Kimberley Strassel’s column on John Kasich in today’s Wall Street Journal takes a weird detour to bash reform conservatism. (Which she has bashed before.)
Mr. Kasich’s is fresh to many voters, but his message isn’t. This is “compassionate conservatism”—or at least a bastardized version of it. George W. Bush first used that phrase to explain how conservative policies made everyone better off. But it would later turn into a license for Republicans to embrace government for their own conservative ends. Giant new education spending was needed to create school “accountability”; a new Medicare drug entitlement would create health-care “competition;” green-energy subsidies bolstered “national security.” Accountability, competition, national security—all conservative priorities, and all (according to the compassionate) best achieved through bigger government.
The philosophy got a revamp in the past year in the self-styled “reformicon” movement. This collection of conservative journalists and thinkers argue that their embrace of tax credits and subsidies is about modernizing conservative policy. In reality, it’s Compassionate Conservatism 2.0. It’s a savvier version, one that places more emphasis on selling policies to a skeptical base, even as it markets them to new audiences. Thus Mr. Kasich’s refrain that his state’s Medicaid program is growing at “one of the lowest rates in the country” even as it helps “the poor.”
Actually, reform conservatives want to see a dramatic reduction in the federal government’s role in health care and higher education; we want a tax code that imposes a much smaller burden on our economy and society; we want the government to stop using job licensing to squelch competition; and we want to head off ill-considered liberal policies. It’s entirely possible that we’re wrong about how to do those things. But it’s just false to suggest we’re writing hymns to big government.
In the real world, reform conservatism has been championed much more consistently and forcefully by Mike Lee than by John Kasich, and reform conservatives have for that reason been much more likely to praise the former than the latter. I myself have been fairly hostile to Kasich’s approach to Medicaid. I opposed No Child Left Behind from the get-go, and the reform-conservative manifesto Room to Grow is on balance critical to it (and does not call for “giant new education spending”). I have written against compassionate conservatism before, during, and after the Bush administration. I know of no reform conservative who defends green-energy subsidies on national security grounds.
Later in the column, Strassel trashes Marco Rubio’s “middle-class tax breaks and low-income handouts” and then praises the allegedly superior approach of Paul Ryan and the late Jack Kemp. Then there’s reality: Kemp favored expanding both the child credit and the earned income tax credit, which are what she’s talking about in her diss of Rubio. Ryan favors expanding the second credit too. (The Journal’s editors sometimes favor tax credits, too, albeit grudgingly–as they showed in an editorial this week.)
Strassel has just thrown a bunch of things she dislikes into a blender and then decided they’re all basically the same.