- Bartlett, Bruce.
Impostor.
New York: Doubleday, 2006.
ISBN 0-385-51827-7.
-
This book is a relentless, uncompromising, and principled
attack on the administration of George W. Bush by an
author whose conservative credentials are impeccable and whose
knowledge of economics and public finance is authoritative; he was
executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress
during the Reagan administration and later served in the
Reagan White House and in the Treasury Department under the
first president Bush. For the last ten years he was a Senior
Fellow at the
National Center for Policy Analysis,
which fired him in 2005 for writing this book.
Bartlett's primary interest is economics, and he focuses almost
exclusively on the Bush administration's spending and tax policies
here, with foreign policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, social
policy, civil liberties, and other contentious issues discussed only
to the extent they affect the budget. The first chapter, titled
“I Know Conservatives, and George W. Bush Is No
Conservative” states the central thesis, which is documented by
detailed analysis of the collapse of the policy-making process in
Washington, the expensive and largely ineffective tax cuts, the
ruinous Medicare prescription drug program (and the shameful way in
which its known costs were covered up while the bill was rammed
through Congress), the abandonment of free trade whenever there were
votes to be bought, the explosion in regulation, and the pork-packed
spending frenzy in the Republican controlled House and Senate
which Bush has done nothing to restrain (he is the first president
since John Quincy Adams to serve a full four year term and never veto
a single piece of legislation). All of this is documented in almost
80 pages of notes and source references.
Bartlett is a “process” person as well as a policy wonk,
and he diagnoses the roots of many of the problems as due to the Bush White
House's resembling a third and fourth Nixon
administration. There is the same desire for secrecy, the intense
value placed on personal loyalty, the suppression of active debate in
favour of a unified line, isolation from outside information and
opinion, an attempt to run everything out of the White House,
bypassing the policy shops and resources in the executive departments,
and the paranoia induced by uniformly hostile press coverage and
detestation by intellectual elites. Also Nixonesque is the
free-spending attempt to buy the votes, at whatever the cost or
long-term consequences, of members of groups who are unlikely in the
extreme to reward Republicans for their largesse because they believe
they'll always get a better deal from the Democrats.
The author concludes that the inevitable economic legacy of the Bush
presidency will be large tax increases in the future, perhaps not
on Bush's watch, but correctly identified as the consequences of his
irresponsibility when they do come to pass. He argues that the adoption
of a European-style value-added tax (VAT) is the “least bad”
way to pay the bill when it comes due. The long-term damage done to
conservatism and the Republican party are assessed, along with
prospects for the post-Bush era.
While Bartlett was one of the first prominent conservatives to speak
out against Bush, he is hardly alone today, with disgruntlement
on the right seemingly restrained mostly due to lack of alternatives. And
that raises a question on which this book is silent: if Bush has
governed (at least in domestic economic policy) irresponsibly,
incompetently, and at variance with conservative principles, what
other potential candidate could have been elected instead who
would have been the true heir of the Reagan legacy? Al Gore? John
Kerry? John McCain? Steve Forbes? What plausible candidate in
either party seems inclined and capable of turning things around
instead of making them even worse? The irony, and a fundamental flaw
of Empire seems to be that empires don't produce the kind of leaders
which built them, or are required to avert their decline. It's
fundamentally a matter of
crunchiness
and sogginess, and it's why
empires don't last forever.
June 2006 