That seems like a joke question, but it’s an apparently serious belief of Bruce Bartlett, a former supply-sider and Bush Administration official who has flipped sides and joined the left.

I’ve known Bruce for decades and he’s a fun guy to hang out with, but he’s gone hard to the left in recent years, pimping for a VAT and urging GOPers to sell out on health care.

But now he is officially crazy, because he wants us to believe that Obama is a conservative, or at least a moderate conservative.

Bruce cites five reasons in his article for this bizarre hypothesis.

1. “His stimulus bill was half the size that his advisers thought necessary”

This is a rather strange assertion. Obama flushed $800 billion down the federal toilet on a fake stimulus, but we’re supposed to believe he’s a “moderate conservative” because he didn’t waste even more of our money.

2. “He continued Bush’s war and national security policies without change and even retained Bush’s defense secretary”

Okay, maybe this is true. I’m not competent to make any sweeping judgments on foreign policy.

3. “He put forward a health plan almost identical to those that had been supported by Republicans such as Mitt Romney in the recent past, pointedly rejecting the single-payer option favored by liberals”

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Writing for Forbes, Bruce Bartlett puts forth an interesting hypothesis that healthcare legislation could have been made better (hopefully he meant to write “less destructive”) if the GOP had been willing to compromise with Democrats:

Democrats desperately wanted a bipartisan bill and would have given a lot to get a few Republicans on board. This undoubtedly would have led to enactment of a better health bill than the one we are likely to get. But Republicans never put forward an alternative health proposal. Instead, they took the position that our current health system is perfect just as it is.

Bruce makes several compelling points in the article, especially when he notes that it will be virtually impossible to repeal a bad bill after 2010 or 2012, but there are good reasons to disagree with his analysis. First, he is wrong in stating that Republicans were united against any compromise. Several GOP senators spent months trying to negotiate something less objectionable, but those discussions were futile. Also, I’m not sure it’s correct to assert Republicans took a the-current-system-is-perfect position.

They may not have offered a full alternative (they did have a few good reforms such as allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines), but their main message was that the Democrats were going to make the current system worse. Strikes me as a perfectly reasonable position, one that I imagine Bruce shares. But let’s further explore Bruce’s core hypothesis: Would compromise have generated a better bill? It’s possible, to be sure, but there are also several reasons why that approach may have backfired:

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A friend of mine on Facebook recently wrote the following about an article on the life of the late Irving Kristol:

“Once upon a time, not too many years ago, the Republican Party was the party of ideas. Would even its staunchest supporters say so today? I think not. The sole substance of the Republican Party today is opposition to whatever the Democrats are for, period.”

Were it true, it would be damning.  Thankfully it’s not.

My friend, a former White House high-ranking employee in both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, grew angry, very angry, about the direction of the Republican Party under President Bush 43, something upon which I agree with him.  But, unlike him, I prefer to stay and fight for what’s right within the party I agree with most, not abandon it. He grew so angry that he voted for Obama in 2008.  Now, I don’t claim to know how any human being works internally, but I don’t understand how someone who claims to be a conservative could make that sort of switch. Simply because your side didn’t live up to their ideals doesn’t mean, to my mind, that  you switch to the side that advocates explicitly the opposite point of view.

But that’s neither here nor there. My friend, and everyone else, is free to vote for whomever they want, for whatever reason they want.  What I take issue with his the common mantra of the Left, echoed by my friend, that Republicans are out of ideas and Democrats are a fountain new ones.

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