GOP: Dead party walking
by Gary Kamiya
(Salon)The GOP race is
great fun to watch — if you’re a Democrat. The uninspiring candidates
wander hat in hand from state to state, each being ritually humiliated
in turn. If this process continues right up to the convention, the
whole snooze-inducing crew may quit in disgust and the GOP will have to
hold a mass sé–nce to conjure up the spirit of Ronald Reagan.
Let’s go down the list. This week’s frontrunner, John McCain,
is trying to create an aura of inevitability after his victory in South
Carolina, but he is still viewed with deep suspicion by his party’s
true believers. The wailing and gnashing of teeth over McCain on
conservative Web sites makes the Clinton-Obama dustup look like a
love-in. Their posters can’t forgive him for his stances on
immigration, campaign finance and the environment, but what really
drives them crazy is that he says things that they don’t agree with. Sometimes he even commits the ultimate sin — he sounds like a liberal!Who knew that the tough-guy supporters of the war on terror were so sensitive?
Then there’s Mitt Romney. Romney is pushed by the party establishment, was endorsed by the National Review,
looks like a million bucks, and is worth a lot more than a million
bucks. And if they amend the Constitution so that a paper doll dressed
up in a Reagan suit can run for office, he could be a serious threat.
Yea, and verily we come now to Mike Huckabee, who combines pre-Darwinian religiosity,
a down-home demeanor, and a remarkable ignorance of the world. And
whosoever believeth that the Huckster shall become president shall have
eternal life in a cheap plot of prime swamp land in Florida.
Then there’s Ron Paul, whose antiwar libertarian policies attract
the most passionate followers of any GOP candidate. Unfortunately, the
fact that those followers constitute only a tiny fraction of the party,
and that mainstream Republicans would rather have consensual man-on-dog
sex than vote for Paul, severely impair his chances.
Finally, there’s Rudy Giuliani, of whom Joe Biden said, There’s
only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb and 9/11.
Giuliani could have been a contender, but he ran out of verbs and
nouns early in the race and, despite federal matching words, could
never form a coherent sentence thereafter.
(There is also alleged to be a GOP candidate named Fred Thompson,
but he has never been seen and is generally regarded as an Internet
myth.)
As P.G. Wodehouse would say, it’s a pretty C3
collection. But what really makes this group pathetic is that instead
of trying to make up for their inadequacies and appeal to voters by
taking new positions, these candidates are running on the same platform
as George W. Bush — the lamest of presidential ducks, whose policies
have failed and whose approval ratings are abysmal.
With the exception of Paul, all of the GOP candidates agree with
Bush on about just about everything. All of them vow to stay in Iraq
until victory is won and to continue the war on terror
indefinitely. All of them agree with him on taxation and healthcare.
And they sing from the same pious songsheet on moral values. They are
essentially running as new, improved clones of Bush.
This is not a winning strategy.
The GOP’s campaign mess reveals just how big a disaster Bush’s
presidency has been for the party. At a time when the electorate is
urgently demanding a new direction, Republican candidates, chained to a
rigid party line and a ruinous war, can only flap their arms and
pretend they’re flying.
Of course, some Republicans are more zombified than others. McCain
opposed Bush’s tax cuts, voted for campaign finance reform, and is more
pro-environment than other Republicans. Huckabee is playing the
populist card and has criticized Bush’s handling of the war on
terror. But those are minor differences, more of style than of
substance. McCain is now campaigning as a born-again supply-sider,
demanding that the corporate tax rate be cut and calling for Bush’s tax
cuts to be made permanent. Huckabee’s economic policies are arguably even more right-wing than Bush’s. And his criticism of Bush’s conduct
of the war on terror is extremely tepid: The Bush administration has
never … convinced us of [Islamic terrorists'] ruthless fanaticism
isn’t exactly a Ron Paul stump speech. And with Romney and Giuliani,
there aren’t even differences of style, except that both of them are
running to Bush’s right on foreign policy. Romney called for doubling the size of Guantamo, and Giuliani virtually declared war on Iran.
The fact that the GOP candidates all hold similar positions but that
none has become the establishment choice is highly unusual for
Republicans, who normally close ranks early behind a candidate. This
has magnified the always-existing fissures in the Republican Party,
setting evangelicals against small-government libertarians against
hawks and preventing any candidate from taking control of the race.
If any Democratic readers need to be cheered up, they should go to the right-wing Web site Townhall.com and read Dick Morris and Eileen McGann’s column,
then the reader responses. Morris and McGann assert that Michigan
plunged the GOP race into total chaos. The scatter-shot outcome
reflects deeper divisions among the GOP’s three wings: Economic
conservatives are moving to Romney; social righties rallying ’round
Huckabee — and the national-security types who started for Rudy have
migrated to McCain in the voting so far, Morris and McGann write. The
various factions are growing ever more alienated from each other,
demanding a level of purity from their candidates that makes consensus
and unity less and less possible … This is no way to select a nominee
who can win.
The Townhall readers don’t buy it. They make lots of legitimate
points about the diversity of the party and the need to take politics
out of the hands of the kingmakers and pundits. And then they
inadvertently illustrate the authors’ thesis, loudly arguing that
Romney, or Huckabee, or Giuliani, or Ron Paul, represents true
conservatism. (Few stick up for McCain.)
But it’s much too early for Democrats to start gloating about the
meltdown of the GOP. The iron discipline that prevented any deviation
from the Bush line in Congress may have an equivalent among Republican
voters. Whether out of pragmatism or us-vs.-them solidarity, once a
nominee is chosen, no matter how bruising the process, rank-and-file
Republicans will probably support him — even if it’s McCain.
Evangelical Christians, in particular, are more pragmatic than they are
often taken to be; if McCain emerges as the GOP candidate, most are
likely to swing behind him.
But aside from the twice-divorced, socially liberal Giuliani (whose
decline has greatly benefited McCain), the Arizona senator is still the
hardest candidate for die-hard Republicans to swallow. Part of the
right-wing worldview is a sense of injured grievance, a feeling that
they (liberals, do-gooder elites, p.c. academics, feminists,
race-card-playing minorities, nanny-state-worshipping hypocrites) are
locked in a war to the death against us. Once the world is defined in
this way, it’s extremely hard to accept shades of gray. McCain, for
various reasons (calling Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell agents of intolerance
didn’t help) is regarded by many orthodox conservatives as a black ant
among red ants. It doesn’t matter what he does — his bitterest enemies
will never accept him.
The irony, of course, is that the very things that make McCain
anathema to some of the party faithful give him the best chance of
beating whomever the Democrats nominate. For the race will not be
decided by the GOP’s base: It will be decided by independents, moderate
Republicans and crossover Dems. And McCain runs strong with these
groups. Perhaps even more than his policies, his reputation as a
maverick has allowed him to differentiate himself from Bush and his
policies in a way no other GOP candidate has. Considering that McCain
crawled back into the bosom of the GOP four years ago and supported Rumsfeld’s management of the war, it’s remarkable that McCain can still sell himself as an outsider.
Indeed, McCain’s last-honest-man image appears to be partly
responsible for one of the more intriguing revelations to emerge from
the primaries: In New Hampshire and Michigan, McCain was supported by
more GOP voters who disapproved of the war than any other candidate –
including Ron Paul. This despite McCain’s declaration that he wouldn’t
be concerned if the United States were still in Iraq in 10,000 years.
It’s hard to know what to make of this peculiar vote. It could be
that McCain’s maverick image makes it possible for Republican antiwar
voters to project their own beliefs on him and magically ignore his
actual positions. Or, more likely, they simply don’t care that much
about getting out of Iraq. That’s certainly possible: The economy has
now supplanted the war as the most important issue for voters.
If McCain wins the GOP nomination and antiwar independents and
moderates across the country are as forgiving of his hard-line hawkish
position on Iraq as New Hampshire and Michigan voters were, McCain
could give the Democrats a real fight. But it’s unlikely voters in the
general election will be so kind. McCain is tied irrevocably to the
war, and barring a miracle, that is not going to be a winning position
in November.
McCain and the GOP got a little lift from the downturn in violence in Iraq after the U.S. troop surge
(and the more significant factor, the rise of anti-jihadi Sunni
forces), but the public’s opposition to the war has not changed.
According to a January 2008 Rasmussen Poll,
58 percent of Americans want all troops home within a year.
Twenty-seven percent want the troops brought home immediately; 38
percent want them to stay until the mission is completed. These numbers
have held more or less steady for a long time.
Moreover, even many GOP voters have turned against the war — bad
news for McCain or any other Republican candidate. Only 63 percent of
New Hampshire Republicans supported the war; 35 percent disapproved of
it. In Michigan, a remarkable 39 percent of GOP voters
said they wanted U.S. troops pulled out within six months. These
figures are higher than national ones, but they still spell bad news
for any pro-war candidate.
Right now, it’s easy for primary voters to tune out the war –
everyone knows it’s going to continue until Bush leaves office, and
there’s really nothing anyone can do. This may also explain the
apparently paradoxical antiwar vote for McCain. But when the general
election rolls around, and the idea of troops coming home in mere
months, not 10,000 years, becomes real, McCain will have a much
harder time persuading voters to support an unreconstructed hawk.
The development that could help McCain on Iraq would be a decisive
breakthrough on the political front. That would vindicate the surge
in the eyes of most, allowing him to claim victory and support bringing
the troops home. But sadly, that isn’t likely to happen in the next 10
months — maybe not even in the next 10 years, if we are to believe the Iraqi defense minister,
who said U.S. troops would be needed until 2018. More likely is the
same slow-motion nightmare that Iraq has been living in for almost five
years — one step forward, one step back, a steady drip-drip of
American casualties, occasional suicide bombings, and all the heavily
armed players and their backers waiting to see what the United States
does before making their move.
If there is no political breakthrough, a clear majority of the
American people will decide once and for all that the war is unwinnable
and endless, and demand that we simply get out and let the Iraqis sort
out their own country. And since they’ll have a real alternative, they
won’t elect a president who wants to extend the war.
In fact, this outcome was predicted by William F. Buckley
last spring. The father of modern intellectual conservatism wrote that
if Americans come to see the enemy as in the nature of a disease,
they will realize that fighting it head-on is useless. In a remarkably
audacious passage, Buckley compared the terrorists in Iraq to the
Christians who caused the Roman Empire to fall, and concluded, There
are grounds for wondering whether the Republican Party will survive
this dilemma.
It seems like just yesterday that Karl Rove dreamed of a permanent
Republican majority. If Buckley is right, the Bush presidency may not
only result in the Democrats’ taking power, perhaps for years, but
could also force the Republican Party to fundamentally redefine itself.
Judging by the candidates on offer right now, it’s high time.
Tags: bush administration, cate, endor, john mccain, liar, ups