Lucille
07-27-2010, 08:01 AM
The Texas Republican Who Hates Bush (http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-07-26/george-w-bush-revisionists-are-wrong-says-tom-pauken/3/)
The movement to rehabilitate the former president’s image is misguided, former Texas GOP Chair Tom Pauken tells Lloyd Grove. Instead, party faithful should be searching for true conservatives to turn the country around.
[...]
“The Bush administration really squandered a lot of the political capital that a lot of Reagan conservatives had built up over three decades,” says Pauken, who these days is Gov. Rick Perry’s appointed chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, which administers unemployment benefits. “There’s an openness to, if you will, asking and seeking answers to the question, What happened? How did we mess it up? How did we set the scene for the Obama administration to come to power?”
Pauken says the Bushes, father and son, have done so much damage to modern Republicanism that not even Dubya’s younger brother Jeb, the highly regarded former governor of Florida, is a leader he could follow. “My view,” Pauken says, “with all due respect, is no more Bushes!”
[...]
“The Bush years were a huge failure, both economically and internationally,” he tells me. “On the economy, we’re not doing anything to create private-sector jobs, and we’re losing our manufacturing base, but it didn’t happen overnight. It’s accelerating during the Obama administration, but from 1999 to 2009, we lost one-third of our U.S. manufacturing jobs. Five million good American jobs have gone away. Internationally, the Bush administration didn’t deal effectively with the threat of radicalism.”
Pauken, who volunteered for Vietnam at the height of the bloodshed in 1967, is particularly scornful of advocates of the Iraq invasion who avoided combat themselves—and he doesn’t necessarily exempt the former president. He sees the adventure as ruinous, both in terms of fiscal and foreign policy.
[...]
The people driving the policy, particularly the pre-emptive war in Iraq—Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, the president himself, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and others—none of them served,” Pauken says. “The only people in the Bush administration who served in Vietnam were Colin Powell, Larry Wilkerson, Richard Armitage—all of whom were skeptical of the war. But they were essentially shunted aside in terms of their advice, as were Generals [Anthony] Zinni and [Norman] Schwarzkopf, both of whom opposed the war in Iraq.”
[...]
Pauken’s searing critique—outlined in his book Bringing America Home: How American Lost Her Way and How We Can Find Our Way Back—also extends to the post-Bush Republican establishment, notably the two Texans who are leading his party’s House and Senate campaign committees, Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. John Cornyn.
“I don’t think they get it. I don’t think they understand, and that’s part of the problem,” Pauken tells me, adding that he was decidedly unimpressed by the duo’s recent joint appearance on Meet the Press, in which neither could provide details of a positive GOP agenda. “If we replace the current administration with a group of Republican retreads who led us into the wilderness in the first place, it’s not going to get things fixed. We have got to have solutions for the very serious problems that face America. And just saying we’re against Obama, saying, ‘Hey, we did better during the Bush years,’ won’t cut it. In point of fact, the Bush years played into the problems facing America today.”
[...]
Pauken goes on: “Unfortunately, the Republican Party in the post-Reagan period got hijacked by a group of people who claimed they were conservative but were really Machiavellian pragmatists like Rove. Or they were former liberal Democrats—Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson Democrats-turned-Republicans, who never were philosophical or ideological conservatives in the first place—like Charles Krauthammer, who was a speechwriter for Mondale. They did a lot of damage in the name of conservatism.”
Not surprisingly, among the Republican contenders for 2012, Pauken is no fan of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (who shares Cornyn’s bullish view of the Bush legacy), and is deeply skeptical of the putative front-runner Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.
“I wouldn’t say he’s a Bush clone, but he’s not a conservative, just like the Bush crowd weren’t conservatives,” Pauken says. “He made his fortune as a leveraged buyout artist, which, with all due respect, were the guys who created part of the problem with the loss of good American jobs and taking advantage of distorted business practice which rewards leverage and debt and penalizes savings and investment. That’s not the guy to lead us back…I don’t know what Romney’s philosophy is. He just wants to be president.”
The movement to rehabilitate the former president’s image is misguided, former Texas GOP Chair Tom Pauken tells Lloyd Grove. Instead, party faithful should be searching for true conservatives to turn the country around.
[...]
“The Bush administration really squandered a lot of the political capital that a lot of Reagan conservatives had built up over three decades,” says Pauken, who these days is Gov. Rick Perry’s appointed chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, which administers unemployment benefits. “There’s an openness to, if you will, asking and seeking answers to the question, What happened? How did we mess it up? How did we set the scene for the Obama administration to come to power?”
Pauken says the Bushes, father and son, have done so much damage to modern Republicanism that not even Dubya’s younger brother Jeb, the highly regarded former governor of Florida, is a leader he could follow. “My view,” Pauken says, “with all due respect, is no more Bushes!”
[...]
“The Bush years were a huge failure, both economically and internationally,” he tells me. “On the economy, we’re not doing anything to create private-sector jobs, and we’re losing our manufacturing base, but it didn’t happen overnight. It’s accelerating during the Obama administration, but from 1999 to 2009, we lost one-third of our U.S. manufacturing jobs. Five million good American jobs have gone away. Internationally, the Bush administration didn’t deal effectively with the threat of radicalism.”
Pauken, who volunteered for Vietnam at the height of the bloodshed in 1967, is particularly scornful of advocates of the Iraq invasion who avoided combat themselves—and he doesn’t necessarily exempt the former president. He sees the adventure as ruinous, both in terms of fiscal and foreign policy.
[...]
The people driving the policy, particularly the pre-emptive war in Iraq—Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, the president himself, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and others—none of them served,” Pauken says. “The only people in the Bush administration who served in Vietnam were Colin Powell, Larry Wilkerson, Richard Armitage—all of whom were skeptical of the war. But they were essentially shunted aside in terms of their advice, as were Generals [Anthony] Zinni and [Norman] Schwarzkopf, both of whom opposed the war in Iraq.”
[...]
Pauken’s searing critique—outlined in his book Bringing America Home: How American Lost Her Way and How We Can Find Our Way Back—also extends to the post-Bush Republican establishment, notably the two Texans who are leading his party’s House and Senate campaign committees, Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. John Cornyn.
“I don’t think they get it. I don’t think they understand, and that’s part of the problem,” Pauken tells me, adding that he was decidedly unimpressed by the duo’s recent joint appearance on Meet the Press, in which neither could provide details of a positive GOP agenda. “If we replace the current administration with a group of Republican retreads who led us into the wilderness in the first place, it’s not going to get things fixed. We have got to have solutions for the very serious problems that face America. And just saying we’re against Obama, saying, ‘Hey, we did better during the Bush years,’ won’t cut it. In point of fact, the Bush years played into the problems facing America today.”
[...]
Pauken goes on: “Unfortunately, the Republican Party in the post-Reagan period got hijacked by a group of people who claimed they were conservative but were really Machiavellian pragmatists like Rove. Or they were former liberal Democrats—Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson Democrats-turned-Republicans, who never were philosophical or ideological conservatives in the first place—like Charles Krauthammer, who was a speechwriter for Mondale. They did a lot of damage in the name of conservatism.”
Not surprisingly, among the Republican contenders for 2012, Pauken is no fan of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (who shares Cornyn’s bullish view of the Bush legacy), and is deeply skeptical of the putative front-runner Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.
“I wouldn’t say he’s a Bush clone, but he’s not a conservative, just like the Bush crowd weren’t conservatives,” Pauken says. “He made his fortune as a leveraged buyout artist, which, with all due respect, were the guys who created part of the problem with the loss of good American jobs and taking advantage of distorted business practice which rewards leverage and debt and penalizes savings and investment. That’s not the guy to lead us back…I don’t know what Romney’s philosophy is. He just wants to be president.”