Jonah Goldberg thinks so as he weighs in on the online exchange between Michael Gerson and John O'Sullivan. Goldberg writes (and this makes sense to me):
"Compassionate" may indeed be a strong adjective, but it's an intellectually weak word. As I've said countless times before, compassionate conservatism makes perhaps the fundamental mistake of contemporary liberalism: It scores a person's moral worth by his commitment to giant government initiatives and often ineffectual or counter-productive bureaucracies. (See David Frum's review of Heroic Conservatism for more on this).
In almost everything Gerson has written about compassionate
conservatism, you could replace the word "compassionate" with "Great
Society" and it would make more sense. . .