“What did you learn from the George W. Bush experience?” was not a question that the prior two nominees could answer in a clear way. But what Ted Cruz is doing here is indicating to the conservative base that he has heard their critiques of the Bush years, absorbed them, and has a definite viewpoint on how a future president should alter his approach – and he is arguing Marco Rubio has not.
The clash gives you a good example of a contrast with the lessons the conservative base took from past 15 years and the lessons Washington elites took from them. Think about the lessons the conservative base and the Tea Party, of which Marco was supposed to be a part, took from the Bush years, and they amount to something like this: that the Bush administration was too optimistic about spreading democracy, and ought to have instead focused on simply killing bad guys; that you can’t trust government when it comes to bailouts and cronyism; that Washington shouldn’t pick and choose winners and losers, but lower the burden of government on all Americans; that we’d gone too far in the direction of government surveillance of American citizens; that Washington was too beholden to Wall Street and big business; and that the Republican Party had wrongly gone down the path of using government to pass entitlements that benefit “our people” (via Medicare Part D and other steps), instead of rolling back the entitlement state.
Rather than distance himself from George W. Bush’s approach to policy, Rubio has largely embraced it. Consider: his embrace of the neoconservative agenda abroad, calling for the deployment of troops hither and thither and sounding inspirational notes that evoke the freedom agenda of the Bush second inaugural; His botched attempt at a bipartisan immigration reform, exactly the sort of thing Bush supported; His embrace of the reform conservative agenda at home, whose figures overlap significantly with those pushing compassionate conservatism for W. – a dramatic increase of child tax credits was part of the Bush agenda, too; His consistent push for strong Defense spending, rejecting the fiscal conservatism of the sequester; And his clashes with fellow Tea Party members over NSA surveillance, subsidies, immigration, and more. Together, they all paint a picture of an agenda that seems to have much more in common with George W. Bush’s than you might expect from someone who is supposed to be part of the new innovative wave of Tea Party politicians.
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