POLITICS - To Rove; Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

"Former Texas GOP chairman Tom Pauken blasts Bush, Rove in new book" by Wayne Slater, Dallas Morning News 3/10/2010

As Karl Rove makes the rounds this week with his memoir burnishing the Bush legacy, another book by another Texas Republican offers a decidedly different view.

Former state GOP chairman Tom Pauken, a Dallas lawyer and foot soldier in the Reagan revolution, offers a sober counterpoint to Rove's full-throated defense of his former boss.

"Republican politics is barely recognizable to many of us who were grassroots activists in the early days of the conservative movement – especially after eight years of a Republican administration headed up by George W. Bush, who claimed to be a conservative," Pauken writes in Bringing America Home.

He adds: "The results were not pretty."

Pauken's critique is what a lot of traditional conservatives are saying – the Bush administration spent too much, drove up the national debt and engaged in a reckless foreign policy.

Conservatives like Pauken have little use for liberal politics and Barack Obama, but they see in Bush a betrayal of principle.

At last month's Conservative Political Action Conference, talk-show host Glenn Beck compared the Republican Party with an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program. He meant the Bush years.

No one was more responsible for the political rise of George W. Bush than Rove, the Austin-based political guru who guided Bush's campaigns for governor and helped catapult him into the White House. On Monday, Rove opened his promotion tour for his memoir, Courage and Consequence , on NBC's Today show.

Pauken's work won't get anything approaching that type of attention, but if read together, the books offer two views of a presidency from deep in the heart of Texas.

Pauken was Texas Republican Party chairman when Bush was elected governor in 1994. He was popular with the party's hard right, and in 1996, conservative delegates picked him, not Bush, to head the Texas delegation at the Republican National Convention.

The tension between Pauken the purist and Rove the pragmatist defines the current battle within the GOP over what it wants to be. Reagan or the Big Tent? Move right or move to the middle?

Pauken's with the Gipper.

"With the younger Bush's election [in 2000] came all the elements of the perfect storm to kill the conservative movement: the rise to power of Machiavellian pragmatists such as Karl Rove along with neoconservative foreign policy advisors … under the sponsorship of Vice President Dick Cheney," Pauken writes.

"From Karl's perspective, there was nothing wrong with big government now that he and his cronies were in power."

In the second half of his book, Pauken offers a prescription for redeeming the GOP: smaller government, lower taxes, local control and less reliance on neoconservatives who want to plant democracy at the barrel of a gun.

These days, Pauken is chairman of the state Workforce Commission, an appointee of Gov. Rick Perry. In his book, Pauken extols Perry as a fiscal conservative, and he looks ahead to those who would restore the conservative cause.

"Is there any hope whatsoever that a true federalist could actually get elected president, reduce the growth of federal spending and return power to the states, local communities and the people?" he asks.

Sounds a lot like Perry's message.