Faithful Infidelity: “Political Time,” George W. Bush, and the Paradox of “Big Government Conservatism”

Published date01 December 2010
AuthorEdmund C. Stazyk,William G. Resh,Robert F. Durant
Date01 December 2010
DOI10.1177/0734371X10381487
Subject MatterArticles
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© 2010 SAGE Publications
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Review of Public Personnel Administration
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Faithful Infidelity:
© 2010 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
“Political Time,” George W.
DOI: 10.1177/0734371X10381487
http://roppa.sagepub.com
Bush, and the Paradox of “Big
Government Conservatism”

Robert F. Durant1, Edmund C. Stazyk1,
and William G. Resh1
Abstract
George W. Bush assumed the presidency with the ill-fated political aim of creating a
permanent electoral alignment favoring Reagan Republicanism in America by pursuing
a “big government conservatism”, agenda with human resource management (HRM)
strategies lying at its heart. In the process of setting the other HRM-focused
contributions to this symposium in broader context, the authors define the logic of
big government conservativism as a strategy for electoral realignment, discuss the
place of HRM as a tactical means for advancing that agenda, and place Bush’s efforts
in “political time.” In offering an integrative framework for assessing the critical role
of the White House, the executive office of the president, and political appointees
in redefining the career civil service as a key component of Bush’s big conservatism
agenda, we portray Bush’s failed efforts at constructing a permanent Republican
political majority as encountering similar dynamics and meeting a similar fate as other
“orthodox innovators” in presidential history. At the same time, his place in political
time was not destiny, because he achieved a mixed record of strategic, political, and
tactical competence while operating within the constraints of his political time.
Keywords
George W. Bush, conservatism, political time, human resource management, political
appointees, the presidency
1American University, Washington, DC
Corresponding Author:
Robert F. Durant, School of Public Affairs, Department of Public Administration and Policy,
American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016
Email: durant@american.edu

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Glendower: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”
Hotspur: “Why, so can I, or so can any man.
But will they come when you call them?”
Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1
In what is now a ritual for departing presidents, the Bush administration left office
issuing a booklet, A Charge Kept, claiming many achievements, not the least of which
were “keeping America safe,” “fostering a culture of life,” “reducing drug use and
crime,” and “confronting tough problems, so as not to pass them on to future genera-
tions” (Thiessen, 2009, passim). Much like his predecessors, Bush’s claimed accom-
plishments revisit some of the now perfunctory campaign booklets and candidate Web
sites that afford laundry lists of promises made to gain office 4 or 8 years earlier. What
every president acknowledges in revisiting campaign promises such as these is that the
battle for their historical legacy does not end when they leave office. Rather, it signi-
fies the beginning of their post-presidency battle for history.
Historians, of course, are not fooled by these efforts, and their perceptions of presi-
dents can change over the decades. But the methodological challenges of evaluating
presidents are multiple. Ascribing the outcome of events solely to presidential perfor-
mance is always problematic in our Madisonian system of “separate institutions
sharing power” (Neustadt, 1960). Nevertheless, assessing how well presidential aims,
strategies, and tactics advance their agendas is a more manageable enterprise. Taken
together, these help over time to build a more complete record assessing the extent—
as Shakespeare’s Glendower and Hotspur might put it—that presidents not only called
the “spirits” of policy, administrative, or human resource management (HRM) reform
from the “vasty deep” but also whether those spirits answered the call.
To these ends, this article affords a broader legislative, administrative, and judicial
context for the specific elements of the Bush HRM administration’s agenda that are
analyzed later in this symposium. To afford readers a sense for debates over the power
of any president to advance their policy agendas, we first chronicle the evolution of
various “presidential agency” and “institutionalist” perspectives on presidential lead-
ership. Finding any one school inadequate to the task, we then offer and apply an
integrative framework for evaluating Bush’s overall “big government conservatism”
agenda for electoral realignment and the role of personnel decisions involving both
career civil servants and political appointees in advancing it. We do this by integrating
Skowronek’s (1993, 2008) work on “political time” affording little room for presiden-
tial agency with three major evaluative criteria—strategic, political, and tactical abili-
ties—adapted from Maranto, Lansford, and Johnson’s (2009) work embracing
presidential agency. Our analysis incorporates elements of President Bush’s HRM
initiatives discussed later in the symposium. We conclude by arguing that a mixed
picture of the Bush administration’s strategic, political, and tactical skills emerges, a

Durant et al.
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picture consonant with presidents operating as “orthodox innovators” in similar
“political time” in American history.
Toward an Integrative Framework
for Assessing Presidential Performance
One common definition of greatness for presidents is the extent to which they endur-
ingly redefined the relationship between citizens and the state and the coalitional basis
of their parties (Landy & Milkis, 2001). But the question of presidential agency—the
ability of presidents to affect their fate in realizing these accomplishments—has long
occupied presidential scholars. As Skowronek (1993, 2008) notes, the presidency is
inherently a position where incumbents contest with others in the Madisonian system
for the legitimacy to act. As Rockman (2008) argues, between the presidencies of
Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, the Congress totally dominated presidents
(with the possible exception of Lincoln, although his vaunted “team of rivals” reflected
the dominance of congressional choices of cabinet officials in a period when parties
dominated). But as America’s role in the world increased during the 20th century,
modern presidents soon were seen as—if not counted on to be—the “great disrupters”
of a system otherwise designed to be “lethargic” and status quo-oriented (Genovese,
2008). Moreover, legitimacy to do so depended on their ability to justify change as
preserving past principles—no easy task in and of itself (Skowronek, 2008).
Scholars studying the modern American presidency have offered a variety of com-
peting perspectives on the institutional context, relative power, and, thus, benchmarks
against which to measure the absolute and relative prowess of presidents. The popular
image of presidents conjured by the media and abetted by presidential candidates
during their campaigns, for example, is a decidedly romanticized, heroic, and often
misbegotten measure of presidential success: one that measures incumbents against
standards few can meet. Specifically, incumbents are successful if they fit the image
of a powerful, purposive, and proactive Colossus standing astride the Madisonian sys-
tem with others bending to their will—for good (the president as savior—Franklin
D. Roosevelt) or for ill (the president as Satan—Nixon). As Rae writes, contemporary
presidents are seen as resembling an “institutionalized ‘charismatic leader’ in Weberian
terms, expected to render shots of democratic energy and adrenalin to a political sys-
tem that is largely inert and incremental” by design (2009, p. 26).
Diametrically opposed to this romantic or “heroic” model of presidential leadership
are “deterministic” models of presidential power. The earliest—or what might be
called a “secular determinism”—model portrayed presidents as typically overwhelmed
by secular economic (e.g., business cycles, oil embargos, and the transition from an
industrial to an information-based economy), sociocultural (e.g., the women’s and
abolitionist movements), demographic (e.g., aging baby boomers), technological (e.g.,
railroads and information technology), and political and philosophical (e.g., party
realignment or dealignment) shifts. These render presidents able to affect policy

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outcomes only marginally. Presidents are no more than reactive “catalysts for events”
and thus are evaluated solely on their ability to ameliorate trends on the margins.
Obviously, presidents can be overwhelmed by secular trends, brewing but unaddressed
inequities (the slavery issue), or catastrophes that seemingly defy anyone’s control.
But various presidents have faced these obstacles and have not been overcome or mar-
ginalized (e.g., Lincoln, the Roosevelt cousins, and Jackson). These presidents consti-
tute the pantheon of presidential greats; those who failed constitute the bottom tier
(e.g., Buchanan, Pierce, and Hoover).
Still, the dominant paradigm from the 1960s to 1990s among presidential scholars
was of presidents having only the power of persuasion at their command, with personal
traits, bargaining skills, reputation, and...

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