One Of Us

Back in January, we linked to a post by David Frum, who wrote:

The day will come, and probably soon, when American liberals and the American left will wake up to the fact that (as Tom Wicker said of Richard Nixon in the book of the same name) on domestic issues Bush was “one of us.” Much as they disliked Bush’s foreign policies, cultural style, and political methods, he actually had more in common with them on domestic issues than he did with his own political base. It will someday be very hard to explain why liberals so hated Bush. I suppose it just goes to prove that – despite all those left-wing books about the false consciousness of those poor deluded rubes in Kansas – culture trumps economics for elites at least as much as for ordinary voters.

Today, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Richard Cohen discovers something some of us on the right have been saying for a while: if you hold your head just so and look at Bush from the right angle, he looks an awful lot like a liberal.

Related thoughts from Ed Morrissey; it’s also worth re-reading Jonathan Rausch’s “The Accidental Radical” from four years ago, which remains a pretty good look at Bush’s overall governing “strategery”.