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From RFK to GWB - In 2000, echoes of 1968
National Review, June 5, 2000 by Michael Knox Beran
The elder Bush's decision to turn his back on Greenwich and light out for the Territory was a smart one. The golden age of patrician dominance in American public life-a period that coincided with the building of the regulatory and administrative state under Wilson and the two Roosevelts-was slowly coming to an end when he brought Barbara and little George to Odessa, Texas, in the summer of 1948. Bobby Kennedy, an almost exact contemporary of the elder Bush, sensed as much himself. He, too, realized that noblesse no longer justified a political career; he, too, was moving to embrace a more entrepreneurial model of reform; at one point he even flirted with the idea of moving to Nevada and running for the Senate there, although in the end he never moved out West as Bush did. (Non- patricians like Johnson and Nixon, oddly enough, seem to have been less aware than either Kennedy or Bush pere that the old seigneurial thinking was doomed; they devoted themselves to expanding the welfare state at a time when more perceptive minds were contemplating retrenchment. Perhaps at some level they were afraid they would otherwise appear boorish and plebeian in comparison with the breezy liberality of men like Stevenson and FDR.) Kennedy did not, of course, believe that the entitlement state should be dismantled; in a number of areas he wanted to see its scope enlarged. But he recognized that it was-as a European (and specifically a German) import-in many ways incompatible with older American traditions and ideals. Although the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was a step in the right direction, one that Kennedy would have applauded, the business of reconciling the entitlement state with older American mores is not yet finished. In pledging to complete the job, the younger Bush would remind people that his own heritage is as much an entrepreneurial as a patrician one.
Some will snicker at the idea that Bush, the product of Kennebunkport summers and the beneficiary of his father's political and business connections, is a genuinely entrepreneurial figure. And yet his experience of life-from the time he spent in public school as a boy in Midland, Texas, to his stints in the private sector-is broader than his opponent's much more narrowly patrician existence. Gore, himself the scion of a patrician (and senatorial) family, a product of St. Alban's and Harvard and summers spent living the life of a gentleman-farmer in Carthage, Tennessee, may genuinely want to "reinvent" the federal government, as he once pledged to do. But his freedom to maneuver is limited. Gore is beholden to the old mandarin elites, to big labor and the bureaucrats, to the teachers' unions and the unrepentant Left, to those who continue to believe that progress results from Washington- directed acts of federal noblesse and shrink from reform that threatens the status quo. Gore's debt to the anti-entrepreneurial aristocracy that still dominates the Left-an aristocracy that fears the introduction of freedom, choice, and competition in areas such as education, trade, and Social Security-gives Bush the opportunity to portray himself as the real revolutionary in the race, the entrepreneurial candidate who, if elected, could make progress in fixing an entitlement system that doesn't work, an education system that doesn't educate, a bureaucrat-knows-best mentality that sees poor people as victims, not as men and women who, with a little self- confidence, could get there on their own.
