At a candidate forum for trial lawyers in Chicago on Sunday, Hillary Clinton
proclaimed that the Bush administration is "the most radical presidency we
have ever had."
This is, quite simply, absurd. But such boob-bait for the Bush bashers is
common today in Democratic circles, just as similar right-wing rhetoric
about Bill Clinton was par for the course a decade ago. The culture war, it
seems, has distorted how we view politics more than we realized. Trust in
government is at historic lows, but faith in one's own "team" remains
remarkably durable. (President Bush's job-approval rating among Republicans
is 80 percent, according to the polling company Rasmussen.)
Only someone suffering partisan amnesia could believe Bush has been a more
"radical" president than, say, Woodrow Wilson, under whom antiwar dissidents
were thrown in jail and beaten in the streets. Wilson was the first
president to openly deride the Constitution, mocking the "Fourth of July
sentiments" of those who cared too much about its meaning. Where Bush
reaches out to American Muslims and illegal immigrants, Wilson demonized
immigrants and "hyphenated Americans" with a venom unimaginable today. "I
cannot say too often - any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a
dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic," Wilson
said in 1919.
For much of the 20th century, American conservatives saw themselves as
opponents of the imperial presidency, as embodied by Wilson and, later, FDR.
In 1964, for instance, Barry Goldwater cast himself as the candidate against
strongman government (and, revealingly, lost badly). But conservatives began
to change their tune when the New Deal/Great Society consensus started to
unravel and they discovered that the presidency could be theirs if they made
peace with it.
In fact, some conservatives viewed Richard Nixon's downfall as the product
of an unfair double standard because Democratic presidents had gotten away
with metaphorical murder for years. Liberals who traditionally had seen
nothing wrong with strongman presidencies (liberal-hero journalist Walter
Lippmann urged FDR to assume "dictatorial powers") changed their tune under
Nixon as well.
"Those who tried to warn us back at the beginning of the New Deal of the
dangers of one-man rule that lay ahead on the path we were taking toward
strong, centralized government may not have been so wrong," then-California
Sen. Alan Cranston conceded at the height of Watergate in 1973.
Stephen F. Hayes' riveting new biography, "Cheney," recounts a discussion in
1980 at the American Enterprise Institute between two new congressmen, Dick
Cheney and Newt Gingrich.