John Podhoretz: Limbaugh shocked at Bush's big government

BIG GOV'T BUSH
Podhoretz - New York Post

September 3, 2003 -- SOME conservatives are convinced President Bush has become a supporter and propounder of Big Government.
Rush Limbaugh went so far yesterday as to say with some despair that his 15 years of broadcasting may have all been for naught. Limbaugh was made heartsick by Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, who visited the offices of the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire and, in the words of a Union-Leader editorial, "said in no uncertain terms that the days of Reaganesque Republican railings against the expansion of federal government are over."

Others were shocked by Bush's announcement on Labor Day of a new high-level "jobs czar" in the Commerce Department. The president said the loss of 2.5 million manufacturing jobs in the past three years demands a government response.

In Bush's willingness to embrace deficits and big-government solutions to problems like job losses, conservatives see a capitulation to conventional liberalism.

I think Bush is being done an injustice - though as far as I'm concerned he deserves plenty of scorn for speaking a line like "when somebody hurts, government's got to move." (My feet hurt, Mr. President; could somebody from HHS send over a free podiatrist?)

Now, Bush has not fought to control the size of government. His concern has been to do what he can to help the economy grow even as he tries to fight a War on Terror.

That's why he has staked his presidency on a tax-cutting program that has genuinely convinced liberals and leftists that he wants to use tax cuts to force the destruction of big government.



The most important task facing Bush is the War on Terror, and he doesn't want to fight on all fronts at all times.

In any case, politicians only take up the war on big government when it's politically expedient. Neither Ronald Reagan nor the Gingrich Republicans actually cut the size of government. At times, they spent like sailors on shore leave. At the end of the day, they were politicians, not ideological warriors.

The philosophical problem of big government is not really a politician's fundamental issue. Rather, it's a matter for op-ed pages and in magazines, in books and on radio programs like Limbaugh's.

The Union-Leader says Gillespie made clear that "the Republican Party [no longer stands] for shrinking the federal government, for scaling back its encroachment into the lives of Americans, or for carrying the banner of federalism into the political battles of the day."

Somehow, I doubt Gillespie put it so candidly, but the Union-Leader and Limbaugh have put Gillespie and the White House on notice that they can't say and do anything and just get away with it.

After all, those of us who purvey opinions for a living need something to keep us busy.

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