Sterling: That’s what I mean. Sure, to liberal people Bush seems very conservative, because he is conservative. But to very conservative people, Bush seems moderate, because he’s he’s not very conservative. To your average conservative, Bush seems like an average conservative.
Bush’s message was, “I’m conservative, but not like THOSE people…” He NEVER ran as a moderate moderate, but as a moderate conservative. That means he was going to appoint people more conservative than he is, like Ashcroft, and people less conservative than he is, like Powell. But they’re all going to be somewhere on the conservative half of the scale.
Well, not quite, Lemur866. Bush didn’t run as a “moderate” conservative, but as a “compassionate” one (as, implicitly, in contrast to the usual “noncompassionate” kind). The words are NOT synonymous.
It’s understandable anyway that Bush’s refusal to discuss the philosophical underpinning of the term, if any, allows it to be defined any way the listener wants it to, and you appear to be a case in point. Isn’t it possible that the term was simply campaign spin, encouraging conservatives with guilty consciences about the human consequences of their views to feel better about voting for him?
We’re still waiting for December to enlighten us as to what the term “compassionate conservative” means to her(him?). Well?
ElvisL1ves went ahead and said all that I was going to care to on this Sunday morning about Bush’s empty slogan. Anyway, I stumbled across an old Washington Post Magazine piece about Tom Delay, who is close ideologically to Trent Lott (whom I mentioned above). Bush was doing his damnedest to separate himself from the likes of those two. Yet I think this passage from Delay is telling.
Sure. The question is whether Bush is tricking the moderates or tricking the conservatives. Of course this is a fairly meaningless term, just like Clinton’s third way. But anyone who looks at Bush and sees a hard-core ideological conservative is missing something. Bush is not an ideological ANYTHING.