NOW with Bill Moyers. Transcript. January 23, 2004 | PBS
MOYERS: In his State of the Union address, President Bush gave us a preview of his re-election campaign. He got 29 standing ovations. But behind the scenes, some conservatives were grumbling about the soaring federal deficits and the President’s failure to confront them. …
MOYERS: After Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon in the 70’s, CPAC [the Conservative Political Action Conference] helped to resurrect the Republican party, with grassroots activism, determination, and Ronald Reagan.
The reward: control of the White House and Congress today.
But the conservative revolution is heading into middle age and new complexities. Traditional conservatives argue now over key questions.
For example: can Homeland Security and civil liberties coexist?
Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia is now working not just with the American Conservative Union, but also the American Civil Liberties Union.
BARR: The direction the party at the national level seems to be going in is to have more and more power to the government to find out more and more about individual law abiding citizens, less and less privacy. …
MOYERS: The big discussion at the conference this week, as it was across the Potomac River in Washington D.C., was about the growth of government spending.
Six conservative watchdog groups have joined to rebuke the administration, charging that Bush isn’t even doing as well as Bill Clinton, and isn’t close to living up to Ronald Reagan’s example. …
BARR: I do worry that at least on fiscal matters at the national level the party seems to be going in the direction of becoming a sort of Democrat-lite party in terms of federal spending. And I think that’s very dangerous for the long term strength of the Conservative movement and certainly for the Republican Party.
MOYERS: Richard Armey spent six years as the Republicans’ majority leader in the house.
ARMEY: Conservatives can get disillusioned, they can get disconcerted, and they can stay home. One hundred percent of the Democrat vote will be out for the presidential election. President Bush cannot afford to have any percentage of his vote stay home, and that’s where, if he loses the election, and I don’t think he will, it’ll be because some of his vote stays home. …
MOYERS: Joining me now to talk more about the conservative agenda is David Keene. He’s the chairman of the American Conservative Union, the largest grassroots conservative organization in the country.
MOYERS: One of your conservative colleagues, Stephen Moore of the Conservative Club for Growth, says that the Bush state of the union has become a state of dependency and a state of entitlement. And Paul Weyrich, another one of the founders with you of the Conservative Movement, says profligate spending by the Republicans in Congress is twice the rate under Bill Clinton.
KEENE: That’s not an opinion, Bill. That’s a fact.
MOYERS: That’s a fact.
KEENE: Non-defense discretionary spending under Clinton was going up at about 2 1/2 percent. And under Bush it’s been going up roughly twice that. And I think that the Republicans, unless they want to lose definition, the definition of their party and what they mean to the base out there that supports them in election after election, have to come to grips with the fact that they are letting that definition be eroded by acts that they would never contemplate were they looking at somebody else doing it. …
MOYERS: What, in essence, defines a conservative today?
KEENE: I think I’ll go back to what Mike Pence said in opening this conference this week. We talked about the conservative desire for a smaller and limited government. A government that doesn’t tax people to death, a government that doesn’t regulate them to death, a government that doesn’t spend money that doesn’t exist.
We talked about the fact that conservatives believe in a strong defense, believe in being able to defend our population and in traditional values that conservatives have historically stood for. And Mike put it very effectively. He said, “If you don’t believe in those things you can be our friend, you can be our ally. We’ll work with you. But you don’t have the right to stand up and call yourself a conservative.”
MOYERS: But, David, I have to come back to this. George W. Bush is spending non-existent money faster than anybody in modern times. He’s expanding the power of the state with not just homeland security and the war of terror abroad but with one extension of domestic agency after another. I mean, do you really consider him a core conservative?
KEENE: We consider Bush to be a conservative who’s allowed the ship to drift a little bit off-course. And we’re yelling to get it back on-course and I think we will. You know, the jury, in a sense, is out.