HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

Mark Steyn breathes a sigh of relief as

George W Bush takes the compassion out of conservatism

New Hampshire FOR us uncompassionate conservatives, one of the pleasant surprises of the last two months has been discovering just how rightwing George W. Bush really is. We never cared for that 'compassionate' shtick, resenting the implicit rebuke to non-adjectival conservatism, but we were demoralised after the Monica business and figured that this touchy-feely multiculti sob-sister was the best we could do. Watching him campaigning in Spanish for increased federal education funding, most conservatives reckoned the only bright spot was that at least this time we wouldn't be sitting around in midFebruary bitching and moaning about how we'd been betrayed yet again: say what you like about this bilingually inarticulate jellyfish, but he had the guts to sell us out beforehand. Expectations dropped even further when the landslide some of us (ahem) predicted never materialised. After his narrow victory — or (in deference to Guardian and Independent readers) his narrow defeat

— the conventional wisdom of the grand bores at the New York Times and Washington Post was that he had no 'mandate' and would have to 'govern from the centre' and 'reach across the aisle'.

But what a guy! Bush is 'governing from the centre' like a man who thinks the centre is about ten yards to the right of Jesse Helms. Every day brings more good news: government promotion of abortion overseas — out! Logging on federal lands — in! Kissing up to North Korea — out! Drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve — in! Vetting of judicial appointees by the lefties of the American Bar Association — out! Two hundred per cent marginal tax rates for anti-tobacco lawyers — in! Ergonomic regulations at the workplace — out! Arsenic in the water supply — in!

To be honest, I think I speak for many heartless right-wing bastards when I say that some of these initiatives are in areas we never even knew we didn't care about. Take arsenic. No, no, I don't mean right now, even if you're a liberal environmentalist sunk in the slough of despond. But, rather, consider the question of arsenic. Who knew there was arsenic in the water? And who knew that the Clinton adminis tration had a whole bunch of regulations worked out to reduce it? But apparently they did, and now Bush has scrapped 'em. A President who champions the right of free-born citizens to drink arsenic-laden water is a fellow who takes small-government libertarianism seriously.

Back at the conservative think-tanks, the ideologues couldn't be happier: the water may be impure, but the President isn't. 'There isn't an us and them with this administration,' says conservative strategist Grover Norquist. 'They is us. We is them,' he adds, in charmingly Bushesque English. Of course, across the aisle there are plenty of other thems who don't feel part of the us. 'President Bush campaigned as a compassionate conservative and turned out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing,' fumes Mark Helm of Friends of the Earth. 'He is a right-wing extremist.' George W. Bush and his people,' pronounces the New York Times's Anthony Lewis, 'are driven by right-wing ideology to an extent not remotely touched by even the Reagan administration.' Not only is he poisoning our air and water,' writes my old friend Barbra Streisand in a blistering threepage memo to Congressional Democrats, tut he's poisoning our political system as well.' As you can gather, many of these critics feel very aggrieved: during the election, when they tagged Bush as a right-wing extremist, they were just indulging in the usual overheated Democratic campaign rhetoric, as they did with Bob Dole, Newt, Bush Snr et al. It never occurred to them that for once they might be correct.

The wilier Clintonites are advancing a more sophisticated argument. Former Clin ton aide Rahm Emmanuel says that the new President is making the same mistake the old one did. Clinton ran as a centrist 'New Democrat' but once in office pursued leftwing obsessions like gays in the military and universal health care. Likewise, Bush ran as a centrist 'compassionate conservative' but in office is pursuing right-wing obsessions like arsenic in the water and universal pollution. Only after Newt wiped out the Democrats in the '94 Congressional elections did Clinton come to his senses and return to the centre. Will it take a similar defeat in 2002 to bring Bush back to the middle?

Comforting as this analogy is to Democrats, it overlooks one big difference. Clinton isn't left-wing, right-wing or any wing: he has no core beliefs, other than his insistence that oral sex doesn't count as adultery. So he's happy to govern from whichever point on the spectrum his pollsters recommend. That's not the Bush way. Over the course of the election campaign, I had maybe ten minutes' worth of conversation with him, which isn't much, but it's usually long enough for the alarm bells to go off when you're talking with Bob Dole, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, John McCain or any other mainstream Republican candidate. This time they didn't. Unlike both Doles, Bush is a conservative off-stage, which is why he isn't having any trouble playing one on-stage.

Of course, the good times may not last. The Senate's split 50-50 and, though (as I write) Bush's chances of getting his budget past the Senate have improved, there's still a chance that a nominally Republican Senate will rebuff the first major Bill by a new Republican President. But even this potential disaster tends to point up the contrast between the genuinely conservative President and some of the ghastly squishes masquerading as Republican senators. If Bush does lose, it will be due to the so-called 'moderate', 'bipartisan' Republicans from New England: i.e., fellows who vote with the Democrats. For all the praise lavished on them by the media, they symbolise the defensive cringe of much of the GOP.

By contrast, Bush's conservatism is lightly worn but deeply felt. Those. like Barbra, who got him wrong this time last year by deriding him as a boob are now making the same mistake all over again by sneering at him as a Big Oil stooge. He may be a right-wing madman, but the insanity has an impressive breadth to it. First, he has a businessman's instinct for cost-benefit analysis. Thus, he overturned the new standards for arsenic levels in water because it would have cost the water companies an initial $4.5 billion for no scientifically proven health benefit. Second, he has a conservative's trust in the market: the ergonomics regulations he repealed were justified by their supporters on the grounds that the $4.2 billion annual cost would be more than offset by increased productivity due to less carpal-tunnel syndrome. But, if that's the case, businesses have every incentive to enforce them voluntarily, rather than letting government impose them. Third, he has a keen eye for small but telling political opportunities: ending the American Bar Association's role in vetting judicial nominees isn't especially important, but paradoxically its comparative lack of importance is what many conservatives found so cheering. It's the sort of thing other Republicans wouldn't have got round to thinking about until, by the time they did, they were surrounded by trimmers explaining why it was politically inexpedient. But Bush just kicked all those leftie lawyers in the testicles almost en passant. In 1953, when Eisenhower brought them into the judicial selection process, the ABA was a professional association offering technical evaluation. By the Nineties, the ABA president, George Bushnell, was dismissing Newt's Republican Congress as 'reptilian bastards'. The organisation openly supported the Clinton health plan and racial quotas. Nothing wrong with that, but other political advocacy groups aren't given a quasi-governmental role in areas of direct interest: the National Rifle Association isn't invited to approve gun laws. In telling them to take a hike. Bush signalled that he appreciates the damage that can be done to a conservative agenda by letting avowedly liberal groups pass themselves off as non-partisan.

Fourth, like all good conservatives, Bush has a sound bullshit detector. One of the curious features of the Left is its lack of interest in whether its policies accomplish the stated goals. For example, restricting logging on federal land sounds very environmentally friendly. In practice, what it means is that the forest doesn't get thinned out and that when a fire breaks out it rages for hundreds of miles because there are no logging roads to contain it. That's why the Clinton era has seen the worst forest fires of the century; an environmentally friendly policy has in fact devastated more of the environment than even the most ambitious Republican could ever hope to do. I may not know much about arsenic or CO, but I'm a small New Hampshire tree farmer whose land borders the federal government's, and Bush's reversals of Clinton will do more for the health of America's great forests than eight years of tree-hugging ever did.

Fifth, and most important, Bush is culturally conservative — big time. When Mrs Thatcher used to say that her favourite singers were the Beverly Sisters or that her favourite record was Rolf Harris's Two Little Boys, the zeitgeist-surfers used to hoot with derision. Personally, I always wondered if she wasn't just winding them up. But, if not, then that kind of imperviousness to the passing parade is very useful in a leader and wonderfully refreshing after Bill Clinton, who always gave the impression that he looked on the presidency as a good entrylevel position into show business. The other day Bush was obliged to address a dinner of TV and radio correspondents, one of those occasions when the President has to show what a sport he is and do a little stand-up. The conceit never really worked with Clin

ton, because he seemed far smoother and accomplished as a Vegas comic than as chief of state. But Bush gamely stood up and did a few tentative gags: 'As you know, we're studying safe levels for arsenic in drinking water.' he began. 'To base our decision on sound science, the scientists told us we needed to test the water glasses of about 3,000 people. Thank you for participating.'

The New York Times's star columnist, Maureen Dowd, said this joke wasn't funny. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.) 'It was a creepy moment,' she decided, and connected it to her larger point that Bush's `White House needs Geritol', is stuck in the Fifties, is planning to bring back Patti Page (The Singing Rage who had a big hit with 'How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?', covered in the United Kingdom by the Beverly Sisters — see above). Bush, she fretted, is 'oddly disconnected from the culture'.

And she's right. He doesn't know any songs by Eminem or Puff Daddy. He doesn't watch Sex and the City, or any of the other TV shows favoured by the New York Times. He doesn't watch The Sopranos, so he wouldn't have understood Miss Dowd's recent political column using the show as an extended metaphor. But then most of America doesn't watch The Sopranos either. Eight million Americans watch The Sopranos, which means 290 million Americans don't. Bush is oddly disconnected from the culture, but only in the same way that the vast majority of non-Times-reading Americans are, Bush is the opposite of Clinton: he doesn't want to be thought cool by Barbra or Puffy or Maureen or Tina. He's never heard of 'ern (well, maybe Streisand), so why should he care what they think? Bush has a crucial conservative quality: the confidence not to be hip. And that's important — not when it comes to rap or movies, but when it comes to political fashions, like environmental regulation.

Barbra headed her Congressional memo 'Nice guys finish last', which I assumed was a reference to the fellows who did the first drafts of Yentl, but instead turned out to be a warning to the Dems that they're not being hard enough on Bush. You could hardly offer worse advice. It's Dubya who's cornered the market on political niceness — low-key, modest, inarticulate, the master of the New Diffidence — but with a tough determination underneath, and a healthy indifference to media and spin. It could all end in tears, but for now this is one nice guy who's finishing first.