White House Letter: Criticism of Bush leaves conservative in the cold

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GREAT FALLS, Virginia What happens if you're a Republican commentator and you write a book critical of President George W. Bush that gets you fired from your job at a conservative think tank?

For starters, no other conservative institution rushes in with an offer for your superb analytical skills.

"Nobody will touch me," said Bruce Bartlett, the author of the forthcoming "Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy." He added, "I think I'm just kind of radioactive at the moment."

Bartlett, a domestic policy aide at the White House in the Reagan administration and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, talked last week at his suburban Washington home about his dismissal, his book and a growing disquiet among conservatives about Bush.

Although "Impostor" is flamboyant in its anti-Bush sentiments - on the first page Bartlett calls Bush a "pretend conservative" and compares him to Richard M. Nixon, "a man who used the right to pursue his agenda" - its basic message reflects the frustration of many conservatives who say that Bush has been on a five-year government spending binge. Like them, Bartlett is particularly upset about Bush's Medicare prescription drug plan, which is expected to cost more than $700 billion over the next decade.

He is unhappy, too, with the president's education and campaign finance bills and his proposal to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, which many Republicans call a dressed-up amnesty plan. The book, to be published by Doubleday on Feb. 28, also criticizes the White House for "an anti-intellectual distrust of facts and analysis" and an obsession with secrecy.

"The Clinton people were vastly more open and easier to deal with and, quite frankly, a lot better on the issues," Bartlett said in the interview, in the kitchen of his pared-down modern house on a street of big new homes in Great Falls. Bartlett hastened to add that although he admired Clinton's economic policies, that did not mean he had changed sides.

"I haven't switched to the Democratic Party," he said. "I wrote this for Republicans."

One Republican, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, responded to Bartlett's book by e-mail message over the weekend.

"Spending is coming under control," McClellan wrote, adding that in the 2007 budget submitted to Congress this month, "the president put forward the most disciplined nonsecurity discretionary proposal since the Reagan era."

Bartlett is well regarded in conservative circles, even as the tone of his book has made him a maverick. "Bruce is really an exception, not the rule, in the degree and thoroughness of his discontent," said William Kristol, a conservative strategist and the editor of The Weekly Standard. "So I wouldn't make too much of it. On the other hand, one thing I've noticed giving speeches in the last couple of months is that conservatives remain pro-Bush, but the loyalty to the movement and the ideas is deeper than the personal loyalty now. Two years ago, Bush was the movement and the cause."

Bartlett, 54, the author of a syndicated newspaper column and articles in academic journals, was dismissed in October as a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a research group based in Dallas. In the interview, Bartlett said he had been fired because his increasingly critical comments about Bush, both in his column, in his book and in other publications, had hampered the ability of the research institution to raise money among Republican donors.

He also provided a copy of an e-mail message that he said was sent to him in August 2004 by Jeanette Goodman, the vice president of the research institution. "100K is off the table if you do another 'dump Cheney' column and 65K donor is having a rebuttal done, in a national magazine, to your attack on the fair tax people so that 65K may be gone also," Goodman wrote about one of Bartlett's columns about the vice president. "Do you have any ideas on where I could raise that amount quickly?"

John Goodman, the president of the organization and Goodman's husband, said in a telephone interview over the weekend that he did not know what his wife had said to Bartlett and that he did not want to say whether Bartlett "did or didn't hurt fund-raising." But Goodman added, "That's not why he was fired."

Goodman said he dismissed Bartlett because after reading the manuscript of "Impostor" last fall, he determined that Bartlett had reneged on an agreement not to personalize his criticism of the president or any other individual, in the Bush administration or not.

"He was supposed to write a book on policy," Goodman said.

Bartlett, for his part, said he is fine financially but hopes his book is a best seller. In any case, he is tired of think tanks. "Some reporter called the other day and asked me about the budget, and I don't give a rat's ### about the budget anymore," Bartlett said. "It's just a boring subject. It's never changed in the 30 years I've been working on the budget. But if I were still working for a think tank, I'd have to be up on that kind of stuff and ready to give a quote or some intelligent analysis, and I feel I can kind of ignore some of that."

So what now?

"I've been thinking about writing a history of the Democratic Party," Bartlett said. "It kind of seemed an interesting thing for a Republican to do."

Elisabeth Bumiller - International Herald Tribune

Edited September 10, 2006 by Steven_and_Jinky

[one...two...tree 2,762]

What? Another Conservative daring to criticize Bush? Get a rope...

[Ban Hammer 13,345]

What? Another Conservative daring to criticize Bush? Get a rope...

having to bump your own threads due to a lack of interest?

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

What? Another Conservative daring to criticize Bush? Get a rope...

Not untypical. Party first, as usual.