Long ago I gave up my desire to insist on what we used to define “fiscal conservatism,” in that the government will spend where its leadership—and the electorate, through who it votes—decides to spend our money on. What I do care about when talking about the “size of the government” is its encroachment into our lives, and believe you me, with cradle-to-grave interference, it boggles the mind where one finds the chances for even more social engineering… until one looks at each party relative to each other, instead of from one’s one stringent standards.

I don’t like it when it all boils down to relative terms, but sometimes we have to. Dean Esmay, long ago, gave me a nice little spanking over my complaints over excessive spending:

In 2000, political conservatives backed George W. Bush, knowing perfectly well–if they were paying attention at all–that he was a moderate centrist, with a few positions to the right, a few to the left, and most of them right down the middle.

Now they’re mad at him for governing exactly like that. [...]

Indeed, here’s my prediction for this year’s election: Bush will spend a good bit of time trying to outmaneuver Democrats on the left on the issues, forcing them to take more extreme positions than they want to, while Democrats try to outmaneuver Bush on the right in exactly the same way.

That most people will be utterly clueless about this will be amusing to watch. Indeed, I don’t know which will be more amusing: watching the left continually try to portray Bush as a “hard right winger” while anyone with a working brain will be able to see that he isn’t one, or watching the right bloviate about how “betrayed” they feel by a President who has governed according to every one of the principles and policy proposals he laid out in his 2000 election campaign–indeed, a President who has quite obviously worked hard to keep all his major campaign promises, promises he made when conservatives showed up by the millions to vote for him.

— Dean Esmay: Conservatives Amuse Me

I revisit this issue considering the aftermath of the President’s speech last night. John Cole, Megan McArdle Mindles H. Dreck, Andy Sullivan, and a whole slew of “less spending please” folks complain to high heaven that George Bush, when it comes to domestic spending, is actually a Democrat.

We knew this then. We still know this now. What in the world is new?

While Republicans have cornered the Democrats on matters of national security, using cold, hard, simplisme to outmaneouvre them into advocating for Saddam’s continued reign of butchery should they oppose the Iraq war, Democrats will always, always attempt to outmaneouvre Republicans in winning the hearts and minds of the downtrodden and the needy. Heck, the hearts and minds of anyone who doesn’t really want to work hard, anyone who hardly understands the classic American dream. So they push for social spending here and there at the expense of our freedom to choose how to live our lives by increased government regulations.

Here’s a glass of water for the “less spending please” Conservatives out there. There are tradeoffs to be made. George Bush’s domestic agenda, as the Crush Kerry folks have observed quite well, is quite conservative relative, not to Reagan’s time, not to “how the Republican party works,” but to that of John Kerry’s platform.

We’re in an election here, if I remember, and us tried and true endorsers of GWB know that the stakes are too high and the cost is too great should we actually have Kerry in office. True, too many things make them look like they were sections of the same grapefruit, but I am a one-issue fan now. Just as George Bush has outmaneouvred the Dems into advocating for further and further Left domestic policies by himself moving the bar to taking all that is good that the Dems could advocate for, we will have to live with that kind of leader until we can rollback the undesirable effects of his actions, which will come with a wiser choice in 2008, then.

At one point or another, a compromise between ideology and victory has to be achieved. “Fiscal conservatism” is behind the line I draw.

The biggest argument in politics is not over whether Republicans are fascists or if Democrats are Communists. It’s about where our money goes, and though I know that we deserve—and need—to keep as much money as we make, we trade it off for national spending in our national interest. It is not the results that should bother us, as I have written before, but the rationale and the methodology.

Yes, the President’s domestic agenda leaves one to wonder if the Reaganomic trickle-down effect, coupled with tax cuts, ringing up a pretty decent deficit, offset by a burgeoning economy that will keep on moving up without the empty promises and saturnalia of the 90s, will actually work.

Nothing comes cheap these days in government; but consider the alternative. The de facto fiscal conservatism of a Kerry administration will be caused not by his own thrift, but by congressional gridlock. At least four years of almost nothing. Is that how we’re supposed to be “conservative?”