Conservative Commentator Dismissed Because
He Opposes Bush's Record Deficits
NY Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON Published: October 18, 2005
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 - In the latest sign of the deepening split among
conservatives over how far to go in challenging President Bush, Bruce Bartlett,
a Republican commentator who has been increasingly critical of the White House,
was dismissed on Monday as a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy
Analysis, a conservative research group based in Dallas.
In a statement, the organization said the decision was made after Mr.
Bartlett supplied its president, John C. Goodman, with the manuscript of his
forthcoming book, "The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and
Betrayed the Reagan Legacy."
Mr. Bartlett, who was a domestic policy aide at the White House in the
Reagan administration and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first
President Bush, confirmed that he had been dismissed after 10 years with the
center but declined to make any further comment.
The statement from the organization said Mr. Bartlett had negotiated a deal
last year to reduce his workload to give him time to write a book about
economic policy and taxation for which he had received a six-figure advance.
The statement said that the manuscript he showed Mr. Goodman was "an evaluation
of the motivations and competencies of politicians rather than an analysis of
public policy." The statement said the organization did not want to be
associated with that kind of work.
In response to a question about whether the administration had pressed the
organization about Mr. Bartlett, Mr. Goodman relayed a reply through a
spokesman saying he had never had any conversation about Mr. Bartlett with
anyone in the White House.
But the dismissal of Mr. Bartlett comes as the White House is facing a
revolt by many conservatives and the prospect of an enduring deep divide within
what had been Mr. Bush's most reliable base of grass-roots, financial and
intellectual support. Up until the last few months, Mr. Bush had been
reasonably successful in two political challenges: presenting himself as a
conservative while also laying a claim to the political center, and holding
together a conservative movement that has always been prone to internal
divisions.
Mr. Bartlett was an early proponent of supply-side economics, and in the
late 1970's was active in promoting the tax-cutting philosophy that later
became the basis for President Ronald Reagan's economic agenda. In recent years
he has written a syndicated newspaper column as well as articles for academic
journals.
Like many economic conservatives, he has grown increasingly disenchanted
with the current administration's fiscal policy, arguing that Mr. Bush has
tolerated if not encouraged a federal spending spree, dashing conservative
hopes for progress toward a smaller, leaner government.
He has also joined social conservatives in attacking Mr. Bush's nomination
of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court. The Miers nomination, more than any
other move by the administration in the last five years, has drawn criticism of
Mr. Bush by conservative scholars and commentators, though the White House so
far appears to have succeeded in limiting the breach with elected Republicans
in Congress.
In his next column, to be published on Wednesday, Mr. Bartlett wrote that it
is dawning on many conservatives "that George W. Bush is not one of them and
never has been," citing the administration's positions on education, campaign
finance, immigration, government spending and regulation. The choice "of a
patently unqualified crony for a critical position on the Supreme Court was the
final straw," he wrote.
In "Impostor," which is scheduled to be published in April by Doubleday and
has already attracted attention on conservative Web sites, Mr. Bartlett expands
on many of the themes he has struck in his columns and other writings. He is
critical of the administration for policy decisions like backing away at times
from its commitment to open trade and for failing to sell conservative ideas
like introducing investment accounts to Social Security.
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