IT should have been the crowning moment of his administration, the
opportunity to exercise one of his most important privileges as
President by picking two new judges to serve on the Supreme Court,
thereby stamping his mark on American society for the next few
decades,
as only a few presidents have done before him. Instead, President
Bush�s astonishingly short-sighted decision last week to nominate a
close colleague with no judicial track record for the Supreme Court,
following an earlier uninspired choice, risks condemning his
administration to being remembered as the most debilitating since the
sorry rule of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.... But we know a lost
cause when we see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White
House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic
policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over
talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and
his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international
affairs �
all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President
who halted then reversed America�s post-Vietnam decline, than any
left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have
dreamed of.
...Last month�s death from thyroid cancer of Chief Justice William
Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O�Connor was a unique
opportunity for Mr Bush to tilt the Supreme Court to the right,
completing the reversal of the liberal dominance instituted under
President Roosevelt seven decades ago. There is not much in Mr
Bush�s
conservative social agenda that we admire but the two vacancies
were an
opportunity finally to bring down the curtain on the unconstitutional
judicial activism which has dominated the Court since the Roosevelt
years. Sadly but characteristically, Mr Bush has blown it: instead of
the conservative intellectual jurists that his supporters had the
right
to expect, Mr Bush has made the mediocre John Roberts, a moderate
conservative with an undistinguished legal track record, the new Chief
Justice and nominated Harriet Miers for the O�Connor vacancy.
...The modern Supreme Court has set the standard for America�s
lesser
courts to use the judicial system as a mechanism for social change,
for
which Americans did not necessarily vote, in areas ranging from school
bussing and prayer to the death penalty and abortion (and most
recently
the powers of the President versus those of Congress in times of war).
An extraordinary decision by the Supreme Court in June illustrates its
power and the controversial nature of its decisions: it ruled five to
four that local governments could force property owners to sell their
homes to private developers whenever officials decide it would
�benefit
the public�, even if the property is not blighted and the new
project�s
success is not guaranteed.
...They were already furious at the President�s incompetent
selling of
his social security reforms; they were equally angry at the
collapse of
his plans for major tax reforms through White House neglect; they have
watched in despair as the President�s upbeat rhetoric in Iraq was
confounded regularly by tragic events, including an appalling American
death toll and a neo-con mission clearly adrift; those who fought the
good fight to restrain government in the Reagan years stood by in
disgust as Mr Bush increased domestic spending faster than at any time
since President Johnson�s Great Society; and the nativist right is
increasingly and dangerously surly at what it views as the
President�s
failure to tackle illegal immigration and secure the country�s
borders.
...Nor is it just the White House that is contaminated by it: when
senior Republican leaders in Congress, who have presided over an
orgy of
public spending and pork-barrel, claimed that there was no fat left to
cut in federal spending and that �after 11 years of Republican
majority
we�ve pared it down pretty good�, it was clear that the inmates
had
indeed taken over the asylum.
...Far more Americans now describe themselves as conservatives than
liberals; the Democrats now need to grab 60% of moderates if they want
to win Congress or the White House, a pretty high hurdle, especially
given the unimpressive state of the Democrat Party, which is
increasingly in the grip of its left-wing activists and devoid of
fresh
or stimulating ideas.
The rise of a popular and populist right-wing politics in America over
the past 35 years is one of the most extraordinary events in modern
Western politics; it is unique to the United States, helping to
explain
the country�s exceptionalism and its growing cultural divergence
with
Europe. The damning charge against Mr Bush is that, instead of using
the continued dominance of the right to finish the large amounts of
uncompleted business from the Reagan revolution � sorting out the
social
security system, simplifying the tax code, tackling America�s
abysmal
primary and secondary schools, reforming corporate welfare with the
same
gusto as welfare for the poor was reformed, forging a new consensus to
wage the war or terror � Mr Bush has failed in all these areas,
and in
some has taken America backwards.