Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Once upon a time, there was a thing called "compassionate conservativism"

Maybe the reason that Trump's approval rating is 38 percent is the complete lack of anything resembling empathy or even basic humanity in his policies.

Looking back, there are so many things about the 2000 presidential campaign that I find unbelievable (and I'm talking about the part before the butterfly ballots and hanging chads in Florida). For one thing, I seriously believed at the time that there wasn't a huge difference whether "Gush" or "Bore" -- George W. Bush or Al Gore (who, full disclosure, I did vote for in the end) -- won the general election. (I also thought then -- true story -- I might have voted for "straight shooter" John McCain had he somehow stolen the GOP nomination.) I guess history showed me, huh?

It was pretty much the last year that newspapers saw themselves as "rolling in dough," and so the Daily News sent me all over the country that year to cover the campaign or work on related stories. That's how it came to pass that I found myself in an airport hangar in Rochester, New York, watching Bush telling a room of glassy-eyed conservatives all of the things he wanted to do to close the achievement gap for poor urban kids.

There was even a name for this: "Compassionate conservativism." Of course, Bush's domestic policies like "No Child Left Behind" were kind of forgotten after September 11, 2001, and everything that followed. But for a time, the debate was less about how cruel GOP policies were for poor people and more about whether a program that relied on "faith-based" initiatives would obliterate the walls between church and state.

In June 2000, the New York Times took a deep dive in the philosophy of Bush and those around him:

Ask Gov. George W. Bush of Texas about the intellectual origins of his campaign's mantra and he says, ''Compassionate conservatism is first and foremost springing from the heart.''

Yet well before Mr. Bush began building his presidential campaign around the words ''compassionate conservative'' -- reshaping the image of his party to follow suit -- a cadre of thinkers on the right had been trying for years to fashion a form of conservatism that rejected the welfare state but did not turn its back on the poor. And with his campaign strategist Karl Rove acting as his guide, Mr. Bush began reading their books and meeting them, even before his first race for governor.

There's also a very end-of-the-20th-Century debate over whether 1960s counterculture had a negative impact on the poor, and then the future Republican president told the Times:

Bush quickly acknowledged, though, that ''positive things'' also came out of the activism of the baby boom generation, like environmentalism and the women's movement.

The Trump presidency is like a Dixie Chicks song -- he's not ready to make nice. Ever. And look, I understand the conservative mindset, that society is too permissive and that certain codes -- whether it's someone's interpretation of moral law, or the actual law -- need to be obeyed. But other conservatives -- most famously Ronald Reagan -- presented sometimes harsh policies without the unvarnished cruelty we've seen since January 20.

And so I wonder if this is really sustainable for Trump. This is a nation where (somewhat) successful politicians called themselves "the Happy Warrior" or tried to sell "The Politics of Joy." Our current president offers a complete lack of empathy -- as seen by his struggles to do something simple such as denounce anti-Semitism -- that just doesn't seem sustainable. When you look at Trump's current situation -- an approval rating of 38 percent, with 55 percent disapproving -- you have to wonder how much of that low regard is his policies and how much is a rejection of the politics of rage. Maybe the POTUS should read up on the idea of "compassionate conservatism." It's not ancient history. It just feels that way.