Yes, George Bush was humanistic, but he left huge messes on the Mexican border and in the Middle East

In the age of Obama, I always assumed that the Democratic Party would define itself against George W. Bush. But I never imagined that the Republican Party would as well.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said that the central conservative insight is that culture matters more than politics. But in this regard, George W. Bush was an odd conservative because he didn’t care much about culture; he believed that people everywhere were pretty much the same. In the mid-1990s, when Pete Wilson and Pat Buchanan were demonizing Mexican immigrants, Bush insisted that they were just like everyone else. “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande River,” he told a reporter. “And see, what I understand is, is that when you’re a man who got kids to feed, and are you making 50 cents and you can look up north and see the chance to make $50 and your kids are hungry, that you are going to come.”

Prominent Republicans barely ever discuss illegal immigrants in the humanizing terms that Bush did.

After September 11, Bush described Muslims in the same universalistic way. A few months after the attacks, he insisted that “Islam is peace,” a view dramatically at odds with the one being propagated by most conservative talking heads. (A 2002 poll of evangelical Protestant leaders found that only 10 percent thought Bush was right.) But Bush’s brand of Christianity was genuinely ecumenical. Although he had transformed his life through Christ, he knew that lots of former addicts had done so through born-again Islam. As president, he sought out people like Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya who told him that the people of Iraq yearned for democracy, and were capable of building it. And it was this belief that made him receptive to the arguments of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who as ambassador to Indonesia had been emboldened by watching the world’s largest majority-Muslim country move from dictatorship to democracy. Two months before the Iraq War, Bush declared, “The human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.”

My take:

These insightful observations get to the heart of George Bush's shortcomings as president. Earlier, people who are familiar with the Bush family have noted that Mexican nannies bounced Bush on their knees when he was a child, and that his brother, Jeb, is married to a Mexican national.

So, Bush had a strong sentimental attachment to Mexican immigrants. This, along with the fact that family wealth meant that he never had to compete for a job, allowed Bush to cast a benign eye on illegal immigration from Mexico.

Other people, who did have to compete for jobs with illegal immigrants, paid the price for Bush's sanguine attitude.

In the Middle East, Bush's above-the-fray posture has had more disastrous results. No one questions the invasion of Afghanistan, the first stage in what has become an endless war. The second stage was the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which Democrat Sen. James Webb, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, and a former Secretary of the Navy, described recently as "the dumbest thing we've ever done."

As for an overall judgment on Bush's ostensibly "compassionate conservative" politics, the late Bob Novak said it best: "He's no conservative. He's a Connecticut liberal, just like his granddaddy."