State of the Union has become the most interesting and best hosted Sunday talk show. Unlike ABC, CNN went for a down-the-middle, no-nonsense interviewer in Candy Crowley. Crowley is able to extract real news — in part because she listens to the answers and asks effective follow-ups. Sunday was no exception. She sat down with George W. Bush and then with Jeb Bush as well.
The newsiest tidbit was Jeb’s apparent openness to a presidential run — but not in 2012:
GEORGE W. BUSH: … I urged [Jeb] to seriously consider running for president, because I think he’d be a great president. But he’s chosen not to run this time, and I finally have believed him.
CROWLEY: See? So you’re getting some place. And you noticed “this time.”
JEB BUSH: You know what? You never say never about anything. I answer the questions forthrightly about 2012.
But just as interesting was the reminder that the so-called “freedom agenda” was central to Bush’s presidency (in obvious contrast to Obama’s). Asked about the war in Afghanistan, Bush answered:
GEORGE W. BUSH: Well, there’s — first of all, Afghanistan was the site where extremists were able to find a safe haven to attack.
CROWLEY: But they’re mostly gone at this point in Afghanistan.
GEORGE W. BUSH: I wouldn’t make that assumption. Oh, in Afghanistan, yes, but it’s not to say they couldn’t come back if a regime that was welcoming them would give them safe haven again.
I would say that, put yourself in the position of a young girl in Afghanistan, and realize that her life will be incredibly brutalized and/or thwarted by people like the Taliban. And the fundamental question, is it worth it? That’s the question we’ve got to ask. Does it matter to our own national security, or does it matter to our conscience that women will be mistreated? I argue it does. And I understand it’s difficult.
On Iraq he sounded a similar theme: “I think somebody’s going to look back some day and say thank goodness the United States believed in the universality of freedom and liberated 25 million and gave the Iraqis a chance to have their own free — free society.”
Also evident is the devotion of both the Bush brothers to immigration reform:
JEB BUSH: Rick Scott got a majority of the Hispanic vote in Florida. We elected two Hispanic governors, Susana Martinez and Brian Sandoval. There were congressmen and women elected of Hispanic origin.
I think the problem is not just a West Coast problem, but it is a big-time California problem. And I think part of it relates to tone.
If you’re watching TV, and someone is kind of legitimately angry that we can’t control our border, and sending signals that it’s them and us, and, by the way, you’re not “us,” you’re “them,” it doesn’t matter what else people turn out. If they’re not — feel like they’re welcome, they’re not going to listen to the message.
CROWLEY: And how does the Republican Party sort of reach out on that? Because immigration reform, you tried.
GEORGE W. BUSH: I did. And I believe the best way to secure the border is to have a comprehensive approach, and said so during an Oval Office address.
The language got carried away though. I mean, people — the issue kind of spiraled out of control and sent bad signals.
I think the Republican Party can attract Latinos through good education policy, good small business policy, good policy toward our veterans. And there have been times when Latinos have voted Republican and times when they haven’t. And so we always need to learn from the past and be sensitive about the future. …
JEB BUSH: Yes. And at the same time, Latino, or Hispanic, as we call people of Hispanic origin in Florida, Hispanics want the border controlled. A great nation has to control its border for national security purposes, for all sorts of purposes. And so I don’t know anybody that says, yes, let’s just open up our border to create chaos.
So, once the border is controlled, and people view it that way, and there’s a perception, it’s benchmarked, and people say yes, then I think you’re going to find that there is common ground to change our immigration policy to help us grow faster as a nation and to welcome people that work hard and play by the rules to create prosperity for us.
None of the brothers got credit from the left for their efforts on immigration reform, while many on the right continue to savage the notion of comprehensive immigration reform — even the Bush formulation (border security first).
Likewise, Bush’s foreign policy was vilified by the Democratic party, which from FDR through JFK was in favor of a freedom-promoting foreign policy. But that’s a faint memory now. Bush’s emphasis on democracy promotion and human rights was the subject of such disdain, that it has taken the current administration two years to drop its aversion to even discussing these topics.
The Crowley interview is a timely reminder that Republicans should be wary of a cramped, batten-down-the-hatches form of conservatism. The political saleability of modern conservatism and its success domestically and overseas are not based solely, or even primarily, on an oppositional agenda (no to spending, no to foreign commitments, no to immigrants). Rather it is the quintessential freedom agenda — free markets, pro-growth policies, a robust assertion of American power and interests oversees, a beacon for and defender of victims of despotism, and a big tent GOP. As the Republicans ready themselves for the 2012 primary, they should not forget that limited government is not an end unto itself, but rather a necessary condition for our freedom and prosperity. Whether on defense spending, immigration, or the war against Islamic terror, conservatives would do well to keep that in mind.
It’s just so unfair!
With all due respect, I think you have to give it up on Hurricane Katrina. The subsequent federal response to the hurricanes that have followed gives the lie to the notion that the Bush Administration handled Katrina right. Sure, the mayor of N.O. is a tool. Sure, Gov. Bianco was awful in a crisis. The school buses and so on. Plenty of blame to go around. But upon seeing the manifest inadequacy of the state and municipal responses, the feds should have dropped the politics, dropped the jurisdictional niceties and just gone in to save people. Instead, as you surely recall, the response was feeble and late, largely because the crony Bush put in charge of FEMA was no leader and in way over his head. Bush himself acted like Katrina response had to wait til he was done with his ranch visit. The optics matter in a situation like this.
Democrats are better at dealing with domestic emergencies. They just are.
Vail Beach,
I don’t disagree with the optics aspect. But FEMA’s not designed for the heavy lifting that was required in Katrina. As for dropping the jurisdictional niceties–I wouldn’t want to see any president send federal troops into any state against the governor’s wishes.
Abe Greenwald Says:
–”I wouldn’t want to see any president send federal troops into any state against the governor’s wishes.”
Any exceptions, Abe?
You’re doin’ a heckuva job, Abie!
Oh come on, folks. Once those levees collapsed, the only guarantee of surviving Katrina
was to have been evacuated before the event. That storm was the size of Great Britain.
The hindsighted idea to have sent in Federal troops to evacuate before the storm in
ANTICIPATION of local incompetence is ludicrous.
Give me a break. And I am voting for Obama.
I think the biggest lesson of Katrina was what it showed us about the city of New Orleans, and it’s not flattering. New Orleans has three major industries—tourism, welfare and crime. The last two were on full display during Katrina. I can’t imagine the people of Boston, DC or New York behaving in such a way during an event like Katrina.
6
melk Says,”Oh come on, folks”
If the Israelis of the Entebbe days had been in charge, well you figure it out. Also, If it had been Houston,not New Orleans, well you figure it out.
RCAR:
If you are comparing the local government of New Orleans
with that of Houston or with the capabilities of the Israelis,
then I agree. Otherwise, imagine a scenario in which
Federal evacuation personnel arrive before the storm in
anticipation of the incompetence of a black, Democratic mayor.
Once the storm hit, there was no way to get Federal help
in time to save those people.
I’m not sure that I’m as confident about the Country’s inherent conservatism.
This war is unpopular and the Country wants to “win” but not in a “thank God, we are the good guys kind of way.” It isn’t that most people don’t think we’re the good guys, but I think they largely see us as the misguided good guys here, and that’s a problem that will allow Obama to even claim credit for “resolution” of the conflict. He’ll be able to advance the take that the surge was a necessary part of an unnecessary war, and that his kinder, gentler, less belligerent approach soothed savage beasts all around.
In Daniel Henninger’s The True Meaning of ‘Historic Vote’ Shifting America’s animating idea from creation to protection, he writes:
The difficulty with convincing most voters of the righteousness of Bush and McCain and their opposition to the practices that led to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the collapse of Lehman, etc., is that they didn’t seem to take it seriously enough to bring it to the electorate’s attention in any meaningful way and when they did, President Bush begged for swift approval of a bailout no one understood. The bailout carried with it an aspect of terror, yet Senators larded the bill and the President signed on. Who is to be trusted? That’s a serious problem because any populace is going to be moved to act in these circumstances, but when they do yield under such duress they are acting less like informed citizens than painfully prodded sheep.
In my view, the Country has been operationally liberal for a very long time. We couldn’t have reached this point if that wasn’t true.
More from Mr. Henninger:
This requires a gain of only 3% for a tyranny of the majority to gain ascendancy and the true meaning of the point of no return that Thomas Sowell recently spoke of to be known.
These new American dirges represent an infantilization that every fiber of my being rises against.
Abe, in three paragraphs you have done more to explain and advocate the Bush Administration’s positions than any of the press secretaries over the entire eight years of the Bush Administration. Maybe you should look for employment within the administration.
Chris Bolts Sr. has one of the most salient points today.
The problem with Katrina wasn’t mainly the federal repsonse (although some of it, like the debit cards and the brainless trailer fiasco, certainly bear criticism) — it was the handling of the PR. There basically WAS none. The Bush White House behaved as if it had the luxury of operating in an information vacuum — as if there were no media out there selling a tendentious story about fault and blame.
Anyone who has had military training in ‘Information Operations” in the last 10 or 15 years has been taught that in the civil persuasion aspects of information warfare, you counter falsehood with the truth. You don’t waste time answering a lot of unaccountable drive-by charges, or trying to argue an issue on the terms of the enemy; you establish the truth and then you report it. You put the issue in the terms you understand to be the truth, and let the truth do its work.
The Bush White House has spent very little time doing that. Bush himself made headway with a few seminal policy speeches in his first term. But his whole administration really seemed to have given up on IO by the second term. In my view, Katrina was an information watershed for Bush II: all the public communication went steadily downhill after it. We can attribute that partly, of course, to the relentless enmity of the mainstream media, where advocacy has supplanted simple reporting for decades.
But there are ways to get to the people other than letting the MSM frame your issues for you. It looks from here like the Bush administration just hasn’t prioritized effective communication enough to find and employ those ways. If nothing else, we certainly have a giant, economy-size “lesson learned” for future Republican presidents, in this regard.
I think the Bush Administration got caught in the sense (maybe correctly to some degree) that the media was so hostile that nothing it did could affect the narrative being created. The end result is that it lost arguments almost by default. It’s sad that it was the work of the local media in places like New Orleans that helped debunk the Lord of the Flies narrative of bodies piling up in the Super Dome created by the national media. Now all we know is that the Katrina response was “botched.” What exactly was botched is stated in less detail. Was it the massive rescue operation? The Army core of engineers? The federal response? The state or municipal response? About two thousand people died in Katrina, so obviously it wasn’t perfect. And maybe the criticisms are just. But criticism without details is just a bare accusation.
I am a native New Orleanian still living in the area. My mother lives a block from the beach in Pass Christian, MS. I am (was) a conservative Republican that voted for Bush twice. All I have to say is you live in an imaginary world as far as Katrina and the federal response is concerned. It was all political spin. Political spin while Americans suffered for YEARS. I lost my country in Katrina, in the lies and abandoment of a country I loved. I hope to get my country back this Tuesday. NEVER AGAIN do I want Americans made to feel their own country feels they don’t deserve help and support when their world is devastated.
doctorj2u — you have my deepest sympathies for whatever devastating losses you suffered. I hope the support from thousands of volunteers who traveled to the area of devastation to help (and still do today, for various projects), and the immediate on-scene presence of the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Southern Baptist Convention, and other private groups supported by donations, did at least something to counter your impression that your country felt you weren’t worth helping and supporting. I hope the Navy’s and Coast Guard’s extensive rescue operation, and the assistance from hundreds of private individuals with small boats, mitigated your sense that no one considered you worth helping. Perhaps the voluntary effort in hundreds of cities across America to help evacuees resettle was of some assistance in countering the bad impression you received? It’s a terrible thing that someone managed to convince you your country didn’t care, or didn’t think you were worthy.
I have a question for you, to help me understand your perspective. What were you expecting, after Katrina, that did not happen, and that would have convinced you that America cared about you?
What did I expect? I expected debris removal. I expected drinkable water, gas and sewarage service. I expected electricity. In some places it took over a year for this to become fact. (It took over 4 months for my 80 year old mother to have drinkable water at her house.) And I expected my government to fix their levees so that people could return home and rebuild safely. I did NOT expect my fellow Americans to tell people faced with COMPLETE destruction for hundreds of miles that they were lazy and needed to help themselves. Not only that, in the middle of everything else, we had to fight for the right for my hometown New Orleans, to EXIST! Say WHAT! I will tell you what this government did, because I was in the middle of it. They drained the city and pulled the people out. (I am taking this on hearsay because I was without electricity for 3 weeks and the country had “Katrina fatigue” by the time I was reconnected to the world. All of my information from this time came from WWL radio out of New Orleans.) And then they left. That is when the nightmare really began. The government needed “plans” before they could help. The government needed documentation of ownership before they could help. They government needed local communities to put 20% of the finances up front before they could help. And all the while the political spin machine was out in full force. It is the Mayor’s fault, it is the governor’s fault, it is ANYBODY”S fault but the US government. It is the lazy people’s fault. Even the federal levee failure was the local’s fault. LOL! And all the while people are waiting for some sigh of leadership to come from SOMEWHERE to get things moving. It never came, so people formed their own organizations to do the smallest of things such as keep the streets cleared of debris, keep the parks cleaned and cut, gut houses. Citizens groups cannot do infrastucture, though. Citizen groups cannot rebuild hospitals or mental health facilties. And an entire region was having a mental breakdown. Do you know it is like to cry everyday for over a year? I do. Do you know what it is like to not know if your hometown could survive for over 3 years? I do. DO you know how it feels to be forgotten and abandoned by own your country? I do. I have lived and fought it, day by day, year after year. I can be sane about it now because I know now we will be OK. I hope we will be better than ever before. Some good most happen from such suffering. But I am telling you the governemnt is broken, the media is broken, the political partisanship is broken. Tuesday will be one more step for me being a US citizen again. Here is a song that kept New Orleans and southern LA going after the storm. I don’t think you can understand what it really means but give it try.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsn2mADGmUo
And here is one that meant a lot to me personally.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXqYPJFjo9w