Pat Buchanan and I rarely agree, but he rightly points out that the election marked the exhaustion of the movement that Barry Goldwater launched with his 1964 campaign. The intellectual vitality and coherence that once characterized modern conservatism have been shattered. Karl Rove is still arguing that the hot issues of this election–Iraq, corruption, sexual hypocrisy–are only “transitory.” He’s ignoring deep fissures in his party. Neocons have been discredited and theocons dispirited. Libertarians feel betrayed by big spenders, incompetent interventionists and moralizing busybodies. In the Schiavo case, in which 70 percent of voters thought Washington should have butted out, Republicans drove a wedge through their own ranks. Same with immigration, which pits the free-trade business wing against nativist Lou Dobbsians. Most important, the stitching that was meant to hold the GOP’s big tent together contained none of the hope and optimism essential to success in American politics. Fear failed.
It failed among the young (18 to 29), who were evenly divided four years ago, but this time gave the Democrats a 20- point edge. It failed among Hispanics, who favored Democrats by 69 to 30 percent. And it even failed among white soccer moms and office-park dads, who turned the American suburbs an unrecognizable shade of blue. The 49-state GOP landslides of 1972 and 1984 are now distant memories, as onetime bellwether states like California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and even Ohio trend heavily toward the Democrats. Texas and the Old Confederacy are no competition.
To recover, conservatives plan to return to what they call the “core principles” of small government and lower taxes. But there’s a reason they abandoned budget balancing: it’s a loser politically. There just aren’t many votes in it, and that’s why Republicans didn’t cut spending. People want the government to deliver for them. Without earmarks–which will now flow to pork-hungry Democrats–and the protection-racket money they got from selling out to lobbyists, Republicans might have lost an additional 20 seats. More than two dozen GOP incumbents won by six points or less and are vulnerable next time.
Their peril has its origins in Bush’s highly divisive effort to intensify the conservative movement instead of governing from the center. After the razor-thin 2000 election, he listened to shortsighted advice from pollster Matthew Dowd that “swing” voters were extinct and success lay in turning out “the base.” But more than one third of American voters identify themselves as independents, which is a higher percentage than claim a party ID. Smart politicians have always known that the G spot of the American body politic is in the middle.
So the Conservative Era is over, a cautionary tale for Democrats who might be tempted to impose a liberal one. Bush, who worked well with a Democratic legislature in Texas, must now admit that America is not Dittohead Nation. He is free of the one-party rule that kept him from being pragmatic–the not-so-secret ingredient in every successful presidency. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill (taxes and Social Security), George H.W. Bush and George Mitchell (the budget) and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich (welfare reform) all showed how presidential concessions in a divided government can burnish a president’s legacy, and even lead to new wings in his library.
For Bush, there are opportunities for consensus not just on Iraq but on immigration, Social Security reform, energy–and even on tax cuts, which he could shift from the wealthy to the middle class. The near wipeout of moderate Republicans makes it tougher. But the interest of the president in his legacy and the Democratic Congress in putting points on the board are aligned. After all the predictable vetoes and subpoenas and finger-pointing, this alignment has the potential to give Bush new political life–and his party a chance to avoid the grim fate of all extremists in American political history.
