We're All Big Government Conservatives Now

August 26, 2004

The 2004 Republican Platform Committee finished its work this afternoon. It wasn't a pretty picture.

You have to give the Bush political operation credit: they badly outflanked the party conservatives. By the time delegates gathered here in New York for the platform committee work, the game was already over. The Bush operation made certain that the committee, selected by state parties, was packed with loyalists. Any chance of a conservative uprising over the platform was DOA.

The most controversial plank in the draft platform was on immigration, specifically President Bush's proposal for a guest worker program for illegal aliens, a plan that also would put those who entered America unlawfully on the path to U.S. citizenship. This idea is wildly unpopular with grassroots Republicans and the Bush people know it. So the fix was in. Any effort by the handful of conservatives on the rubber-stamp platform committee to amend or delete the offending plank on immigration were trumped by a series of strong-arm tactics and procedural maneuverings.

Not that the bullying tactics mattered much. The platform delegates comported themselves like a flock of obedient sheep. Taking their cues from committee co-chairmen Sen. Bill Frist and Colorado Gov. Bill Owens, delegates even rejected amendments drawn word-for-word from the 2000 GOP platform.

While there is much in the platform to please conservatives, there is also plenty to infuriate. Just eight years after the GOP platform called for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education, the 2004 platform boasts, “President Bush and Congressional Republicans have provided the largest increase in federal education funding in history and the highest percentage gain since the 1960s [only a last-minute amendment deleted a reference to LBJ at this point] . . . Support for elementary and secondary education has had the largest increase in any single Presidential term since the 1960s—an increase of nearly 50 percent since 2001.”

A Texas delegate, introducing an amendment to delete this mind-boggling big government boast, said it sounded like something out of the Democratic Platform rather than anything identifiably Republican. The amendment was overwhelmingly crushed.

And that's how it went here in New York. I guess it's true: We're all big government conservatives now.

Richard Lessner was the executive director of the American Conservative Union from 2003-2005.