Wait, Bush is okay now?

By B.G. | WASHINGTON

WE'VE all had our fun with this New York Times/CBS Tea Party poll, but on second read a new paragraph stands out.

[Tea Party supporters] do not want a third party and say they usually or almost always vote Republican. The percentage holding a favorable opinion of former President George W. Bush, at 57 percent, almost exactly matches the percentage in the general public that holds an unfavorable view of him.

I thought it was a little disgusting the way the Republicans ran from George Bush when his poll numbers tanked. They invited him to the 2008 convention only via video conference; they quite literally couldn't be seen in the same room with him. Slightly more disgusting was the attempt to reinvent the Bush years as more liberal hegemony. In his wearily counterintuitive way, Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2006 that Mr Bush was a liberal just like Nixon, and concluded

Perhaps this unnoticed fact explains part of Bush's falling poll numbers more than most observers are willing to admit. The modern conservative movement, from Goldwater to Reagan, was formed as a backlash against Nixonism. Today, Reaganite conservatives make up a majority of the Republican party. If Bush held the Reaganite line on liberty at home the way he does on liberty abroad, he'd be in a lot better shape. After all, if Bush's own base supported him at their natural level, his job-approval numbers wouldn't be stellar, but they wouldn't have his enemies cackling, either.

Then in his convention speech, Mitt Romney decided that bad things were liberal, and since Washington was bad, it was therefore liberal.

Is government spending, putting aside inflation, liberal or conservative if it doubles since 1980? It's liberal. We need change all right: change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington: Throw out the big-government liberals and elect John McCain and Sarah Palin.

You hear this on talk radio, too. The problem is Washington, evidently, and the way it turns good Republicans bad. True conservatives held their tongue during the Bush administration out of a commitment to the party, but now they don't have to. It is an explanation that allowed people to sand off the sharp edges of their own cognitive dissonance.

But it isn't supported by fact. Despite what Mr Romney and Mr Goldberg tell themselves, the base never punished Bush for his ideological failures. The Tea Partiers, 57% of them, still love them some unfunded-entitlement-spending, TARP-bail-outing, compassionate Bush. They just don't like Barack Obama. I used to think that the Tea Party consisted of well-meaning budget hawks, peppered, like all movements, with crazies who own markers. But now they feel more and more like Grandpa Simpson, who, when left alone too long would eventually arrive at

I'm thirsty! Ew, what smells like mustard? There sure are a lot of ugly people in your neighborhood. Ooh, look at that one. Ow, my glaucoma just got worse. The president is a Democrat!

(Photo credit: AFP)