Yes, he would.
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WSJ Editorial: Slouching Toward Bush Won't Save Us From Gomorrah
By Robert H. Bork
The Wall Steet Journal
It is a considerable compliment to have one's book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," cited, even disparagingly, by a presidential contender whose proud boast it is that he does not read books. (He may not even have realized that he was referring to a book.) But George W. Bush knows people who do read books (just as he bragged that he may not know where East Timor is but he knows people who do know). Some of them even write his speeches for him. Bill Bennett, displaying a new-found optimism about the direction of American culture, mentioned that he was one. A rolodex is a wonderful substitute for actual knowledge.
Mr. Bush's crack about slouching ("Too often, on social issues, my party has painted an image of America slouching toward Gomorrah"), made in a speech at the Manhattan Institute last week, was intended to separate himself from conservatives worried about the abysmal condition of American culture as well as from the liberalism responsible for the state of that culture. Dick Morris called it triangulation.
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Mr. Bush's speech was by no means his first effort to distance himself from the nasty conservatives. The week before, he seized a proposed minor tax revision as the occasion to denounce House Republicans for trying to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor," a patently false charge. Next, he claimed that Republicans were too absorbed with affluence and not sufficiently sensitive to people's needs. He gives the impression that the backs of the poor would be safe in his administration, but that he intends to reach the White House over the dead bodies of conservatives.
No doubt Mr. Bush and his advisers believe themselves to be emulating the sunny, optimistic conservatism of Ronald Reagan, but they can't carry the tune or remember the lyrics. Mr. Reagan did sound a note of hope and of pride in America, but he most emphatically did not go out of his way to pander to the "moderates" (read, Republican liberals) by attacking conservatives. Nor did Mr. Reagan shy away from using divisive and confrontational rhetoric, when reality called for it, as when he labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire" or denounced "welfare queens." Mr. Reagan wore the label conservative -- no qualifications attached -- proudly.
Mr. Bush evidently thinks conservatives are another species altogether. He has tried to take back his words by saying he really meant that the problem is not with Republicans but with the way they are heard by the public. An unnamed adviser gave that game away by explaining, "After you hit a dog, you pet it." The initial reaction of conservatives suggests that Mr. Bush miscalculated: Conservatives are not gazing up at him with warm, wet eyes, eager to be scratched behind the ears.