As the 2008 presidential election draws closer and candidates announce their bids to become heir to the free world, it seems appropriate to step back and take measure of the issues that supposedly divide our country. It is increasingly clear that the issues that divide candidates and political parties are no longer ideological; they are instead almost completely political. Both sides of the political aisle are guilty of playing partisan politics, and never has this been more evident than during the era of the Bush administration.
Both Democrats and Republicans have abandoned their ideological bases in recent years, yet the American people still blindly vote for candidates simply because they have either an R or a D next to their names. Republicans, in particular, led by President Bush, paid dearly for the folly of abandoning deep-rooted conservative underpinnings in the fall 2006 elections.
Under Bush, Republicans have distanced themselves from traditional conservative principles in favor of listening to a president who has turned his back on the small government principles of the traditional Grand Old Party and other conservatives. But conservatives, ever-weary of keeping liberals out of office at any cost, have been left with no choice but to vote for the lesser of two evils. This is the only thing keeping conservatives voting Republican.
Basically, President Bush has gotten away from the essence of true conservatism. Consider this: Under the Bush administration, traditional conservatives have watched helplessly as government has grown in all directions. Expansions in Medicare, the nationalization of education and an 80-percent increase in education spending through the No Child Left Behind Act and continuous deficit spending, including a proposed 2008 budget that would bring deficit spending to $244 billion, have alienated conservatives who have long stood on principles of smaller government and fiscal responsibility.
Add to this the creation of the Department of Homeland Security under the Patriot Act (a massive expansion of federal power) and enormous agricultural subsidies in the farm bill of 2002, and any real conservative must cringe.
President Bush has thus far represented nothing close to the conservative principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility he was elected to restore. In fact, in the 2006 fiscal year, Bush approved an estimated $67 billion in earmarks, which turned out to be nothing more than pork-barrel spending.
The last seven years have been nothing but a disappointment to true conservatives, as the federal budget has increased at its "fastest rate in 30 years" according to an Independent Institute study. And it appears there is no relief in sight as the 2008 budget introduced by the president projects an increase of 4.2 percent over last year's already gargantuan budget.
A 2003 report from the Brookings Institute published by The Wall Street Journal concluded the "number of full-time employees working on government contracts and grants has zoomed by more than one million people since 1999, bringing the overall head count to more than 12.1 million as of this past October."
Ironically, the size of government was kept smaller under the Clinton administration. According to Daniel Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation, this was mostly due to a conservative Congress dictating and controlling most of Clinton's agenda.
Mitchell told The Wall Street Journal the increase in the size of government under President Bush was "very troubling for conservatives." He went on to say that this was discouraging, "particularly since we made so much progress under Clinton in reducing the size of government."
In the end, any small-government conservative must feel betrayed by the Bush administration's pursuit of the expansion of government, but what other options did conservatives even have to vote for? The 2004 election was almost a choice of the lesser of two evils to true conservatives.
No conservative in his right mind would have voted for Kerry — or any liberal for that matter — as the idea of liberalism itself advocates an increased role of government in domestic issues along with a general trend toward increases in taxes. Liberalism seeks a greater role for the government in social issues, which in turn leads to more government spending and a decrease in personal responsibility. This, of course, is contrary to what a traditional conservative would fight for. Thus, in 2004, the right was left with no choice but to vote for President Bush over a liberal party that openly advocated the creation of a bigger government.
This still doesn't take away the fact that the president betrayed the very ideological basis of the Republican Party: small government and fiscal responsibility. Hopefully the fall 2006 elections will serve as a wakeup call to Republican lawmakers, and they will recommit themselves to the longstanding responsible principles of true conservatism.
Joe Trovato ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in journalism.
