Burnt Orange Report

No More Compassion

By Byron LaMasters

While President Bush still highlights his "compassion agenda" on his website along with his compassion photo album where he poses with Black kids, it appears as if the Bush Campaign has decided to deemphasize the image of "compassionate conservativism" that was a large part of Bush's 2000 campaign. Hotline reports (via the Dallas Morning News:

As he approaches the November election, President Bush has shed a good part of the "compassionate conservative" image he cultivated during the 2000 election, a Washington Post poll has found. Mr. Bush came to office three years ago with a message that he was different from traditional Republican conservatives because he was promoting programs for the poor and disadvantaged. But with his presidency dominated by foreign policy issues and such traditional conservative favorites as tax cuts, he has dropped from his speeches the compassionate conservative moniker that was his trademark in 2000. The Post poll found Americans split over whether Mr. Bush has governed in a compassionate way, with 49 percent saying he has and 45 percent saying he has not. That is down sharply from February 2003, when a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 64 percent of Americans thought he had governed compassionately. The margin of error in the Post poll is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Makes sense to me. There's no point in calling President Bush a "compassionate conservative" when most moderate and independent voters won't buy it anymore.