There he goes again. President
Bush is claiming to
be a "compassionate conservative."
He said it in
his speech at the Republican
convention, and he has been
repeating it on the campaign hustings --
just as he did in 2000. But this time
around, the claim has no credibility.
Bush came into office promising a
reinvigorated battle against poverty,
drug addiction, and other persistent
societal ills. Outdoing his father's
pledge to spark "a thousand points of
light," he vowed to "rally
America's armies of compassion"
-- in particular, the
nation's people of faith. Yet
after four years in power,
the social policy revolution
that Bush promised hasn't materialized.
Compassion has been a rhetorical
mainstay of his administration; a
search for "compassion" on the White
House website turns up more than
1,000 references. But the president has
done little of substance to match his
lofty words. In fact, the ambitious
compassion agenda that he put forth
in 2001 has since dwindled to a bare
handful of halfhearted and under-funded
grant programs.
One of them, the proposed $100
million annual Compassion Capital
Fund, has received about a one-third
of its promised funding, and almost
none of its grantees are the small
churches and community groups the
fund was intended to help.
In addition, a much-touted initiative
to mentor children of prisoners has
received only $60 million in total funds
since its announcement. That's $40 for
each of the 1.5 million American children
with a parent in prison.
And then there was the
dramatic expansion of the
AmeriCorps national service
program that Bush promised.
The president exhorted
Americans to perform 4,000 hours of
lifetime community service, but he
didn't hold up his end of the bargain.
In fact, he delivered a one-third cut in
funding for AmeriCorps, and a cap on
its membership.
Perhaps this is not surprising. As
practiced by the Bush administration,
compassion has been more an act of
politics than one of will or heart.
Take, for example, the president's
centerpiece "faith-based initiative,"
which stalled in Congress. The initiative
promised to open a floodgate of
federal funding for faith-based institutions
and community groups to provide
a wide range of social
services. But the White
House barely lifted a finger
to make it happen.
Instead of crafting legislation
that could win bipartisan
support, it delegated its authority
to House Republican leaders who
took a purely partisan approach.
With White House consent, House
Republicans drafted a bill that ignored
the concerns of many Democrats and
civil libertarians. They feared that federal
money would be spent in support of
religious proselytizing. They also objected
to giving exemptions from employment
discrimination laws to the groups
providing social services under federal
contracts. No surprise, the bill passed
the House on a near party-line vote, but
foundered in the Senate.
John DiIulio, a Democrat tapped
by Bush to be the first head of the
White House Office of Faith-based
and Community Initiatives, was so
frustrated by the administration's
unwillingness to work for broad bipartisan
support for its faith-based initiative
that he quit. In a now-famous
memo, he said that the president knew
the faith-based bill probably would go
nowhere.
Describing it as a product of "the
most far-right House Republicans,"
DiIulio slammed the proposal as an
"absolute political nonstarter" that
"bore few marks of 'compassionate conservatism.'"
After this initial failure, the White
House drastically scaled back its faithbased
initiative into a package of tax
cuts intended to promote charitable giving.
The House and Senate have passed
separate versions of this tax package,
and it is likely to be the only artifact of
the original faith-based initiative to
become law.
In the meantime, the president's
policies toward welfare reform and
social spending for the poor have also
borne few marks of compassion.
Bush's welfare reform proposal --
also still stalled in Congress -- asks welfare
moms to put in more work hours,
but without more resources for childcare.
Already, as few as one in seven
families eligible for subsidized childcare
receive it.
In addition, the president has proposed
turning several bedrock entitlement
programs into block grants,
including the Section 8 housing program,
Medicaid, and federal child welfare
programs. In return for "flexibility,"
states would receive capped funding
with no promise of more money if
the economy were to sour. The national
poverty rate has, meanwhile, crept
upward to 12.5 percent in 2003 from
a historic low of 11.3 percent under
President Clinton. And the number of
people without health insurance
soared to an all-time high of 45 million
in 2003 -- an increase of 5 million
people since 2001.
Perhaps most mean-spirited, the
Bush administration introduced a
"precertification" regime for recipients
of the Earned Income Tax Credit, now
the federal government's largest and
most successful anti-poverty program.
Under the guise of rooting out waste
and fraud, the precertification requirement
burdens poor working families
with providing affidavits and filling
out cumbersome paperwork to prove
their eligibility for the credit before filing
a tax return. This is analogous to
asking middle-class taxpayers to register
with the IRS in advance for a mortgage
interest deduction. It is a pilot
program, but the IRS plans to expand
EITC precertification to 300,000 families
next year.
Unmasked, Bush's brand of compassionate
conservatism is little more than
a variant of default Republican anti-government
ideology. But the tragic
irony is that the idea of enlisting private
and nonprofit energy to improve social
welfare once bore the seeds of a potentially
meaningful political movement.
Leading New Democrats, most
notably Sen. Joe Lieberman, have long
championed the transformative force of
faith-based organizations as an engine
for social good. But long-standing
mutual suspicions have kept faith-based
groups and the government from working
in concert to fight poverty. A genuine,
bipartisan initiative to break down
these barriers could have yielded terrific
social dividends, and there is no question
that Lieberman and other
Democrats would have been willing
partners in that effort.
Unfortunately, the president chose to
turn his back. He has instead spent considerable
energy building a rhetorical
Potemkin village around his promise of
compassion. And well into the second
half of his term, his efforts had succeeded.
As late as January 2003, nearly twothirds
of respondents in a CNN/USA
Today/Gallup poll agreed that the president
"governed in a way that is compassionate."
But as the reality of the president's
record sinks in, cracks are beginning to
show. A recent Greenberg-Quinlan-
Rosner poll found that only 30 percent
of registered voters strongly agreed with
the statement, "George Bush has lived
up to his promise to govern as a compassionate
conservative." In fact, 41 percent
of voters now say they strongly
believe the opposite: "George Bush
promised to govern as a compassionate
conservative, but his actions in office
have proven otherwise."
With the election upon
us, the president has little
time to reverse his record
of talking big and acting
small. The so-called compassionate
conservative president can
now only hope that voters will look
upon his sparse achievements with
some compassion of their own, and
give him another chance.
But after four years of hollow
promises, the time for that kind of
compassion is over.
