Re: OT: The Smart Brother

How Bush Destroyed the Republican Party

A president driven by ideology. A Congress rife with corruption. A political
party hellbent on a "permanent majority." A leading scholar examines the
radicals who hijacked the GOP ? and wrecked the longest conservative
ascendancy in American history

SEAN WILENTZ

The failure of the administration of George W. Bush ? and the accompanying
crisis of the Republican Party ? has caused a political meltdown of historic
proportions. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th,
Bush enjoyed the greatest popularity ever recorded for a modern American
president. Republicans on Capitol Hill, under the iron rule of House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay, fattened their coffers through a fearsome
operation overseen by corporate lobbyists and GOP henchmen that functioned
more like an empire than an old-fashioned political machine. "Republican
hegemony," the prominent conservative commentator Fred Barnes rejoiced in
2004, "is now expected to last for years, maybe decades."

Now, only four years later, Bush is leaving office with the longest
sustained period of public disapproval ever recorded. No president, at least
in modern times ? and certainly no two-term president ? has risen so high
only to fall so low. Indeed, Bush's standings in the polls describe one of
the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the American presidency ?
second only, perhaps, to that of Richard Nixon, the only president ever
forced to resign from office. And in Congress, the indictment and downfall
of DeLay and a host of associated scandals involving, among others, the
Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, have badly damaged the party's
image. The supremacy of the GOP, once envisioned by party operatives as a
"permanent majority," may be gone for a very long time to come.

At first glance, the collapse of the Republican Party seems rapid and
unexpected. When viewed within the larger context of American history,
however, the party's breakdown looks familiar, even predictable. As in
earlier party crackups ? 1854, 1932, 1968 ? the demise has involved not a
single, sudden explosion but a gradual unraveling followed by a sharp and
rapid deterioration amid major national calamities. If Bush and the
Republican majority in Congress accelerated the demise of Ronald Reagan's
political era with their assault on traditional American values and
institutions ? including the rule of law itself ? it is a decline that began
two decades ago.

A few examples serve to place recent events in historical perspective. In
1848, the Whig Party, which had emerged more than a decade earlier to oppose
the Democrats of Andrew Jackson, captured the presidency for the second time
in its history and consolidated what looked like a formidable, nationwide
political base. Yet differences over slavery and territorial expansion had
always hampered party unity, and in 1854, amid the sectional warfare caused
by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the Whigs ceased to be a national force,
replaced by the anti-slavery Republican Party as the nation lurched toward
the Civil War.

Three generations later, in 1928, the Republicans, although the dominant
party, were battered by scandals and old battles between conservative party
regulars and self-styled progressives. GOP power brokers wisely chose as
their presidential nominee Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, whose
engineering projects and disaster-relief efforts had earned admiration
across party lines. Hoover crushed his Democratic opponent, Al Smith, in
what looked like the culmination of the party's growth since the Civil War.
Four years later, though, following the stock-market crash of October 1929
and the onset of the Great Depression, the Republicans went to pieces ? and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after burying Hoover in a landslide, inaugurated
the New Deal.

In 1964, the Texas liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson wiped out the right-wing
hero Barry Goldwater and ushered in a true working majority of Democratic
reformers in Congress. Political commentators hailed a second birth of New
Deal liberalism, and some experts even wondered if the Republicans would
soon go the way of the Whigs. Yet the Democrats had long been battling among
themselves over civil rights issues, and Johnson's signing of the Civil
Rights Act in 1964 triggered the defection of the once solidly Democratic
South. A mere four years after Johnson's outsize triumph, Democratic
infighting over his escalation of the war in Vietnam, as well as over racial
turmoil in the nation's cities, paved the way for Richard Nixon's election.
The breakdown of the Democrats, coupled with Nixon's downfall in 1974 in the
Watergate scandal, blew the ideological center out of American politics and
cleared the way for the conservative age of Ronald Reagan ? the age only now
beginning to come to an end.

The decay of Reagan Republicanism dates to 1988, Reagan's final year in
office. With no clear-cut successor from the right on the horizon, the party
chose Reagan's dutiful vice president, George H.W. Bush. A scion of the old
GOP establishment, the son of a U.S. senator from Connecticut who was a Wall
Street banker and golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower, Bush had
shifted both rightward and southwesterly over the years. Although he was
never able to forge a convincing political identity as a Connecticut Yankee
in Texas, as president he dealt with the enormous federal deficits left over
from Reagan's "supply-side" stewardship. In 1990, he finally broke his "no
new taxes" vow ? thereby earning the enduring contempt of the Republican
right. The quirky but effective third-party candidacy of Ross Perot in 1992
was a sure sign that Bush had lost touch with the GOP's anti-government
base, and his inability to cope with a recession tolled his end.

Bill Clinton's victory over both Bush and Perot seemed to spell a revival of
center-left liberalism in a new form. But during his first two years in
office, Clinton's missteps and defeats, coupled with the self-destructive
fracturing of the Democratic Congress, handed the Republicans an opportunity
to regroup. Their recapture of the House for the first time in 40 years ? by
forging their "Contract With America" during the midterm elections in 1994 ?
seemed to portend that Clinton, like his predecessor, would be a one-term
president. Yet the brash ideological leadership of the new House speaker,
Newt Gingrich, foreshadowed the GOP's turn to the far right and further
hastened the unraveling of the conservative ascendancy. Clinton outfoxed
Gingrich in battles over the federal budget and held the line against GOP
demands to slash Medicare and cut taxes, and most of the public blamed
Congress for the partisan bickering in Washington. In 1996, only two years
after Democrats had been repudiated at the polls, Clinton won re-election
with an increased plurality, marking the first time a Democrat had won two
presidential terms since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.

The outcome incited congressional Republicans to a fury, and conservative
leaders even more doctrinaire than Gingrich ? including House Majority
Leader *** Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay ? took advantage of the anger
to hijack the party. In 1998, after a network of right-wing operatives
discovered Clinton's sexual trysts with the young White House intern Monica
Lewinsky, the congressional right-wingers forced Clinton's impeachment. But
public backlash over the impeachment drive contributed to Gingrich's
downfall as speaker and Clinton's acquittal in the Senate. With Clinton's
popularity soaring and his troubles behind him amid peace and prosperity, it
looked as if 2000 would bring a solid Democratic victory.

But nothing went right for the Democrats. Their nominee, Vice President Al
Gore, believed that the Lewinsky scandal had made Clinton a liability and
distanced himself from the very administration he had served so ably. Rather
than building on the legacy of the previous eight years, Gore embraced the
bogus idea of "Clinton fatigue," signaled by his naming Joe Lieberman, the
sanctimonious Clinton critic, as his running mate. The left wing of the
party backed the protest candidacy of Ralph Nader, and the Republican
candidate, George W. Bush, ran as a "compassionate conservative" who would
uphold the kinder, gentler mode of his father as a kind of Clinton-lite. The
press, following its dismal performance as mouthpiece for impeachment
prosecutor Ken Starr, gave credence to a string of pseudoscandals about
Gore, tarnishing his integrity and casting him as a privileged,
self-regarding dissembler. Nader's nihilistic campaign to destroy Gore won
him enough votes to throw New Hampshire to Bush, and the election ultimately
turned on the razor-thin margin in Florida. The conservative majority on the
Supreme Court, including four Reagan-era appointees (and the man Ronald
Reagan had named chief justice, William Rehnquist), finally intervened,
stopping the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, and made Bush
president.

Clinton's precarious center-left alliance did not hold. With Bush's
court-engineered victory, the conservative ascendancy entered a new and even
more radical phase. But that phase would prove to be its last.

George w. Bush was easilyunderestimated by the press and his Democratic
opponent. When he entered the White House, he looked like the luckiest
political leader on the face of the earth. A man whose early efforts in
business and politics had failed, Bush had persevered thanks to
well-connected family and friends who repeatedly saved him from his failures
and gave him his chance to make a fortune when he sold his financial
interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team. In 1994, Bush won his first of
two terms as governor of Texas ? a high-profile job with, as stipulated in
the state's constitution, undemanding day-to-day authority. Having learned
the nastier arts of politics while helping out in his father's national
campaigns and apprenticing with the ferocious Republican operative Lee
Atwater, Bush formed an alliance with one of the greatest political
tacticians in the country ? Karl Rove, another Atwater disciple. After Sen.
Robert Dole lost his presidential bid in 1996 ? and with Rove pulling
strings in the background ? Bush emerged as a top candidate for the 2000
nomination.

Bush's family connections, once again, proved invaluable. For nearly half a
century, from 1952 to 1996 ? except for 1964, the year of Barry Goldwater ?
the Republican Party's national ticket included a Nixon, a Bush or a Dole.
Through thick and thin, the party's top leadership had retained a coherence
that was familial as well as political. And when Ronald Reagan transformed
the party in 1980, he wisely did not uproot its establishment, as the
Goldwaterites had tried to do in 1964, but rather absorbed it into his grand
new coalition by naming George H.W. Bush as his running mate. Twenty years
later, another Bush was waiting in the wings.

Although born in Connecticut and schooled at Yale and Harvard Business, the
younger Bush had successfully assimilated himself to Texas business and
political culture as his father had never managed. The black sheep of the
family, Bush also, at the age of 40, took Jesus Christ as his personal
savior. That conversion, he said, freed him from a well-documented addiction
to drink. It also brought him into much closer connection with the
right-wing evangelical base that Reagan had brought into the Republican
Party and with which Bush senior never forged a convincing bond.

The younger Bush perfectly embodied a new melding of the Republican right
and the GOP establishment, a process essential to the success of the
conservative ascendancy since 1980. The only other serious challenger for
the nomination was neither a son of the party establishment nor a Reaganite
ideologue: Sen. John McCain. A hero of the Vietnam War (a conflict from
which Bush had escaped by serving in the Texas Air National Guard), McCain
married a wealthy second wife and made his political home in Arizona, where
being a conservative and a maverick fit the Goldwater tradition. His
independent stands on campaign-finance reform, regulation of the tobacco
industry and health care irked the party's leadership but gained him favor
inside the news media.

After McCain shocked Bush by beating him in the New Hampshire primary, Bush
tacked hard right for the next major battle, in South Carolina, where Karl
Rove and his supporters unleashed a well-financed dirty-tricks campaign.
McCain did not anticipate how scurrilous the operation would become: "They
know no depths, do they?" he asked reporters, apparently having never heard
of South Carolina's own Lee Atwater. Bush not only decisively defeated his
opponent; he personally humiliated him. Unable to recover from the setback,
McCain bided his time, looking for an opportunity to regain his honor. But
further surprises awaited him and his party ? along with some fierce
ironies.

Bush came to office as the first Republican president in nearly a
half-century to enjoy majorities in both houses of Congress. Although put in
office through a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court ? and without a
majority of the popular vote ? he proceeded to govern, much as Reagan had,
as if he had won by a landslide. It quickly became clear that Bush would
subordinate his "compassionate conservatism" in favor of reigniting the
Reagan agenda, chiefly through regressive tax cuts. To old Reagan hands,
Bush seemed to be building the third term of the Reagan presidency, as his
father had promised but failed to do. The New York Times later called the
new president "the fruition of Reagan" and predicted that he stood "a good
chance of advancing a radical agenda that Reagan himself could only carry so
far."

Some political moderates comforted themselves with the thought that Bush's
early appointees ? notably Colin Powell as secretary of state and
Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser ? were signs of a president
devoted to what he had pledged would be a "humble" foreign policy. But
Bush's selection of the hard-line religious conservative John Ashcroft as
attorney general came as a shock to more pragmatic Republicans. And two
other figures ? both political veterans, albeit nearly a decade apart in
age ? quickly assumed enormous power inside the White House, directing the
administration's highly politicized and doctrinaire agenda.

Karl Rove, Bush's political guru, worked as a dirty-trickster for Nixon in
1972 and refined his mastery of inflammatory, wedge-issue politics alongside
Atwater. Having masterminded Bush's political victories, Rove now dreamed of
forging a revised and impregnable national majority through tax cuts,
"values issues" such as gay rights, and a muscular foreign policy. Never
again would a Republican president make the mistake that Bush's father had,
by appearing to backtrack from the one true Republican faith as established
by Reagan. Instead, policy decisions would be dictated almost entirely by
political considerations, stoking the cultural and ideological polarization
that, according to Rove, was the key to Republican domination.

Bush's vice president, *** Cheney, worked as an aide in the Nixon White
House and went on to serve ? before his lucrative stint at Halliburton ? as
President Ford's chief of staff, a congressman from Wyoming and the elder
Bush's secretary of defense. His low-key manner, and his service in the
center-right administrations of Ford and the elder Bush, gained Cheney a
reputation as a levelheaded conservative. But his politics had always been
more Nixonian, and since the mid-1970s he had developed close ties to
hawkish, so-called neoconservatives. Cheney's penchant for secrecy, combined
with his unrivaled understanding of the Washington bureaucracy, made him a
formidable advocate for the "imperial presidency."

The convergence of Bush, Rove and Cheney, alongside Republican congressional
majorities led by Trent Lott in the Senate and Tom DeLay in the House,
presaged a government far beyond Reaganism in its ideological zealotry.
While Reagan cut taxes, poured billions into the military, vowed to reduce
the size of government and paid lip service to the religious right, he
proved open to compromise and political adjustment. The born-again Bush, by
contrast, refused all efforts at compromise and made Christian
fundamentalism a centerpiece of his agenda, marrying the cultural crusades
of right-wing evangelicals to the interests of traditionally pro-Republican
corporate business sectors, including oil and energy companies. For Bush and
his inner circle, Rove's divisive political tactics were not merely an
effective strategy for winning elections ? they were a blueprint for
governing.

The public reacted coolly at first to the new president's radicalized
approach ? a clear indication that, whatever the White House strategists
might have thought, the voters were not looking forward to a turbocharged
Reagan. Only four months after Bush took office, his heavy-handed approach
to Congress backfired. In May 2001, Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont, a moderate
Republican, announced he was leaving his party to caucus with the Democrats,
handing them a majority in the Senate. By September 10th, less than eight
months into his term, Bush's approval ratings were barely hovering above 50
percent.

The atrocities of the next day changed everything ? and, ironically,
prepared the way for Bush's eventual collapse. In the short term, to be
sure, Bush's initial toppling of the Taliban rallied a traumatized nation.
But in the first weeks after the terrorist attacks, events behind the scenes
at the White House ? trying to tie Iraq and Saddam Hussein directly to Al
Qaeda, crafting a "War on Terror" to serve as a vehicle to pursue partisan
advantage ? signaled a long march into a political as well as military
morass. Fear and secrecy became deeply entrenched in every branch of the
federal government, driving public policy to a degree that arguably
outstripped the Red Scares that gripped the nation following both world
wars.

Shortly after the attacks of September 11th, Rove informed a meeting of the
Republican National Committee that he fully intended to make the War on
Terror a partisan issue, charging that the Democrats could not be trusted to
keep the nation safe. The White House's thorough politicization of a war
crisis ? without parallel in modern American history ? would continue over
the weeks and months to come, from Republican campaign ads to sudden
announcements of elevated terrorist alerts by Homeland Security, seemingly
whenever the president's poll ratings began to dip. In the midterm elections
of 2002, barely a year after September 11th, public anxieties helped the
Republicans win back the Senate and expand their majority in the House by
eight seats.

The decision to politicize the threat of terrorism led directly to a
politicized war. By the time the long-expected American invasion of Iraq
finally came in 2003, a large majority of Americans believed that Saddam
Hussein's dictatorship possessed weapons of mass destruction ? the Bush
administration's chief casus belli ? and most favored military action even
if the United Nations refused to go along. The press, primed by carefully
orchestrated leaks, lined up behind the administration. Even outlets that
criticized Bush's tactics as overly hasty heeded the drumbeat for war: "It's
not surprising that in the wake of Sept. 11th, the president would want to
make the world safer, and that one of his top priorities would be
eliminating Iraq's ability to create biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons," The New York Times editorialized during the run-up to the
invasion. Briefed by Secretary of State Colin Powell and other top advisers
that Saddam had an active program to develop nuclear weapons, Congress also
fell into line. Bush, dismissing pleas to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to
complete their mission, launched a precipitous invasion that quickly deposed
Saddam's regime. On May 1st, 2003, standing beneath a banner on the deck of
the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln that read "Mission Accomplished," Bush declared
major American combat activities completed.

It would prove to be one of the most disastrously premature spectacles in
the history of the American presidency. Far from completed, the U.S.
military and political adventure in Iraq had just begun. Before long, the
country had descended into chaos, torn apart by anti-American insurgency and
Muslim factional warfare. Lacking adequate troops and equipment, U.S.
military commanders became reliant on National Guardsmen, many of whom were
compelled to serve multiple tours of duty. Private mercenaries operated
outside the authority of Iraqi and American law, and U.S. troops
systematically brutalized and tortured suspects at Abu Ghraib, giving the
world a new and ugly image of American supremacy. Between the day Bush
announced the end of major hostilities and the close of 2004, nearly 1,200
American soldiers died ? with no end in sight to either the occupation or
the killing.

With the 2004 election approaching, Bush's approval ratings fell to barely
40 percent ? yet the Democrats were unable to take advantage of the
administration's failings. The party's candidate, John Kerry, proved
remarkably slow and ineffective at responding to a classic GOP smear
campaign on his war record. Having stripped Kerry of his most imposing
credential, the Bush campaign portrayed him as an inconsistent
"flip-flopper" on defense and military issues. But the Republicans did not,
as many Democrats wanted to believe, simply smear their way back into
office. Bush enjoyed deep support among the Christian fundamentalists whom
he had brought into the federal government, as well as among many of the
hedge-fund billionaires he had created with his regressive tax policies. And
many Americans, still shaken by the horror of 9/11, sincerely believed that
the Republicans would do a better job of thwarting foreign terrorists than
the Democrats. Despite his disastrous mismanagement in Iraq and his attacks
on civil liberties at home, Bush finally managed to win the popular vote.
Although his margin in the final tally was the slightest ever for a
successful presidential re-election, he immediately announced that he had
gained the political capital he needed to pursue his radical agenda. In only
a matter of months, however, the bottom began to fall out.

Nothing fails like failure. The deepening quagmire in Iraq, coupled with
reports that the administration had relied upon false as well as
questionable evidence to justify the original invasion, soured the public's
mood ? and led a few commentators, including some high-profile
conservatives, to dissent from the conventional wisdom. According to George
Will, the Bush presidency's crusade in Iraq had produced "a torrent of
acrimony about the dubious inception and incompetent conduct of a war that
became perhaps the worst foreign-policy debacle in the nation's history."
The growing dissent was fueled by the administration's efforts to claim
extraordinary executive powers under the cover of an undeclared war, to
disregard the Constitution and defy Congress by using so-called signing
statements as a pretext for disregarding the law, to spy on American
citizens without warrants and to torture prisoners detained in Iraq and at
Guantánamo Bay.

Developments on the home front severely worsened Bush's political situation.
First came the White House's abortive campaign to privatize Social Security
under the guise of reform. Then came the Terri Schiavo affair, in which Bush
signed extraordinary legislation giving federal courts the authority to
force a husband to keep his irreparably brain-damaged wife alive. The
administration's campaign of deceit and manipulation on Iraq also began to
unravel with the revelation that Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, leaked the identity of a CIA agent as an act of political
retribution.

Then there was Hurricane Katrina. Historians may yet record that the debacle
in New Orleans, rather than the deepening morass in Iraq, marked the turning
point in the public's evaluation of Bush and his administration. No matter
how badly the White House bungled the political and military situation in
Iraq, the televised scenes of death and desperation in New Orleans generated
an even deeper outrage. Andrew Jackson, the general and future president,
had saved New Orleans from British invasion in 1815; in 2005, in the
aftermath of Katrina, George Bush appeared to have surrendered the city
without a fight to a natural disaster. Refusing to cut short his summer
vacation when the hurricane hit, he praised manifestly inept subordinates,
housed survivors in toxic trailers and provided no meaningful federal action
to rebuild the city. The catastrophe dramatized the results of decades of
Republican indifference to the plight of the nation's urban poor; it also
dramatized the logical conclusion of an anti-government, right-wing ideology
that, under Bush, had turned once-admired government operations like the
Federal Emergency Management Agency into nests of cronyism and futility. And
it all unfolded live on TV, as Americans watched in real time while the
federal government, through incompetence and neglect, abandoned a great
American city to its fate.

Had the Republican-controlled Congress shown any political independence ?
indeed, had it simply performed its duty as a separate branch of
government ? Bush might have been checked, or at least warned about the
recklessness of his course. But far from exercising oversight and applying
the brakes, the House and the Senate saw themselves as blindly loyal to the
White House. Instead of halting their party's skid, they contributed to it
with their own scandals and corruption.

When Newt Gingrich ascended to the speaker's chair after the Republican
triumph in 1994, he hailed it as "the most explicitly ideologically
committed House Republican Party in modern history." Under his vigorous
leadership, House Republicans upheld doctrinaire conservatism as a form of
purity and enforced strict discipline within the ranks. No deviation from
the party line, as established by Gingrich and his inner circle, was
tolerated. But when Gingrich failed to obliterate Clinton, some of his
lieutenants, even fiercer than he, challenged his leadership ? and finally,
in 1998, overthrew him. Maximum power flowed to Tom DeLay, a former
exterminator from Sugar Land, Texas, whose inflexible rule as House majority
whip earned him the nickname "the Hammer." DeLay, elevated to the post of
majority leader in 2003, preferred to work in the shadows, pulling the
strings while his hand-picked choice for speaker, Rep. Dennis Hastert of
Illinois, presided.

Under DeLay's leadership, Congress became a virtual political extension of
the White House. Until 2006, there was barely a peep of criticism from
either Republican caucus as the Bush administration passed regressive tax
cuts, invaded Iraq, mismanaged the occupation and vastly augmented executive
authority on shaky legal grounds. DeLay also happily pursued numerous
financial as well as political adventures. Chief among them was the K Street
Project, designed to enforce absolute deference from Washington lobbying
firms to the Republican regime by compelling them to hire party activists in
exchange for favorable legislation and loosened regulatory oversight for
major corporate clients. By systematically replacing the bipartisan lobbying
ranks with GOP hardliners, DeLay attempted to make Republicans the only
party with whom corporate America would be allowed to do business ? a
partisan power grab of breathtaking audacity.

Congressional corruption, on a spectacular scale, is nothing new. During the
Gilded Age in the late 19th century, the Crédit Mobilier scandal and later
abuses of federal power involved blatant bribery of elected officials by
large railroad corporations and other emerging industrial giants. But DeLay
and his accomplices were attempting to turn American business into an
exclusive and permanent ATM for the Republican Party ? by turning Congress
into a rubber stamp for corporate lobbyists. Before long, however, the
deep-seated corruption began to fall apart. First DeLay became ensnared,
along with other top Republicans, in a web of financial scandals involving
GOP superlobbyist Jack Abramoff. Separate charges about illegal fundraising
in Texas led to DeLay's indictment, which forced him to surrender his seat
in April 2006. Then a gay-sex scandal involving young congressional pages
and Rep. Mark Foley ? a staunch and vocal soldier in the Republican culture
wars ? severely undercut the GOP's image as the defender of traditional
values. In the midterm elections of 2006, voters signaled their mounting
displeasure with GOP corruption and fearmongering by giving Democrats
control of both the House and Senate. Within a year, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove had been
forced to resign.

The past 18 months have only accelerated the Republican Party's plunge. In
Iraq, the dispatch of 30,000 additional troops in the "surge" has helped
quiet the violence but done little to alter the political stalemate among
rival Iraqi factions. At home, a dramatic decline in the real estate market
has led to a credit crisis, and the nationwide economic downturn has been
made far more severe by the skyrocketing price of crude oil, which pushed
prices at the pump over the once-unimaginable mark of $4 per gallon. Nowhere
was the diminished and increasingly divided quality of the GOP more apparent
than in its original field of candidates for the 2008 presidential
nomination. Each man represented one strand in the old Reagan coalition, but
none stood for the coalition as a whole ? and each, by dint of his religious
background or political positions, offended elements in the Republican base.
Pro-war voters could back former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani; religious
conservatives supported former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee; anti-tax,
pro-business Republicans went for multi-millionaire and former Massachusetts
governor Mitt Romney; and doctrinaire right-wing libertarians flocked to
Texas congressman Ron Paul.

Enter John McCain. Nearing the age of 72 ? three years older than Reagan was
when he became the oldest man ever elected to the White House ? McCain
seemed to have passed his prime long ago. More than any other GOP aspirant,
McCain had alienated his party's bedrock supporters, especially with his
past disdain for the religious right and his initial opposition to Bush's
tax cuts. Low on campaign funds and lacking any clear base, McCain seemed
likely to join the ranks of Al Gore and John Kerry, becoming the latest
Vietnam veteran to fail in a bid for the presidency. But McCain's detractors
overlooked some important advantages he still enjoyed: the respect and even
affection the political press had for him as a supposed "straight talker,"
his links to the party's glory days under Reagan and his abiding popularity
in New Hampshire, where he focused almost all of his early campaigning.
McCain also had enormous wells of pride, which pushed him to vindicate his
loss to Bush in 2000 and, at last, become president.
McCain's ultimate victory in the primaries owed a great deal to a decision
that he had taken several years earlier ? one that increasingly appears to
have been a fatal political misstep. As McCain began gearing up for his
campaign, his contempt for Bush over the nastiness in South Carolina in 2000
came into conflict with his quest to reclaim the personal honor that Bush
and Rove had besmirched. In the end, expediency won out over contempt.
McCain warmly endorsed Bush for re-election in 2004, and stepped up his
efforts to woo the elements of the party that distrusted him ? above all,
the Bush family and its key associates. He arranged for audiences in Texas
with the elder Bush and lined up important Bush operatives to work in his
own campaign. He also drew closer to the president on policy matters, vowing
to oppose any repeal of the Bush tax cuts he once opposed.

At the time, with the Reagan coalition splintering, it looked like a smart
move to reconcile with what was left of the old party establishment, even in
its current radicalized form. As it happened, though, McCain chose to join
himself at the hip with George W. Bush at the very moment when the
president's popularity began its final descent to rock bottom. As a result,
the one-time maverick, having secured the GOP nomination, now enters the
general-election campaign carrying the full burden of the most unpopular
American president in modern times. McCain's dilemmas are, to be sure, a
product of his own foibles and ambitions, as well as of the collapse of his
party. Still, there is a measure of pathos to his plight. To please elements
of the diminished Republican base that dislike him, as well as to please the
Bush family operation that once dishonored him, he has been forced to
embrace positions that plainly make him uncomfortable. Those positions, and
the charges of inconsistency that taking them entail, may well alienate the
independent voters that McCain must win over if he is to prevail in
November. Having been defeated by George Bush in 2000, he may find himself
defeated by the legacy of Bush's presidency in 2008.

It is, of course, too early to predict whether these ironies will come to
pass. For the last 30 years, with the exceptions of 1992 and 1996, the
Democrats have proved themselves experts at snatching defeat from the jaws
of victory. Old divisions between "new politics" liberals and the party's
working-class base ? divisions put aside during Bush's presidency ? were
reopened in the prolonged primary-campaign battle between Barack Obama and
Hillary Clinton. For all of his travails, McCain ? alone of those the
Republicans might have nominated ? remains far better liked by the general
public than his party.

Yet none of this belies the crucial underlying fact of this year's campaign:
that the Republican Party, which has dominated American politics for more
than a generation, has reached the end of an era. No matter who wins the
presidency, the new Congress will almost certainly include a greatly
enlarged Democratic majority in the House and a clear Democratic majority in
the Senate. And whatever the outcome in November, the Republican Party will
still face the unavoidable task of reinventing itself after the Bush
presidency's calamitous descent into radicalism ? the final fall in the
party's long decline.

Reinventing themselves will not be easy for the Republicans, even if McCain
manages to win. Historically, political parties that reach a crisis ? the
Federalists after the ascension of Thomas Jefferson in 1801, the Whigs in
the 1850s, the Republicans in the 1930s, the Democrats in the 1970s ? recoup
only if they recover a sense of intraparty comity, disciplining while also
accommodating their more extreme elements on the right and left. It took the
Democrats decades to recover from the divisions of the Vietnam era, before
Bill Clinton offered a more moderate basis for the party's future. Even now,
it is unclear how thoroughly the Democrats have overcome underlying fissures
and restored the shared values essential to hold together a diverse national
majority.

The Republican Party, having presided over the longest conservative
political ascendancy in U.S. history, now finds itself out of touch with the
American people, held hostage by radicals who have forsaken basic values
like respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. The ideological
factions and interest groups that now make up the party ? the foreign-policy
neoconservatives, the religious right and the pro-business, anti-tax
radicals ? are increasingly angry and inflexible in their demands. At the
beginning of the conservative ascendancy, it took a politician with the
skills and magnetism of Ronald Reagan to hold those forces together and
build a national majority ? and Reagan's America was far less diverse, and
far more suspicious of Democrats, than the nation is today. Now the old Navy
man John McCain, the last of the Reagan-era Republicans ? bearing the wounds
of war and politics, his party's ultimate prize his at last ? finds himself
swimming against strong historical tides. In the end, even if he should
somehow manage to evade the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwrecked GOP, he may
well find himself pulled out to sea by the inexorable and unprecedented
undertow of the Bush presidency.

[From Issue 1060 ? September 4, 2008]


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