Rove had ‘tactical brilliance, strategic blindness’
Pandering to that voting bloc, Bush stopped enforcing the immigration laws and offered amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens and the businesses that hired them. Bush and Rove were going to lure the Hispanic vote away from the Democratic Party by putting illegals on a path to citizenship.
But as we saw in June, when the nation rose up in rage against the Bush amnesty, the pair did indeed unite the GOP – against themselves, and they severed themselves from the Reagan Democrats and the country.
It was cynical politics, and it backfired, crippling the presidential candidacy of John McCain in the process.
But even before the disastrous immigration reform bill, Bush had become a zealot of NAFTA, GATT and most-favored-nation status for China. These have left his country with the worst trade deficits in history, put the United States $2 trillion in debt to Beijing and Tokyo, cost Middle America 3 million manufacturing jobs and arrested the income rise of the middle class, as our capitalist pigs and hedge-fund hogs have happily gorged themselves at the capital gains tax trough.
Bush’s original idea of “compassionate conservatism” was a fine one. But under him and Rove, compassionate conservative turned out to be code for a cocktail of Great Society Liberalism and Big Government Conservatism. How could professed admirers of Ronald Reagan think that by doubling the budget of the Department of Education the tests scores of school kids would inexorably rise?
