Wampum

Erosion

Recently, I suggested that President Bush was a solid favorite to win reelection due, in part, to the solid support of his base. I noted that “in the last few days, there has been some indication that that Mr. Bush’s Republican support could slip.”

How can we tell if Mr. Bush’s support among the Republicans base is slipping? One way, of course, is to carefully watch the polling for information about trends among Republicans. Donkey Rising reports that swing voters are beginning to doubt Mr. Bush’s trustworthiness. I have not yet seen any empirical evidence of slippage among rank and file members of Mr. Bush’s base.

The trouble with waiting on the polls is that they do not tell us anything until it has already happened. This is the world of blogs, dammit, we want to be ahead of the curve. Is there some sort of leading indicator that would tell us if Mr. Bush’s base support was about to erode? Perhaps so.

Many on the left believe that one of the major advantages of the right is the captive conservative media. The Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, Fox News, a bevy of pundits and the Washington interest groups all form an echo chamber. That echo chamber has the ability to shape the terms of the debate for the remainder of the media and, eventually, to shape public opinion. That is the Mighty Wurlitzer. If the Wurlitzer turned on Mr. Bush, would that not be a leading indicator that slippage in his base was on the way?

Some recent punditry suggests that the Wurlitzer may be moving from blind support of Mr. Bush to a more critical position. Tim Noah of Slate suggests that Mr. Bush risks losing the support of his base because Mr. Bush, instead of lying generally to the public at large, is now lying directly in the face of his base.

It should be obvious how the Meet the Press lie about spending differs from the usual Bush lie. He's lying to a different audience. Bush isn't gaslighting Democrats …

Bush is gaslighting small-government Republicans… He's lying, in short, to people who believe in him. Or rather, believed; Sullivan is drifting rapidly leftward and has already struck out at Bush's dishonesty on Meet the Press. If others follow, Bush could see serious erosion in his political base.

Is it possible all these conservatives are going to take Bush's lie, er, lying down? Be warned, Republican brothers: Once Bush starts lying to you, he may never stop.

Is there evidence that the Wurlitzer has changed its tune? I think that there is. A few examples follow.

The Wall Street Journal is first up. Via Political Wire, the Wall Street Journal notes signs of unrest:

"A new level of tension is emerging between Bush and congressional Republicans over his election-year agenda to give legal status to illegal immigrants, as well as the president's Iraq and fiscal policies," the Wall Street Journal reports.

"Activists in the think tanks and hard-line conservatives in Congress... insist the unrest is bottom-up, with grassroots Republicans erupting over pork-fattened appropriations bills, spending rates exceeding those of the Lyndon Johnson era and a new, budget-busting Medicare drug benefit."

"Such grumbling is especially striking at a time when Democrats, energized by anti-Bush fervor, have been turning out in big numbers for state party presidential-nominating contests."

As Noah suggested, Andrew Sullivan is already off the reservation. Sullivan recently took to the pages of The New Republic to blast Bush on fiscal policy:

OK, let me put this gently here. Is he out of his mind? The minor reforms to Medicare are indeed welcome in providing more choice and some accountability in the program. But the major impact of his Medicare reform is literally trillions of dollars in new spending for the foreseeable future. He has enacted one of the biggest new entitlements since Richard Nixon; he has attached it to a population that is growing fast in numbers; and the entitlement is to products, prescription drugs, whose prices are rising faster than almost everything else in the economy. Despite all this, the president believes it will "help the fiscal situation of our long-term projection"? Who does he think he's kidding? It's like a man who earns $50,000 per year getting a mortgage for a $5 million house and bragging that he got a good interest rate…

But, if this is the level of coherence, grasp of reality, and honesty that is really at work in his understanding of domestic fiscal policy, then we are in even worse trouble than we thought. We have a captain on the fiscal Titanic who thinks he's in the Caribbean.

Rush Limbaugh is not far behind. He recently castigated Bush for proposing to increase the funding of the NEA:

On Thursday, I took two calls on the Bush proposal to increase the National Endowment for the Arts' budget. .. As part of his continuing strategy to peel off Democrat voters by growing government, Bush wants to force all of us to give the NEA $15 to $20 million in 2004. Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government will fund art? If we like it, we can fund it on our own. I can only explain what I think is happening. I can't explain why the White House thinks their strategy is working when it's clearly not. Bush 41 didn't have a strategy, as one caller mentioned when comparing the two presidents. Bush 43 does - and I'm sad to say it's taken the shape of outspending Bill Clinton on the domestic side. This immigration bill and the… $540b Medicare entitlement makes conservative voters feel taken for granted.

The Big Theory, softening people's view of conservatism by making Americans work more for government and less for themselves, isn't working. How can it? If you act like a liberal to get Democrat votes, you can't do something conservative when you win without losing those new voters. Bush requested $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa and let Ted Kennedy write an education bill that spent more on "the children" than ever, and they still rip him to shreds on those issues. You know, Republicans told us that we needed to give them control of the House, Senate and White House to get something done.

George Will is not much kinder to George W. Bush:

Rhetorical carelessness and overreaching began before the war …

After the war, in May, on Polish television, President Bush said, ``We found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories.'' No, we did not.

Once begun, leakage of public confidence in a president's pronouncements is difficult to staunch. This president's certitude that $400 billion ``is enough to meet our commitments'' for 10 years under the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement was followed by a one-third upward revision of the estimate. ..
Republicans are swiftly forfeiting the perception that they are especially responsible stewards of government finances…

[I]f the president is to win a second term, and if it is to be worth winning, he must begin again to speak plainly and accurately, not just less foolishly than the (Democrats).

Paul Weyrich is also critical of the President. From a Club for Growth press release:

"This is a 'drunken sailor budget,' and it ought to be defeated," charged Paul M. Weyrich, National Chairman of Coalitions for America. "We've already seen a 27% jump in discretionary spending in just two years, from $649 billion in 2001 to $824 billion last year, and if the Senate continues on this trend, it could raise interest rates and jeopardize the recovery.

From the same press release, Richard Lesser of the American Conservative Union:

There's nothing 'discretionary' about spending $50 million on an 'indoor rainforest' in Coralville, Iowa … (It is) just one piece of bacon in this pork-laden bill. Instead of building an 'indoor rainforest,' the government could afford to send every one of the 15,123 residents of Coralville, Iowa to Brazil, where they could see the real thing!"

The Club For Growth’s own Stephen Moore:

Adding unnecessary and wasteful spending to the budget when we already have a half-trillion dollars of deficit spending is a form of fiscal child abuse."

National Taxpayers Union's John Berthoud:

By spending recklessly today, Congress and President Bush raise the chances that a future Congress will raise taxes on the American people. If we want a low-tax America, Congress must stop the spending spree -- now!

NRO’s The Corner was not impressed with Mr. Bush’s appearance on Meet The Press. As reported by Kevin Drum:

Michael Graham: President Bush looks like he's afraid of Tim Russert. He's stammering and unsteady. For the first time, I've felt a twinge of fear myself about the November election.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Not to pile on here, but I think lots of eyebrows legitimately raise re: the March 2005 commission deadline. I’m not sure he sufficiently answered that…

Kathryn Jean Lopez: A pundit-type just said to me: "If he loses this year, this will be the day he lost it."

Rod Dreher: I'm afraid I have to side with Michael on the Bush interview. I kept wincing as the president bobbled his answers....He had better get his act together....

John Derbyshire: Just got through watching the President on Meet the Press. I thought it was a pretty dismal performance... At times, he looked like Al Sharpton on the Federal Reserve.

Rod Dreher: ....I can't believe that fiscal conservatives were relieved by the president's patently dishonest answer when Russert brought up the spending issue.

Does any of that punditry matter in the long run? I do not know. If it seeps down to the grass roots and depresses intensity, turnout or votes, it might. I suspect that the Wurlitzer’s criticism of Mr. Bush is only temporary. They will return home by summer.

Nonetheless, as the Daily Howler has relentlessly documented, the mainstream media covers elections by scripting roles for the candidates. Everything is then viewed through the lens of the script. If the Wurlitzer helps to create a script that is unfavorable for Mr. Bush, it will be difficult to shake the role.

Whether or not the Wurlitzer’s criticism of Mr. Bush is permanent or temporary, it sure is fun while it lasts. Pass the popcorn, please.

Update:

Via Matthew Yglesias, writing at Tapped, we can add two more voices to the choir.

The Heritage Foundation:

Conservatives across the nation are raising concerns about the huge increases in spending coming out of Washington. The impact this will have on our economy, taxpayers, and future generations is of paramount concern.

Bill O’Reilly:

O'Reilly said he was "much more skeptical about the Bush administration now" since former weapons inspector David Kay said he did not think Saddam had any weapons of mass destruction.

Posted by Dwight Meredith at February 10, 2004 02:13 AM | TrackBack