Last March, a campaign finance reform bill finally made its way out of
Congress to the White House, where George W. Bush, abandoning long-standing
Republican opposition, quietly signed it despite his view that it was
flawed. But this was hardly Bush's moment. Instead, it was the crowning
achievement of his one-time rival for the GOP presidential nomination,
Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who has labored tirelessly on the issue for
many years, consistently provoking sharp criticism from fellow Republicans.
During the Republican primary season in 1999-2000, McCain emerged not
only as Bush's only serious political rival, but also as the embodiment
of the hopes of a dissident group of Republicans for a new kind of GOP
politics, one that would make a clean break with the concerns and preoccupations
of the dominant Republican strains in Congress. McCain was a war hero
emphasizing patriotism and personal sacrifice, in contrast to the complacent
self-regard of the times and the stark anti-statism of the congressional
GOP.
The leading theorist of the dissident wing was David Brooks, who in March
1997 had written a remarkable piece for The Weekly Standard called
"A Return to National Greatness: Manifesto for a Lost Creed."
Brooks lamented the small-mindedness of both the times and the conservative
vision, contrasting it with periods in which Americans had a more robust
sense of themselves and their national purpose. "America is a more
dominant power in the world than Americans a century ago could ever have
imagined," Brooks wrote. "Yet we have almost none of the sense
of global purpose that Americans had when they only dreamed of enjoying
the stature we possess today." For Brooks, the emblematic American
figure of "national greatness" was President Teddy Roosevelt,
"who believed in limited but energetic government, full-bore Americanism,
active foreign policy, big national projects (such as the Panama Canal
and the national parks), and efforts to smash cozy arrangements (like
the trusts) that retarded dynamic meritocracy."
Could McCain be the new T.R.? The advocates of "national greatness"
certainly hoped so. "Right now [McCain's] sentiments are vague,"
Brooks conceded in a September 1999 Standard article, "One
Nation Conservatism," which nevertheless portrayed McCain as the
embodiment of an emerging "new Republican philosophy."
On policy issues, McCain styled himself first and foremost as a reformer,
starting with campaign finance but hardly ending there. He called for
ending corporate welfare -- thereby antagonizing any number of GOP-aligned
big-business interests. In a bid for the mantle of superior fiscal responsibility,
he promoted a tax cut smaller and more targeted to the middle class than
the one George W. Bush was pushing. McCain was also a long-time foe of
pork-barrel spending, and he pledged to use the bulk of the federal budget
surplus to address the long-term needs of Social Security.
McCain also pressed a vision of a more robust U.S. global engagement,
faulting not only the Clinton administration for irresolution and fecklessness,
but also the mainline GOP for a pinched and narrow view of what the United
States could or should do abroad. In 2000, McCain was talking about "rogue
state rollback." And he distanced himself from GOP realpolitik by
saying he was open to U.S. intervention for humanitarian purposes, not
quite vowing "no more Rwandas," but coming close.
Whether it was the issues or the personality -- he named his campaign bus
the Straight Talk Express -- McCain was a huge hit, especially with independent
voters. He started to rise in the polls from the moment that George W.
Bush emerged shakily from his Austin, Texas, redoubt. When the results
came in New Hampshire, McCain was running nearly even with Bush among
GOP voters and had capitalized on rules allowing independents to vote
in party primaries to inflict a near-fatal blow to the front-runner.
The GOP establishment, which had long since coalesced in support of Bush,
hated McCain. But clearly, he struck a chord with swing voters and was
drawing a number of people into politics for the first time, especially
young people. As for the dissenters within the GOP, the discontent with
Bush took many forms, from a visceral dislike for the frat boy in him
to the sense that he simply wasn't up to the job, either of defeating
Al Gore or of the presidency itself. If you had to boil the discontent
down to a single phrase, it would probably be "small-time."
In this reading, Bush and the GOP establishment represented too little,
asked too little of themselves, and were prepared to settle for too little.
They had embraced a kind of least-common-denominator approach to managing
their own coalition, and there was reason to worry that their approach
would translate into a least-common-denominator domestic agenda and foreign
policy, too.
It's striking how neatly the differing views of Bush and McCain dovetailed
with the views among the GOP intellectual set of the "national greatness"
project itself. Libertarians hated it, as one might expect. And many,
if not most, orthodox conservatives saw it as little more than the latest
iteration of a longtime bugbear, namely, "big-government conservatism."
(This response was no doubt aggravated by the praise that the notion of
"national greatness" was receiving in certain Democratic circles.)
As Brooks wrote in 1997, "It almost doesn't matter what great task
government sets for itself, as long as it does some tangible thing with
energy and effectiveness." In this sense, McCain and the project
were well matched: McCain was a study in energy and effectiveness; yet
his policy agenda is still a work in progress, falling short of a fully
developed alternative to Bush-brand Republicanism. Meanwhile, as he did
in the 2000 campaign, Bush has responded primarily by trying to co-opt
McCain's argument. Bush proposed his USA Freedom Corps after McCain (with
DLC Chair Evan Bayh) called for a major expansion of national service.
And, in the end, Bush signed McCain's campaign finance reform bill.
So in this sense McCain and his allies have shaped their party's agenda.
But in the meantime, we have had "national greatness" thrust
upon us in no uncertain terms by the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The great
task of mobilizing America to wage a long campaign against terrorism has,
for now at least, eclipsed the McCainiacs' reformist critique of the GOP.
Will these tensions within the conservative camp resurface? We'll see.
In the war on terror, "national greatness" now has a proper
project, but in the GOP at least, it's Bush's.
