Tacitus has a post in which he wonders if Bush is losing the conservative base. Several bloggers have said that they’re willing to vote for a Democrat in order to produce the kind of divided government that kept government spending to a minimum during the Clinton years. The arguments are that if Bush is going to spend like a Democrat, why not simply elect one?
The problem with that is that it’s like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Now, I won’t defend Bush’s spending habits of late. The increase in non-defense discretionary spending has been simply untenable. It’s the main reason why we’re facing such horrendous deficits. Congress and the President are spending money like drunken sailors except drunken sailors can’t raid the Treasury to keep up their binging. At some point or another the party has to end and someone’s going to have to pay the bill, and that’s going to be a major fiscal hangover for whatever Congress gets stuck with it.
At the same time, we know that the Democrats aren’t going to be much better. A nationalized health care system will be an albatross around the neck of this country that will leave the national budget seeing more red than a Mars probe. Trusting the Democrats to be fiscally responsible is about as sound as trusting Ted Kennedy with whiskey and car keys. Counting on divided government is no solution either – if the Democrats win control of Congress say good-bye to budget restraint and hello to massive increases in entitlement programs. Even if that doesn’t happen, there’s no guarantee that the parties won’t continue the race to outspend each other.
I don’t even want to think about what would happen to the war on terrorism if a Clark or a Dean were in charge. We’d have a return to the fool’s errand of Oslo, an abandonment of Iraq, and a foreign policy run from Brussels rather than Washington. Those Republicans who think the status quo is bad are foolish to think that things would get better with a Democrat in control of US foreign policy. The only potential exception would be Joe Lieberman, who is a foreign-policy hawk, but the chances of him getting the nomination remain slim with the anti-war base of the Democratic Party firmly in charge.
The fact is that champions of limited government spending are going to have far more sway in a Bush White House than in a White House openly hostile to that agenda. With each Democrat planning to eliminate Bush’s supply-side tax cuts the country would be hit with the double-whammy of more spending and increased taxes. The economic gains of the last few months would disappear, lowering revenues and making the situation worse.
A pragmatic look at the situation makes it clear – while Bush is hardly tight with the budget, he’s far better than any other alternative. While there are likely many ideological conservatives who might lash out against Bush, all they have to do is talk to some of the ideologues that voted for Nader in 2000 to see what the results of ideological purity over pragmatic politics will turn out to be.
