It Bush’s approval rating were at 65%, it would be cheering and yelling: “See, what a vonservative president can do!. Let’s elect another just like him.”

His not being a true conservative would be a tiny footnote in all newspaper op-eds and blogs.

So why the “discontent”? Why the “rebellion”?

So may of you lefties not only get one thing after another wrong, you can’t even ask the right questions.

Why were Americans upset with Bush’s father, and what are we seeing now, even if Bush appears to refuse to duplicate his father 100%? To what extent are we seeing a repetition, and why was Dubya a candidate in 2000, anyway? At least try asking some good questions.

the Great Depression hit he waited for the free market system to right the country, and refused to take any extraordinary measures to keep the banks from closing

…

On Thursday October 24th, 1929, less than eight months into Herbert Hoover’s presidency and less than a year since he had been elected by the widest margin ever, the stock market crashed. Most experts, including Hoover, who had served brilliantly as the Secretary of Commerce for the two previous administrations, thought that the crash was part of a passing recession. But by the time the president wrote the first of these two letters, this one to his friend Governor Emmerson of Illinois, it had become clear that excessive speculation and a worldwide economic slowdown had plunged America into the midst of a Great Depression. While Hoover wrote in July 1931 that “considerable continuance of destitution over the winter,” and perhaps longer, was unavoidable, he was far from inactive in dealing with the problem. Since the crash, he had worked ceaselessly trying to fix the economy. He founded government agencies, encouraged labor harmony, supported local aid for public works, fostered cooperation between government and business in order to stabilize prices, and struggled to balance the budget. His work focused on indirect relief coming from individual states and the private sector. This focus can be seen in this letter in his emphasis on supporting “each state committee” and his stress on “appeals for funds” from outside the government, known as volunteerism.

As the Depression became worse, however, calls grew for more radical measures involving increased Federal intervention and spending. But Hoover refused, adhering strongly to his principles. While he was willing to use his influence to persuade business leaders to set moderate prices and employ more men, he refused to involve the Federal government in forcing fixed prices, controlling businesses, or manipulating the value of the currency, all of which he felt were steps towards socialism. And while he was inclined to give indirect aid to banks or local public works projects, he refused to use Federal money for direct aid to citizens, since he felt that the dole was un-American and would only further weaken public morale. He focused on volunteerism to raise money because he refused to engage in massive deficit spending, which he worried would only exacerbate the depression. These decisions allowed his opponents to paint Hoover as cold and uncaring toward the common citizen, even though he was in fact a philanthropist and a progressive before becoming president. During his reelection campaign, Hoover tried to convince Americans that the measures they were calling for might seem to help in the short term, but would be ruinous in the long run. In his speeches he asserted that he cared for common Americans too much to destroy the country’s foundations with deficits and Socialist institutions. But he could not escape the reputation of being both heartless and ineffectual, and was soundly defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/docs_archive/docs_archive_hoover.html

Did Hoover really subscribe to a “hands-off-the-economy,” free-market philosophy? His opponent in the 1932 election, Franklin Roosevelt, didn’t think so. During the campaign, Roosevelt blasted Hoover for spending and taxing too much, boosting the national debt, choking off trade, and putting millions on the dole. He accused the president of “reckless and extravagant” spending, of thinking “that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible,” and of presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.” Roosevelt’s running mate, John Nance Garner, charged that Hoover was “leading the country down the path of socialism.”

http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=4026

Roosevelt’s total subordination of his country’s welfare to his personal ambition began before he took office in March, 1933. The outgoing president, Herbert Hoover, confronted a dilemma. Faced with numerous bank failures throughout the country, Hoover wished to announce a plan to help promote bank solvency. He knew, however, that a statement from him would be worse than useless. He had utterly lost the confidence of Congress and the people.

He accordingly proposed to Roosevelt that he announce a plan to save the banks. Roosevelt refused to do so, since continued bank failures until he took office were to his political advantage. It would hardly do, would it, to have the banks recover under Hoover? Perish the thought! “On February 28 [1933], Hoover received a message that [Roosevelt adviser] Rexford Tugwell had said that the banks would collapse in a couple of days and that is what they wanted” (p. 22, emphasis in original). I leave aside here the issue of whether governmental action to end the bank panic was appropriate. Roosevelt himself favored such action: the point was not to allow Hoover credit for it.

Not an auspicious beginning, and matters soon got worse. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover as a spendthrift, and his platform promised strict economy in government. But a government that spent little would give Roosevelt scant opportunity to exercise the patronage he craved. Accordingly, “Roosevelt sent his now famous message to Congress deploring the disastrous extravagance of the Hoover administration…. As one reads that message now it is difficult to believe that it could ever have been uttered by a man who before ending his regime would spend not merely more money than President Hoover, but more than all the other 31 presidents put together three times more, in fact, than all the presidents from George Washington to Herbert Hoover” (p. 28, emphasis in original).

http://www.mises.org/misesreview_detail.asp?control=49&sortorder=issue

MgvD, you lost me there. Maybe he’s not a rationale, intelligent consevative, but he definitly is a conservative. He is what you get when you take all the nuance out of conservative ideaology and replace it with the instinct of the wrongheaded. Just as some “Capitalists” think the word stands for totally unfettered trade/industry with no regulation whatsoever, the real deal is a bit more complicated than that and has to be to work.

He’s a conservative, just a dumb one. Like Rush, Hannity, Coulter et al….

I don’t doubt the column writers have had to flip-flop since they all push the rhetoric overboard to sell that day’s newspaper. Point taken as to them.

As for the average Joe conservative, however, I would imagine the skirmish in Mess-opotamia had a trumping effect on their earlier criticism.

Jonah Goldberg, May 29, 2007 (Bush approval rating – 32%)
Bush, The Liberal [Jonah Goldberg]

Richard Cohen discovers something some of us on the right have been saying for a while: if you hold your head just so and look at Bush from the right angle, he looks an awful lot like a liberal.

Jonah Goldberg, November 8, 2003 (Bush approval rating – 60%)
But it is now clear that Bush’s own son takes far more after his father’s old boss than he does his own father, at least politically speaking. From tax cuts (and deficits, alas), to his personal conviction on aborrtion (sic), to aligning America with the historical tide of liberty in the world, Georrge (sic) W. Bush has proved that he’s a Reaganite, not a “Bushie.” He may not be a natural heir to Reagan, but that’s the point. The party is all Reaganite now. What better sign that this is now truly and totally the Gipper’s Party than the obvious conversion of George Bush’s own son?

You do realize that’s an oxymoron? A conservative is one who wishes to conserve resources- such as power or finances. The Big Biz boys are great on corporate welfare, and- as we know, anyone who is pro-welfare ain’t a con.

Michael is certainly no conservative when it comes to foreign policy and war. While Bush is not a conservative when it comes to *anything* and I’ve always thought that. I’ve often tried to argue with “conservatives” on just that point. Same with Clinton; he wasn’t exactly liberal.

You could say that I am a conservative hawk. Slowly but surely, however, I am becoming more and more a traditional conservative. You should not forget that I am 22 years old. I am still learning. My views are still developing.

Anyway – I am what we call a conservative liberal, but that sadly doesn’t say Americans a lot.

if you back a radical, were you really a conservative in the first place?

Exactly

Michael you again do what people seem fond of doing; someone has a few conservative traits, thus that person is a conservative.

That’s not how it works or at least that’s not how it should work.

You have to understand that Bush played this game very well. What did he do? He called himself a compassionate conservative. A what? A compassionate conservative.

That should have triggered conservatives immediately. They should have understood that, what he actually was saying was “i have a few conservative traits, but I’m actually a Big Government and Big Business Republican.”

Shaun: o please – I have never been part of the Bush cult. I supported the war in iraq, but that was about it. As I have said on numerous occasions, I would not have voted for Bush, especially not in 00.