True believer

“IT really gets me when the critics say I haven’t done enough for the economy,” cracked George W. Bush during the 2004 campaign. “I mean, look what I’ve done for the book publishing industry.”

He wasn’t altogether kidding. This is a presidency that has launched a thousand screeds -- Molly Ivins’ “Bushwhacked,” Maureen Dowd’s “Bushworld,” Michael Moore’s “Dude, Where’s My Country?,” Al Franken’s “The Truth (With Jokes)” -- and turned liberal journalism into an armada captained by Ahabs. The left has had so much noisy fun hunting Moby Dubya that it has been easy to ignore a more unpredictable development: the growing anger against the president on the hard-core right.

Its frustration is palpable in the new philippic, “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” This withering volume was written by Bruce Bartlett, an honorable conservative columnist who boasts the kind of “controversial” back story that publishers find delightfully marketable. A loyal subaltern of the Reagan Revolution -- he wrote the 1981 book “Reaganomics” -- Bartlett was recently axed by the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-wing Dallas-based think tank, after they saw what he had put in this book. Not only does Bartlett accuse the president of being “an impostor, a pretend conservative,” but he also dishes up an indictment of Bush’s policies that is as relentless as anything from Moore or Franken -- but with none of their breezy humor. His book could just as easily have been titled “The Truth (Without Jokes).”

If you’ve kept up with the jeremiad genre, parts of “Impostor” will have the reassuring familiarity of your iPod playlist. Bartlett evokes many of Bush-bashing’s greatest hits -- Karl Rove and his “Mayberry Machiavellis,” the “compassionate conservative” scam, the record budget deficits, the Katrina debacle (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!”) and the president’s unpleasant habit of firing those who tell him things (however true) he doesn’t want to hear.

But Bartlett also offers something different -- a passionate, if often redundant, argument that Bush has sold out Reaganism’s bedrock faith in free markets and small government. Likening him to Richard M. Nixon (whom hard-core conservatives see as akin to Lord Voldemort), Bartlett holds that the current administration has “severely undermined the [Republican] party and its principles just to get reelected.” Among other things, Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill (not even the oinkiest), imposed trade-deal-wrecking tariffs for political gain and slammed through huge tax cuts that will force a later administration to ratchet our tax bills sky-high. The right may have enjoyed moralizing about Bill Clinton’s priapic inclinations, but, notes Bartlett, when it comes to trade and the budget, the Man from Hope was a better president than Bush. (Such praise may unnerve Clinton’s admirers with its implication that he was in many ways a first-rate Republican chief executive.)

Bartlett tells us he will “never forgive” Bush for signing the 2003 expansion of Medicare, which “may well be the worst piece of legislation ever enacted.” Now, some of his pique comes from a reflexive mistrust of any entitlement program -- he adamantly believes that government is a beast that must be starved. But ideology aside, Bartlett gives a nifty explanation of exactly why Bush’s prescription-drug plan is such a debacle: Not only has it proved far more expensive than the White House originally claimed (a deliberate lie, we’re reminded) but it didn’t even achieve its pettiest goal -- securing the AARP vote for the Republicans in 2004. Instead, this ruinous entitlement lines the pockets of giant companies -- and not just Big Pharma. Even more excoriating than most left-wing critiques, “Impostor” shows how the prescription-drug legislation will produce an additional $8 billion in annual corporate profits by subsidizing company drug-coverage programs tax-free.

Though Bartlett’s brief against the president will be catnip for liberals -- one imagines them cackling over its pages on Air America -- the many millions who voted to reelect him will probably be puzzled to see their man, so loathed by the left, being thumped in the name of “Flashdance”-era conservatism. Indeed, while reading “Impostor,” I found myself recalling the days when people on the left were desperately trying to distinguish between what they called “actually existing socialism” (you know -- all those brutal, incompetent police states) and the vaulting ideas of Karl Marx, as if the two could somehow be disconnected. One senses that Bartlett, too, would like to draw a distinction between the right’s professed principles circa 1980 and the actually existing conservatism that is currently running up massive budget deficits, waging a costly war in Iraq and insisting that wartime presidents have limitless powers.

Trouble is, the legacy Bush has supposedly betrayed is only one aspect of Reaganism. True, the Gipper did embrace ideas about small government, free trade, federalism and respect for the Constitution’s original intent. But that was just theory. The conservative movement itself would have gone nowhere without world-class marketing (“Morning in America”), big-money donors who saw Reaganomics as a way of transferring wealth to the already wealthy (which it dutifully did), and middle-American voters drawn to Reagan’s promise of a return to an earlier, simpler America.

Ronald Reagan didn’t win two terms because the public was turned on by supply-side economics. For all his sunniness, he had an instinctive mastery of modern mass politics, whether speaking in racial code by announcing his candidacy in Philadelphia, Miss. (a town notorious for the murder of civil rights workers), putting his Marlboro Man image up against gorilla-faced Leonid Brezhnev’s Evil Empire or playing on the social resentments first tapped into by Nixon’s evocation of the Silent Majority.

Bush has refined this aspect of the Reagan legacy. Mythologizing himself as a regular, brush-clearing guy (unlike such toffs as prissy Al Gore and multilingual John Kerry), he’s laid on the anti-elitist populism. Even as he’s vastly increased the military budget (just as Reagan did), he has won the support of countless political foot soldiers -- many of them devout Christians -- who think genuine conservatism should aim higher than the peaks of the economists’ Laffer Curve.

Bush has backed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, tied AIDS funding to abstinence education and, in John Roberts and Samuel Alito, made the two most right-wing Supreme Court picks of any modern president. “[S]ocial conservatives freely admit that Bush is the best president they have had,” John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge note in their fine book, “The Right Nation.” “This is partly because they genuinely think that he is ‘one of them’ -- a righteous man.”

In all this, Bush has out-Gippered the Gipper. For better or worse, he, not Reagan, is the face of conservative politics in today’s America. Bartlett is too smart not to know that, and he insists his “primary motivation” for writing this book was not to smack the Bush administration but to “rescue the Republican Party from ... a coming political debacle resulting from George W. Bush’s policies.” As one who harbors a strange fondness for Reaganite true believers, especially the dreamy libertarians, I wish him good luck. But I don’t give his cause much hope. It’s far too late to resuscitate the old-school conservatism that rose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964. “Impostor” makes it abundantly clear that this movement has long since been spoiled by victory. In fact, as his own recent firing suggests, nowadays it’s principled believers like Bartlett who are treated as impostors at the Republican feast. *