Case Study: George W. Bush

After George W. Bush was sworn in to a second term as President of the United States in January, Americans were surprised, and at times dismayed by the inaugural speech he delivered.  A general refrain was that in the years since the imposition of the two-term limit, second inaugural addresses would tend to be far more idealistic in tone than first addresses, and Bush’s address was no exception.   Others cynically pointed out that Bush had appointed a new speechwriter to craft the second inaugural address, and a new speechwriter means effectively a new voice for the presidential product.  However, it may be noted that the 2005 inaugural address represented a radical departure from what we had come to expect from the president, and depending on one’s ideological or partisan stance, one may either be confused, angered, suspicious, or thrilled.  What stood out for most observers was that Bush’s address in January included a heavy reliance on words and phrases that spoke to  “liberty” or “freedom”­—far more than in any of his previous speeches, and certainly far more than during his campaign. 

That liberals would criticize Bush comes as a surprise to no one.  Bush had already painted himself a “compassionate conservative” in the previous election campaign, and his initiative record generally favored an agenda concerned with order, security, and traditional institutions, especially religious institutions.  What did come as a surprise to some was the negative reaction voiced by some conservatives in response to his inaugural address.  However, because order, not liberty, is the primary focus of conservatives, conservative antipathy towards Bush’s second inaugural address, a prima facie libertarian speech, should also not surprise us.

At first one must ask the question: Was Bush’s second inaugural address in fact a libertarian speech? And if so, exactly how closely does it cleave towards libertarian rhetoric?  In order to find out, I obtained a transcript of the address and measured the frequency of ideological indicators along the three axes of liberty, equality, and order.  Employing a method that compared the text of the address with a predetermined range of ideological indicators (the same table of indicators used for the previous inquiries), I counted 38 direct references to liberty, 18 references to equality, and 6 references to order in the text of Bush’s speech.

What is most peculiar about Bush’s second inaugural address is not simply that it cleaves towards libertarian rhetoric, but that it cleaves so strongly to libertarianism that it is ultimately incongruous with the president’s ostensibly conservative 2004 re-election campaign.  Indeed an analysis of ideological indicators reveals that this speech is at least as ideologically libertarian as his campaign was conservative.  Despite this overt expression of libertarian sentiment, however, ideological libertarians are likely to look upon President Bush with suspicion, or else to accuse the president of “flip-flopping” as much as the Bush campaign accused John Kerry of having done during his tenure in the U.S. Senate.   It is possible that the administration was aware of this problem, and so crafted Bush’s subsequent State of the Union address so that it would attempt to reconcile the two seemingly conflicting positions.  (See below; Click charts to enlarge)

George W. Bush’s Ideological Signatures

 

 

 

It would not have been sufficient for President Bush to have delivered a single strong libertarian speech in order to convince those favorably disposed towards such rhetoric that Bush himself harbored libertarian tendencies.   After all, a single inaugural address, despite the media attention it receives, cannot in one stroke erase the burden of an entire prior campaign, as the next figure illustrates:

Ideological Rhetorical Volumes for George W. Bush

 


Most troubling for the ideological libertarian is that although the 2005 inaugural address contains language he would consider favorable, its total rhetorical volume is far less than the whole of George W. Bush’s prior election campaign, and is therefore unlikely to shift the president’s basic ideological orientation.  The subsequent State of the Union address appears to have attempted to make up for this deficiency with an increase in overall rhetorical volume, ultimately to overtake the measurable rhetorical volume of the issues pages on Bush’s 2004 Campaign web site (“Campaign 2k4” in the figures above).  Even so, when all is taken together—the Bush campaign, the inaugural address, and the State of the Union address—the president still comes across under the LEO model as a conservative, albeit a conservative of a different stripe from before the election, rather than a libertarian.

If George Bush remains a conservative, what could explain his flirtation with libertarianism in both the Inaugural Address and the State of the Union speech?  One possible reason may be found by looking to the LEO model itself.  Were one to assume that the three axes—liberty, equality, and order—are primary dimensions of American ideology, and that other axes are of minute enough influence not to be relevant to the perception of how moderate or extreme a given political actor appears, i.e. that the three axes of this model describe a closed system, then an express attachment to more than one of these axes ultimately moderates any tendency towards ideological extremism. Observation of the president’s re-election campaign literature indicated that at least fifty percent of his language favored order, and thus placed Mr. Bush in the category of “Conservative Ideologue”, and even moderate or centrist conservatives may be unlikely to support even those who share their general ideological preference if they appear too strident in those beliefs, or else are unwilling to entertain the opinions of those with whom they disagree ideologically.  By adopting a quasi-libertarian stance, Bush was able to moderate yet maintain his ideological preference without fear of appearing to adopt the views of ideological liberals, which would effectively alienate him from the conservative leadership in his own party who see liberalism as anathema.

Another possible reason for Bush to employ libertarian rhetoric in his speeches stems from the basic character of the successful coalition within the Republican Party forged in 1968 by then-governor of California Ronald Reagan.  Reagan, himself a former Democrat, joined the Republicans in the 1960s in part to challenge the deeply entrenched leadership within the Democratic Party in California, but also because he believed that Democrats had strayed from their Jeffersonian advocacy of small government and devotion to expanding individual liberty.  “Government is not the solution to the problem,” Reagan boldly declared in the 1980 presidential campaign and in his first inaugural address, “government is the problem.”  This fundamentally libertarian viewpoint would propel Reagan into the White House that year and again in an electoral landslide in 1984. The Reagan Coalition—an alliance of libertarians, conservatives, and some moderates—would come to define the Republican Party throughout the 1980s and push it into the majority of both houses of Congress in 1994, a position Republicans have enjoyed largely unchallenged for the last decade.

The 2004 Republican National Convention, however, demonstrated that in light of the president’s overtly conservative initiative platform, as well as a largely conservative agenda outlined in his campaign for that year, the foundation of the Reagan Coalition was beginning to crack.  Few who watched or listened to the coverage at the Republican Convention failed to notice the marked difference in tone between conservative speakers such as Laura Bush or Democrat Zell Miller and the libertarian-leaning governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Few also could fail to notice that the responses each speaker received on the floor among the delegates spoke volumes about the potential split emerging within the Republican Party.  Ideological coalitions between orthogonally opposed positions are expected to be fragile, and unless the President did something to maintain the increasingly uneasy alliance (defined largely by a shared distate for programmatic liberalism) in positive rather than negative terms, the Party itself was in long term jeopardy.

Bush’s acceptance speech at the 2004 Convention would prove to be a shade of things to come.  For most of that speech, Bush concentrated on his conservative allies, emphasizing security, tradition, and perceived American virtues.  The last six paragraphs, however, concentrated heavily on the American attachment to liberty, and many observers remarked that Bush’s address was effectively two separate speeches, bearing two perhaps divergent themes.  What was not recognized, however, was that these two themes spoke to two distinct ideological pressures from within the Republican party: one stridently conservative and best embodied in the rhetoric of a Laura Bush or a Rick Santorum, the other manifestly libertarian and expressed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ron Paul, or Pete Sessions.

George W. Bush, like his Democratic opponent John Kerry, could be said to be reacting rather than acting.  However, unlike Kerry, who reacted strongly in the Senate to pressures that could threaten his standing with his constituents, Bush has reacted strongly in the presidency to ideological pressures from within his own party that could threaten not only his standing with that party, but even the party itself.  From the abrupt change of central theme in his acceptance speech to the singularly libertarian character of his Inaugural Address, through to the combination of both libertarian and conservative themes in the State of the Union Address, Bush appears to be trying to maintain a fragile alliance among partisans who find it difficult to remain together.

 

Comments

[Mark Zuniga]

Is this the kind of study typical for political science study? It is so radically different than anything I did for my politics degree from UD.

[jonathon]

Is there something the matter with it?

The model I've been working on is actually a hybrid of political theory and an empirical method using (in this case) text analysis. I also have another test that follows a method similar to a personality inventory. In order to test and refine this inventory, I compared it with the scores from the PotUS 2k4 inquiry, and made predictions about how they voted and why. One person from Laredo thought I was some kind of fortune teller or mind-reader, because my assessment of her attitude in the voting booth was spot on.

[jonathon]

Studies using instruments like NOMINATE and FILTER are actually typical of empirical political science. The thing I found most disturbing is that they seemed to lack a clear inductive method to establish their theses.

Case studies are recognized in mainstream political science, but most poli.sci. researchers won't deal with them because they assume that case studies are simply too complex to deal with

Study in UD's Politics program is generally philosophically rigorous and adheres strongly to the investigation of fundamental political principles. However, it falls short when it comes to reinforcement or rejection of these theories based upon what is actually observed.

Many other institutions may be empirically rigorous, but ultimately have little to no theoretical foundation, and are awash and adrift with meaningless or trivial observations. When they do have a theoretical foundation, sadly that foundation is often based on Harold Lasswell's theory of politics, which appears to be a watered-down version of dialectical materialism.

At this point on this site I've only alluded to the method I used, without displaying either the actual reference table or the analytic table. I'm still playing that one fairly close to the belt. It'll go in Part II.

Now I'm curious, and I'm glad to get some feedback; what do you find so alien about this study?

[jonathon]

I know that empiricists are likely to see this model as somewhat strange, since it maintains a strong connection with the humanities/philosophy side of the discipline in setting up the model. It begins with known writers on their ideological preferences, and compares them one against another in terms of theme. This comes from literary criticism. The basic model that emerges is either Aristotelian or, more properly, Montesquieuian in character. Refined a little further in terms of relational logic and it becomes a formal model; put it all together and you've got the theory itself.

The analysis of presidential candidates and the case studies of Kerry and Bush are tests of the model.
The individual inventory (about which I have not yet written), when compared with presidential candidates to explain or predict voting behavior, is a further test and an application of the model that comes from the empirical tradition.

So far I've found that at least the basic model appears to hold, although I need to expand the part of the individual test that seeks to measure whether one is generally moved more by ideology or by moderation. I've been wrong twice in about a hundred individual responses. The first time was because I had not accounted for ideological ambivalence, the second I didn't have enough discrete items on the ideology v. moderation test to provide an accurate response.

[jonathon]

When people get the test table, and try it out for themselves, they're often shocked at how well it works. Granted, statisticians are likely to sneer at it because it lacks the mind-boggling complexity of most multivariate analysis, but hey, I wanted to build something relatively accurate, useful, flexible, and simple enough for ordinary people (i.e. non-statisticians) to understand.

[Mark Zuniga]

I did not mean to imply that there was anything wrong with what you're doing. I'm merely aware that UD claims to be different and I had been wondering how.

[jonathon]

It wasn't my intention to suggest that you were implying anything of the kind. I'm just glad to see that someone is looking at it.
The trouble is, this is neither typical UD study nor it is typical political science. It's more of a synthesis of the two.

[jonathon]

Mark? I hope I haven't chased you off :)