, his campaign against big government delighted libertarians and fiscal hawks, who now complain that Bush has abandoned that legacy. Federal spending leaped 35 percent during Bush’s first term, the Cato Institute notes.

“We hoped [Bush] would be more like Reagan than his father, but clearly he is not like Ronald Reagan,” says Viguerie. “Reagan was no pure conservative – he wandered off the conservative reservation here and there. But there was such a massive reservoir of goodwill for Reagan, because he was one of us. He walked with us and came to our meetings and receptions and dinners and sat with us.”

And remember, too, that this whole argument started because you wanted to paint Dubai as some cross between a Chinese labor camp and a haven for terrorists. In fact, I asked you once what China had to do with a Dubai company unloading ships here. You never answered. You just changed the subject.

Oh, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Or not. If you’re going to try to put words in my mouth, at least have the decency to make me coherently evil.

“You sound like the Attorney for Ken Lay at ENRON… Please stop attacking the messenger and deal with the issue.”

Enron? LOL. What issue would you like me to deal with, John? You’re the one running for office and you have yet to articulate a single coherent policy proposal, never mind an agenda. All you’ve done is prattle on vaguely about how bad things are and how much worse they are going to get, dismissed government statistics that contradict your claims, blamed Tom Price, George Bush or the Republican party generally for it all, and dropped names of public figures you claim agree with you.

You sound like most of the angry left, John – all finger pointing and alarmism, but no viable solutions. “Everything’s going to heck and it’s that guy’s fault” is not an agenda and, as Kerry/Edwards showed, it’s not a great campaign strategy either.

You really do not want to argue that Jesus would support U.S. dollars to build child labor sweatshops overseas at the expense of the American middle class? I can give you more sources but I would think the association of Baptist churches in Massachusetts would be a good start.

Catholic

Central American and U.S. Bishops Joint Statement

Catholic Relief Services

Maryknoll Association fof the Faithful

Missionary Oblates Justice & Peace/Integrity of Creation Office

Pax Christi USA

Leadership Conference of Women Religious

Testimony of Guatemalan Bishop Alvaro Ramizzini

Jewish

American Jewish World Service

Protestant

Presbyterian Church (USA)

Association of Baptist Churhes of Massachusetts

Lutheran World Relief

Association of Baptist Churches of Massachusetts

American Friends Service Committee

Bob, You really do not want to argue that Investment bankers , CEO’s and Treasury Sectaries do not qualify as economist ? You sound like the Attorney for Ken Lay at ENRON. You may disagree, with billionaire Warren Buffet, Treasury Secretary and former CEO of ALCOA Paul O NEAL, Treasury Secetary Pete Peterson, Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts………. are all qualified as experts by any rational standard. Please stop attacking the messenger and deal with the issue. Thanks jk

The others are actually international relief (2) and political (1) organizations that just happen to operate under a banner of religious faith.

More importantly, none of the four groups you cited that actually took a position against CAFTA did so on the basis of US trade balances, foreigners taking American jobs, a “race to the bottom”, making the US “more like China and India”, or any of the other nonsense you are talking about.

In some cases, they actually want to protect jobs in Latin America from competition from the US. In others, they want us to force other countries to adopt stricter labor laws or other regulations (on humanitarian or other non-xenophobic grounds) as a condition to free trade, want to remove provisions that knock down barriers to investment in those countries, or want to allow other countries to engage in restrictive trade practices to protect specific industries from competition in the interest of either economic development or cultural heritage.

As for the rest, expressing concern about the size of trade deficits and suggesting we find ways to increase personal savings to reduce consumption, as Volcker was talking about, is not the same as opposing free trade deals.

And BTW, Paul O’Neil, Warren Buffet, Pete Peterson and Lou Dobbs are not economists. Peterson comes the closest – he’s an investment banker. And I have no idea what John Williams you might be talking about.

I will give you many more examples from Baptist,Methodist,Catholics,Jewish………. Who all oppose CAFTA based on moral grounds.

http://www.tradejusticeusa.org/issues/trade_agreements/cafta-main.htm

http://www.ajws.org/index.cfm?section_id=8&sub_section_id=12&page_id=413

http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2004/04-141.htm

http://www.tradejusticeusa.org/issues/trade_agreements/documents/OCBC-soc-2004-final.pdf

http://www.lwr.org/advocacy/tradejustice/CAFTA/index.asp

http://www.pcusa.org/trade/cafta.htm

When Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan , Paul Volcker …. are all issuing warnings,about are trade deficits , what trade deals do you think they are talking about ? When Warren Buffett is proposing a his new trade policy deal it is about reforming NAFTA, CAFTA WTO…. Bob you are a smart guy , do you really want to argue that they are not talking about reforming are current failed trade policy ?

Do you really want to become part of the NEOCON group that has declared war on respected Republicans economist like Bruce Bartlet, Paul O Neal, Warren Buffet,Pete Peterson,Paul Craig Roberts, Lou Dobbs John Williams………. just because they are telling the truth about our economy. “The truth will set you free”

As for religious opposition to NAFTA and CAFTA, do you really think one opinion piece from one preacher/talk radio host/2004 minor party VP candidate/vocal opponent of the Republican party, who describes Islam as “a religion of violence and hatred”, proves any point about “every major religion”?

Sorry, it doesn’t. But at least we now know where you get your xenophobic world view and reflexive opposition to Republicans in office.