Republican Soul Searching
motown67
4,513 Posts
Not sure if people noticed this but the Republicans are having a serious identity crisis right now. It started during the lead up to the Congressional elections, and is now in full swing.Basically they're facing a couple tough issues, namely:1) An unpopular war and president that none of them wants, but are stuck with2) When they controlled Congress they proved to be everything they said they were fighting against, namely spending just as much as Democrats and being tainted by corruptionIn political science speak this might be leading to another realignment that happens every couple decades when voters make a major swing in their opinions and tastes in politics. During the 1920s America was conservative, then the Great Depression led to a liberal period from the 1930s to the 1960s. The Vietnam War and the 60s led to a conservative trend that was topped by Reagan's election that lasted from the 1970s to the present, with Clinton in between, but with a Republican controlled Congress for part of his term. Here are a couple pieces on the issue. The best is this guy from the neoconservative Weekly Standard in the NPR piece who said that many Republicans are looking forward to Bush going back to Texas for good.Pieces:1) NPR piece. It can be heard on Real Audio[/b]http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92725662) San Francisco Chronicle article from October 2006 before the elections[/b]http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/08/MNGAULL5471.DTL&type=printableDistraught Republicans lambasting one anotherCarolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington BureauSunday, October 8, 2006(10-08) 04:00 PDT Washington -- Former Rep. Mark Foley's lewd behavior with teenage pages dropped like a match in a dry forest of conservative anger at Republicans.More than the scandal itself, the anger is what could topple the House leadership and end 12 years of Republican control of the House.For many conservatives, Republicans have assumed a startling resemblance to the Democrats they ousted from a 40-year reign in 1994."They have become that which they beheld," said Richard Viguerie, the father of conservative grassroots activism. "In the early 1990s, they talked about a culture of corruption by the Democrats and how they were abusing their power. Lo and behold, that seems to be what the Republicans have engaged in. It's very, very hard to tell conservatives that there really is a significant difference on most issues between this crowd and the Democrats."House Republicans are a long way from the heady days of 1994, when the Republican revolution began with a 54-seat landslide after fiery back-bencher Newt Gingrich of Georgia and his conservative allies issued the Contract With America, "aimed at restoring the faith and trust of the American people in their government," starting with fiscal responsibility and reform of the House itself.Foley's escapades fuel a long-simmering frustration that Republicans have betrayed their principles. The latest issue of Washington Monthly ran essays from seven lifelong Republicans arguing -- before the Foley scandal broke -- that it might be better if Republicans lost the House.Titles ranged from "Bring on Pelosi" to "Let's Quit While We're Behind."Former Florida Rep. Joe Scarborough, a member of the GOP class of 1994 and now an MSNBC television host, wrote that he would prefer "an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention than having this lot of Republicans controlling America's checkbook for the next two years."Republicans may be divided over the war in Iraq, civil liberties, immigration, and the struggle between religious and economic conservatives. But one thing that unifies party members of all persuasions is a profound dismay at what they see as profligate spending by Congress under President Bush.Fighting big government has been a GOP lodestar since Barry Goldwater was nominated for the presidency in 1964. It animated Ronald Reagan's presidency, helped deny George H.W. Bush a second term when he violated his "read-my-lips" no-new-tax pledge, and became the defining battle of the Gingrich revolution in 1994, leading to a government shutdown in a face-off with Democratic President Bill Clinton.When the younger Bush was elected in 2000, Republicans gained unified control of the White House, the House and, for most of the last six years, the Senate.Yet what majority control produced was lavish farm subsidies; the Medicare drug bill, which is the biggest entitlement expansion since the Great Society; enormous funding increases for Cabinet departments Republicans once pledged to eliminate; highway bills larded with bridges to nowhere; and a galaxy of special spending earmarks for individual lawmakers' pet projects -- along with an invasion of Iraq."Starting with George W. Bush, it's been all downhill," said William Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute and a former Reagan official. "The growth of federal spending has been the highest since Lyndon Johnson, this is the first Republican war in over a century in which the ground combat lasted more than a few days, we've had an erosion of our civil liberties ... it's really a very sad story."Many in the 1994 House vanguard -- Gingrich, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, policy chief Chris Cox of Newport Beach (now Securities and Exchange Commission chairman) and budget chairman John Kasich of Ohio -- have retired. Tom DeLay, who battled Armey and replaced him as majority leader, fell this year to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. One of the GOP's savviest legislators, Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, is retiring this year because of term limits on committee chairs that Republicans instituted in 1994 in their effort to clean up the House.Armey cites "principally Tom DeLay" as a source of GOP problems. DeLay's job was passing bills, and he did it aggressively, trading spending for votes. Pressure on conservatives was intense. DeLay was reprimanded for trying to bribe Rep. Nick Smith of Michigan with $100,000 for Smith's son's campaign in exchange for the lawmaker's vote on the Medicare drug bill. Smith refused."Like old wise men say, 'Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely,' " said Smith, now retired, although he said Democrats who supported the bill received just as much pressure from their leaders to kill it as he got to support it.Conservatives now "have to make a decision," Smith said. "Do they let the Democrats in? It's a tough decision for a lot of conservative Republicans around the country."Kasich said he fought the good fight -- achieving the first budget surplus since man walked on the moon, even managing to eliminate programs -- but he said he began meeting resistance after that."Maybe in a way, they got too comfortable with power," Kasich said of his former colleagues. "On both sides it's about either keeping power or getting it."Kasich said budget discipline began to unravel in the late 1990s with a pork-filled highway bill. "The minute we did that, it was a signal," he said. "It was the beginning of the end.""You don't make a lot of friends in politics when you take things away from people," Kasich argued. "It's hard. Look at all politicians; look at the governor of California. His popularity has gone up as he's passed more stuff out, and when he wanted to take something away, he became unpopular. ... When you run in a political campaign and you face a million dollars worth of ads that tell everybody that you're trying to throw their grandmother out in the stre
et, it's tough."GOP revolutionary fervor was at such a pitch in 1994 that when an analyst from the conservative Heritage Foundation suggested cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, new members booed him, demanding that the entire department be eliminated, recalled Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation."The attitude most of them had compared with now is the difference between day and night," Weyrich said. "They came here to change Washington, and Washington changed them."There were important victories -- welfare reform in 1996, a revolutionary farm bill phasing out subsidies (reversed under Bush), and telecom deregulation. But after Republicans took the blame for the government shutdown in their spending fight with Clinton, then lost seats later in 1998, their spending discipline evaporated."The shutdown scalded a number of them in a very profound way," said Mike Franc, head of government relations for the Heritage Foundation. "A lot of the Republican caucus became very, very trepidatious about anything relating to the size and scope of government."Bush campaigned as a "compassionate conservative," not on shrinking government. He thrilled conservatives with major tax cuts, but never attempted to reduce spending to compensate for them. Bush expanded the federal role in education rather than eliminating it, as conservatives once demanded. He created the Department of Homeland Security and raised military spending to Vietnam War levels.Although he pushed hard to add private accounts to Social Security, the plan flopped."The Bush people have confused the politics of governing with the politics of campaigning," said Cato's Niskanen. "Bush never really understood what it takes to govern when you have to deal across party lines."Ironically, many Republicans believe that Republican control of all three branches of government installed a perverse dynamic."The mutually enabling codependence of a Republican president with a Republican Congress does not have the same dynamic as divided party control," said Tom Miller, a former Republican Senate aide now at the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute. "Each one tends to support the other's worst instincts, and there is no restraining force to provide a counterbalance."Leon Panetta, the former Democratic lawmaker from Monterey who was Clinton's chief of staff, agreed that power became the end rather than a means to a policy end for the Republicans."The simplest answer is to go back to the biggest thing our forefathers were concerned about when they put our Constitution together: the centralization of power," said Panetta, who negotiated for Clinton with Republican leaders during the 1995 budget showdown. "They didn't want a king, they didn't want a king's parliament, they didn't want a chamber court. ... When you have a lot of power, power becomes the sole purpose of the game. It tends sometimes to divert you from governing. And that's their biggest mistake. Being in office became more about winning than about governing."Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist and close collaborator with the Republican leadership and the White House, takes strong issue with such critics."I'm more radical than these idiots who are whining that we haven't gotten there fast enough," Norquist said. "I work every day trying to move the party and the government toward the more-freedom and lower-tax position. I know why things aren't moving faster -- because it's difficult."Norquist draws a parallel between current GOP infighting and battles on the left during the 1960s. "It is always frustrating for true believers," he said. "Looking back, we can see the left made a lot of progress during this period when the New Left was busy tearing the Democratic Party apart because things didn't move as rapidly as they wanted them to. They tore the party apart and threw away their governing majority."Tony Blankley, Gingrich's press secretary for seven years and now editorial page editor of the Washington Times, has called for House Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign over the Foley affair. But he stops short of saying Republicans should lose their House majority."If there was another alternative, you could make the case, but I think a Democrat majority would do inestimable damage," Blankley said. "As much as I wish the Republican majority had controlled spending better, I don't have the slightest doubt that if the Democrats were in, particularly if they had a Democratic president, the spending would increase and the deficit would increase. So you're not going to gain anything."Viguerie, who is launching a new Web site, www.conservativesbetrayed.com, said Republicans should not fear defeat."Conservatives are like the biblical Jews who had to wander through the desert for 40 years until that generation of immoral, corrupt leaders had passed away," he said. "We are not going to get to the political promised land with this leadership. They don't have vision -- they don't have an idea of where they want to take the country."Reagan never would have won had Gerald Ford not been defeated in 1976, Viguerie said, and Republicans would never have won the House if George H.W. Bush had been re-elected in 1992. "Conservatives, by the way, are not an arm of the party," he said. "We're not a wing of the party. We are the party." 3) Time magazine article from current issue[/b]http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1599374,00.htmlThursday, Mar. 15, 2007How the Right Went WrongBy Karen TumultyA generation ago, fresh off the second biggest electoral landslide in American history, Ronald Reagan surveyed the wreckage that had been the opposition and declared victory. Standing before 1,700 true believers at the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he proclaimed, "The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital." At this year's conference two weeks ago, Reagan's name was invoked more than anyone else's. But the mood at the most storied annual gathering of conservatives was anything but triumphal. John McCain, the Establishment favorite to win the 2008 Republican nomination, skipped CPAC entirely but did show up on David Letterman the night before, choosing the most aggressively glib venue to semiofficially announce his candidacy. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was there to make his pitch for 2008 but had to compete with a man who was working the crowd in a dolphin costume and a T-shirt identifying him as "Flip Romney: Just another flip flopper from Massachusetts." Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani barely mentioned the social issues on which he parts ways with conservatives, except to joke, "I don't agree with myself on everything." And the only memorable sound bite of the whole affair came from right-wing telepundit Ann Coulter, whose idea of an ideological rallying cry was to declare Democratic hopeful John Edwards a "faggot." The condemnation that followed, in which at least seven newspapers banished her column from their opinion pages, became a ragged coda for the state of a movement that had once been justly proud of its ability to win an argument.These are gloomy and uncertain days for conservatives, who ??? except for the eight-year Clinton interregnum ??? have dominated political power and thought in this country since Reagan rode in from the West. Their tradition goes back even further, to Founding Fathers who believed that people should do things for themselves and who shook off a monarchy in their conviction that Big Government is more to be feared than encouraged. The Boston Tea Party, as Reagan used to point out, was an antitax in
itiative.But everything that Reagan said in 1985 about "the other side" could easily apply to the conservatives of 2007. They are handcuffed to a political party that looks unsettlingly like the Democrats did in the 1980s, one that is more a collection of interest groups than ideas, recognizable more by its campaign tactics than its philosophy. The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan's legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It's true that Reagan didn't live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush's apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick.Set adrift as it is, the right understandably feels anxious as it contemplates who will carry Reagan's mantle into November 2008. "We're in the political equivalent of a world without the law of gravity," says Republican strategist Ralph Reed. "Nothing we have known in the past seems relevant." At the top of the Republican field in the latest TIME poll is the pro-choice, pro-gay-rights former mayor of liberal New York City. Giuliani's lead is as much as 19 points over onetime front runner McCain. But neither Republican manages better than a statistical tie in a hypothetical matchup against the two leading Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.Giuliani's lead in the early polls doesn't necessarily mean the Republican race is getting any closer to the kind of early coronation the party usually manages to engineer. A New York Times/CBS News poll out this week found that nearly 6 out of 10 Republican primary voters who responded said they were unsatisfied with the choice of candidates running for the party's nomination; by comparison, nearly 6 in 10 Democrats pronounced themselves happy with their field. The Democrats were also far more confident in the future. Whereas 40% of Republicans predicted the other party would win the White House next year, whomever it nominates, only 12% of Democrats felt that pessimistic about their chances. Then there is the real worry that the whole exercise might already be a lost cause. "In this environment, nobody looks good if you have an R by your name. It doesn't matter who you are," says a Republican campaign consultant in the Midwest. "I don't see how that changes between now and Election Day. It's the war; it's huge. It's just huge."The Iraq war has challenged the conservative movement's custodianship of America's place in the world, as well as its claim to competence. Reagan restored a sense of America's mission as the "city on a hill" that would be a light to the world and helped bring about the defeat of what he very undiplomatically christened "the evil empire." After 9/11 Bush found his own evil empire, in fact a whole axis of evil. But he hasn't produced Reagan's results: North Korea is nuclear, Iran swaggers across the world stage, Iraq is a morass. "Conservatives are divided on the Iraq war, but there is a growing feeling it was a mistake," says longtime conservative activist and fund-raiser Richard Viguerie. "It's not a Ronald Reagan�type of idea to ride on our white horse around the world trying to save it militarily. Ronald Reagan won the cold war by bankrupting the Soviet Union. No planes flew. No tanks rolled. No armies marched."Then there are the scandals and the corruption. The dismay that voters expressed in last fall's midterm election was aimed not so much at conservatism as at the G.O.P's failure to honor it with a respect for law and order. And now that subpoena power gives the Democrats their first chance to shine a light into the crevices of an Administration and its very unconservative approach to Executive power, the final years of Bush's presidency are likely to be punctuated by one controversy after another. The past weeks alone have produced a parade of revelations: leftover questions about Vice President Dick Cheney's role in the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby case; the betrayal by neglect of the war wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and veterans hospitals across the country; the connected dots showing that the White House and the Justice Department exploited the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, of all things, to engineer a purge of U.S. attorneys across the country.Conservatives are in many ways victims of their successes, and there have indeed been big ones. At 35%, the top tax rate is about half what it was when Reagan took office; the Soviet Union broke up; inflation is barely a nuisance; crime is down; and welfare is reformed. But if all that's true, what is conservatism's rationale for the next generation? What set of goals is there to hold together a coalition that has always been more fractious than it seemed to be from the outside, with its realists and its neoconservatives, its religious ground troops and its libertarian intelligentsia, its Pat Buchanan populists and its Milton Friedman free traders? That is why the challenge for Republican conservatives goes far deeper than merely trying to figure out how to win the next election. 2008 is a question with a very clear premise: Does the conservative movement still have what it takes to redeem its grand old traditions ??? or, better, to chart new territory?There was a time when John McCain would have seemed the most natural heir to Reagan. It was Reagan who first introduced McCain to a conservative audience ??? ironically enough, given McCain's conspicuous no-show this year, at CPAC's 1974 conference. McCain was one of three former Vietnam POWs in attendance. With their release, Reagan said, "this country had its spirits lifted as they have never been lifted in many years." Twenty-five years later, McCain was a fiscal conservative and security hawk serving his third term in Barry Goldwater's old Senate seat when Nancy Reagan picked him to accept the American Conservative Union's Conservative of the Century Award on behalf of her husband, who was too incapacitated by Alzheimer's to do it himself.But the right's view of McCain changed when he ran for President in 2000. What bothered conservatives wasn't just the fact that he challenged the Anointed One in a party that treats its primaries like a royal accession. It was also the glee with which he went after all its institutions, from the special interests to the theocrats to Big Business. "Remember that the Establishment is against us," he exulted after winning the New Hampshire primary. "This is an insurgency campaign, and I'm Luke Skywalker." Then again, as both Reagan and Goldwater showed, there is nothing more fundamentally conservative than an insurgency.On his second try, McCain seems to have become much of what he used to fight against. The deficit hawk who had opposed Bush's tax cuts voted to extend them. The apostate who counted the Rev. Jerry Falwell among the "agents of intolerance" seven years ago delivered the commencement speech at Falwell's Liberty University last May. Ask the candidate what his message is this time around, and he tells TIME, "Experience, background, record and vision. Who is best capable to address the challenge of the 21st century, which is the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism?" But what about reform? These days McCain has to be prompted on that one, which he lumps into "all of those things."McCain veterans insist their candidate hasn't changed, just his prospects. "The key difference is, hopefully, this is a winning campaign," says his chief strategist John Weaver. Trying to rekindle the old magic, they rearranged his schedule to put him back on the Straight Talk Express bus this month. But that could distract him from another goal in this critical period: building up his campaign coffers so that he has the financial muscle of a front-runn
er when the tallies are released for the first reporting period, which ends March 31.Certainly, McCain's operation has an institutional feel, for better or worse. Whereas he ran his 2000 campaign from shabby offices with a single toilet, McCain 2.0 is housed on the 13th floor (superstitiously identified by the building as the "M" floor) of a soulless office high-rise in northern Virginia. McCain's 2000 campaign was a free-for-all, but his 2008 operation is more conventional, with far more hands on the wheel.Being embraced by the Establishment isn't such a good thing when the Establishment is in disrepute. And on the biggest issue on which McCain has shown backbone and hasn't wavered ??? his support for the war and Bush's troop buildup ??? he happens to find himself on the opposite side of the fence from 72% of Americans in the latest TIME poll.If McCain is playing up to the right, it's not working all that well. He is still at odds with the conservative base: flexible on immigration, opposed to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and dedicated to preserving the Senate's right to filibuster judicial nominees. "The problem with McCain, and I don't know how he fixes it," says evangelical leader Richard Lands, "is that he's so unpredictable. What makes him appealing to independents makes him worrisome to social conservatives. They say, 'Yeah, he's pro-life, but will that have anything to do with who he nominates to the Supreme Court?' People don't like unpredictability in candidates."But then the only person who beats McCain in the polls is even further out of line with conservatives. Just out on YouTube is a 1989 video, which quickly made its way to the Drudge Report, in which Giuliani declares, "There must be public funding for abortions for poor women. We cannot deny any woman the right to make her own decision about abortion because she lacks resources." Also getting fresh play are the unsavory details of his second divorce (familiar to anyone who picked up a New York City tabloid at the time): Giuliani's wife got the news that they were splitting when he announced it at a press conference, and then the couple squabbled over whether she or his mistress would get to stay in Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence. Now there is an additional, painfully raw story line about how his third marriage has left him estranged from his children.What draws conservatives to Giuliani, though, are his other qualities: the leadership and strength he showed as New York City's mayor on 9/11; his record transformation of a crumbling, crime-ridden city into a safe and clean one; and the need for that kind of toughness in a dangerous world. Giuliani is talking to conservatives now in a language they want to hear. He promises that whatever his personal views, the judges he appoints as President would be "strict constructionists" in the mold of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts, which is generally understood to mean against abortion and gay marriage.Romney, meanwhile, has taken a whisk broom to his record in liberal Massachusetts, where he twice ran for statewide office as a pro-choice candidate dedicated to "full equality for America's gay and lesbian citizens." He now says he opposes Roe v. Wade and describes himself as "a champion of traditional marriage." In Massachusetts, he bucked the National Rifle Association by supporting the Brady Bill and an assault-weapons ban, boasting, "I don't line up with the NRA." Lately he brags that he has joined the gun-rights organization as a life member. He did that in August.Romney registers a meager 9% in TIME's poll of Republicans, but there are plenty of signs that conservatives are trying to overlook his past and fall in love. He won the straw poll at CPAC, and the endorsements are piling up. Romney has also picked up much of the political operation of Jeb Bush, who is the could-have-been candidate most longed for on the right. Money doesn't seem to be a problem either; Romney raised $6.5 million on a single National Call Day in early January. The campaign is flush enough to be on the air at this early date with ads to introduce Romney to voters as a "business legend" who "rescued the Olympics" and "turned around a Democratic state." The Mormon in the race also points out ??? jokingly, but with an edge ??? that he is the only leading contender who is still with his first wife.Some on the right have been keeping a light in the window for the last conservative to have led a revolution. Newt Gingrich recently confessed his past marital infidelity on the Christian radio show of James Dobson, admitting he was carrying on with the House aide who became his third wife even as he was lambasting Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the upside-down leap of reasoning that this campaign season has wrought in the movement, hanging his dirty sheets from the window was enough to convince everyone that Gingrich is running ??? and landed him an invitation from Falwell to be this year's Liberty University commencement speaker. "He has admitted his moral shortcomings to me, as well, in private conversations," Falwell wrote in his weekly newsletter. "And he has also told me that he has, in recent years, come to grips with his personal failures and sought God's forgiveness."It's no wonder that other potential Republican candidates, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and former Senator turned television star Fred Thompson, are deciding that they can afford to wait a while before making up their minds. There is a full lineup of conservatives who are already in the race and looking for lightning to strike: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and California Congressman Duncan Hunter, to name just a few. Many conservatives say a long election season offers the advantage of letting conservatives work through their doubts about their options for 2008, especially when they turn their attention to November. "When it's Hillary vs. Giuliani," asks antitax activist Grover Norquist, "who's going to vote for Hillary?" But others on the right say they are looking at this election as a write-off. "I'm not focusing on 2008," Viguerie says. "Realistically, it will probably take until the year 2016" before the movement regains anything resembling its former glory.And where will those new ideas and leaders come from? In this magazine, conservative columnist William Kristol has cited two possible sources, both of which focus on the very middle-class voters that Reagan so successfully peeled away from their Democratic moorings. In a forthcoming book, conservative authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam identify these voters as "Sam's Club Republicans," who could benefit from market-friendly health-care and tax policies that are aimed at families and especially at at-home parents. Another conservative thinker, Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues along a similar vein with a set of policy proposals that he calls "Putting Parents First." Bush's signature approach to domestic policy fell short in that regard, Levin wrote in the Weekly Standard. "Compassionate conservatism, for all its virtues, does not even try to address itself to parents. A conservative agenda that did so would not only cement a relationship with these voters, it would also appeal to many with similar worries who do not share the strong cultural predilections that have drawn middle- and lower-middle-class parents to vote for Republicans."The Gipper would probably have had little patience for all the fretting his party is doing over its brand. But he also understood, because he embodied the idea, that progress comes from going up against the status quo. To become "creators of the future," as he called his compatriots, he might have suggested that they look back to their past.???with reporting by Jay Carney and Michael Duffy/Washington and Nancy Gibbs/New York
et, it's tough."GOP revolutionary fervor was at such a pitch in 1994 that when an analyst from the conservative Heritage Foundation suggested cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, new members booed him, demanding that the entire department be eliminated, recalled Paul Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation."The attitude most of them had compared with now is the difference between day and night," Weyrich said. "They came here to change Washington, and Washington changed them."There were important victories -- welfare reform in 1996, a revolutionary farm bill phasing out subsidies (reversed under Bush), and telecom deregulation. But after Republicans took the blame for the government shutdown in their spending fight with Clinton, then lost seats later in 1998, their spending discipline evaporated."The shutdown scalded a number of them in a very profound way," said Mike Franc, head of government relations for the Heritage Foundation. "A lot of the Republican caucus became very, very trepidatious about anything relating to the size and scope of government."Bush campaigned as a "compassionate conservative," not on shrinking government. He thrilled conservatives with major tax cuts, but never attempted to reduce spending to compensate for them. Bush expanded the federal role in education rather than eliminating it, as conservatives once demanded. He created the Department of Homeland Security and raised military spending to Vietnam War levels.Although he pushed hard to add private accounts to Social Security, the plan flopped."The Bush people have confused the politics of governing with the politics of campaigning," said Cato's Niskanen. "Bush never really understood what it takes to govern when you have to deal across party lines."Ironically, many Republicans believe that Republican control of all three branches of government installed a perverse dynamic."The mutually enabling codependence of a Republican president with a Republican Congress does not have the same dynamic as divided party control," said Tom Miller, a former Republican Senate aide now at the nonpartisan American Enterprise Institute. "Each one tends to support the other's worst instincts, and there is no restraining force to provide a counterbalance."Leon Panetta, the former Democratic lawmaker from Monterey who was Clinton's chief of staff, agreed that power became the end rather than a means to a policy end for the Republicans."The simplest answer is to go back to the biggest thing our forefathers were concerned about when they put our Constitution together: the centralization of power," said Panetta, who negotiated for Clinton with Republican leaders during the 1995 budget showdown. "They didn't want a king, they didn't want a king's parliament, they didn't want a chamber court. ... When you have a lot of power, power becomes the sole purpose of the game. It tends sometimes to divert you from governing. And that's their biggest mistake. Being in office became more about winning than about governing."Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist and close collaborator with the Republican leadership and the White House, takes strong issue with such critics."I'm more radical than these idiots who are whining that we haven't gotten there fast enough," Norquist said. "I work every day trying to move the party and the government toward the more-freedom and lower-tax position. I know why things aren't moving faster -- because it's difficult."Norquist draws a parallel between current GOP infighting and battles on the left during the 1960s. "It is always frustrating for true believers," he said. "Looking back, we can see the left made a lot of progress during this period when the New Left was busy tearing the Democratic Party apart because things didn't move as rapidly as they wanted them to. They tore the party apart and threw away their governing majority."Tony Blankley, Gingrich's press secretary for seven years and now editorial page editor of the Washington Times, has called for House Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign over the Foley affair. But he stops short of saying Republicans should lose their House majority."If there was another alternative, you could make the case, but I think a Democrat majority would do inestimable damage," Blankley said. "As much as I wish the Republican majority had controlled spending better, I don't have the slightest doubt that if the Democrats were in, particularly if they had a Democratic president, the spending would increase and the deficit would increase. So you're not going to gain anything."Viguerie, who is launching a new Web site, www.conservativesbetrayed.com, said Republicans should not fear defeat."Conservatives are like the biblical Jews who had to wander through the desert for 40 years until that generation of immoral, corrupt leaders had passed away," he said. "We are not going to get to the political promised land with this leadership. They don't have vision -- they don't have an idea of where they want to take the country."Reagan never would have won had Gerald Ford not been defeated in 1976, Viguerie said, and Republicans would never have won the House if George H.W. Bush had been re-elected in 1992. "Conservatives, by the way, are not an arm of the party," he said. "We're not a wing of the party. We are the party." 3) Time magazine article from current issue[/b]http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1599374,00.htmlThursday, Mar. 15, 2007How the Right Went WrongBy Karen TumultyA generation ago, fresh off the second biggest electoral landslide in American history, Ronald Reagan surveyed the wreckage that had been the opposition and declared victory. Standing before 1,700 true believers at the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he proclaimed, "The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital." At this year's conference two weeks ago, Reagan's name was invoked more than anyone else's. But the mood at the most storied annual gathering of conservatives was anything but triumphal. John McCain, the Establishment favorite to win the 2008 Republican nomination, skipped CPAC entirely but did show up on David Letterman the night before, choosing the most aggressively glib venue to semiofficially announce his candidacy. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was there to make his pitch for 2008 but had to compete with a man who was working the crowd in a dolphin costume and a T-shirt identifying him as "Flip Romney: Just another flip flopper from Massachusetts." Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani barely mentioned the social issues on which he parts ways with conservatives, except to joke, "I don't agree with myself on everything." And the only memorable sound bite of the whole affair came from right-wing telepundit Ann Coulter, whose idea of an ideological rallying cry was to declare Democratic hopeful John Edwards a "faggot." The condemnation that followed, in which at least seven newspapers banished her column from their opinion pages, became a ragged coda for the state of a movement that had once been justly proud of its ability to win an argument.These are gloomy and uncertain days for conservatives, who ??? except for the eight-year Clinton interregnum ??? have dominated political power and thought in this country since Reagan rode in from the West. Their tradition goes back even further, to Founding Fathers who believed that people should do things for themselves and who shook off a monarchy in their conviction that Big Government is more to be feared than encouraged. The Boston Tea Party, as Reagan used to point out, was an antitax in
itiative.But everything that Reagan said in 1985 about "the other side" could easily apply to the conservatives of 2007. They are handcuffed to a political party that looks unsettlingly like the Democrats did in the 1980s, one that is more a collection of interest groups than ideas, recognizable more by its campaign tactics than its philosophy. The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan's legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It's true that Reagan didn't live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush's apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick.Set adrift as it is, the right understandably feels anxious as it contemplates who will carry Reagan's mantle into November 2008. "We're in the political equivalent of a world without the law of gravity," says Republican strategist Ralph Reed. "Nothing we have known in the past seems relevant." At the top of the Republican field in the latest TIME poll is the pro-choice, pro-gay-rights former mayor of liberal New York City. Giuliani's lead is as much as 19 points over onetime front runner McCain. But neither Republican manages better than a statistical tie in a hypothetical matchup against the two leading Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.Giuliani's lead in the early polls doesn't necessarily mean the Republican race is getting any closer to the kind of early coronation the party usually manages to engineer. A New York Times/CBS News poll out this week found that nearly 6 out of 10 Republican primary voters who responded said they were unsatisfied with the choice of candidates running for the party's nomination; by comparison, nearly 6 in 10 Democrats pronounced themselves happy with their field. The Democrats were also far more confident in the future. Whereas 40% of Republicans predicted the other party would win the White House next year, whomever it nominates, only 12% of Democrats felt that pessimistic about their chances. Then there is the real worry that the whole exercise might already be a lost cause. "In this environment, nobody looks good if you have an R by your name. It doesn't matter who you are," says a Republican campaign consultant in the Midwest. "I don't see how that changes between now and Election Day. It's the war; it's huge. It's just huge."The Iraq war has challenged the conservative movement's custodianship of America's place in the world, as well as its claim to competence. Reagan restored a sense of America's mission as the "city on a hill" that would be a light to the world and helped bring about the defeat of what he very undiplomatically christened "the evil empire." After 9/11 Bush found his own evil empire, in fact a whole axis of evil. But he hasn't produced Reagan's results: North Korea is nuclear, Iran swaggers across the world stage, Iraq is a morass. "Conservatives are divided on the Iraq war, but there is a growing feeling it was a mistake," says longtime conservative activist and fund-raiser Richard Viguerie. "It's not a Ronald Reagan�type of idea to ride on our white horse around the world trying to save it militarily. Ronald Reagan won the cold war by bankrupting the Soviet Union. No planes flew. No tanks rolled. No armies marched."Then there are the scandals and the corruption. The dismay that voters expressed in last fall's midterm election was aimed not so much at conservatism as at the G.O.P's failure to honor it with a respect for law and order. And now that subpoena power gives the Democrats their first chance to shine a light into the crevices of an Administration and its very unconservative approach to Executive power, the final years of Bush's presidency are likely to be punctuated by one controversy after another. The past weeks alone have produced a parade of revelations: leftover questions about Vice President Dick Cheney's role in the I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby case; the betrayal by neglect of the war wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and veterans hospitals across the country; the connected dots showing that the White House and the Justice Department exploited the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, of all things, to engineer a purge of U.S. attorneys across the country.Conservatives are in many ways victims of their successes, and there have indeed been big ones. At 35%, the top tax rate is about half what it was when Reagan took office; the Soviet Union broke up; inflation is barely a nuisance; crime is down; and welfare is reformed. But if all that's true, what is conservatism's rationale for the next generation? What set of goals is there to hold together a coalition that has always been more fractious than it seemed to be from the outside, with its realists and its neoconservatives, its religious ground troops and its libertarian intelligentsia, its Pat Buchanan populists and its Milton Friedman free traders? That is why the challenge for Republican conservatives goes far deeper than merely trying to figure out how to win the next election. 2008 is a question with a very clear premise: Does the conservative movement still have what it takes to redeem its grand old traditions ??? or, better, to chart new territory?There was a time when John McCain would have seemed the most natural heir to Reagan. It was Reagan who first introduced McCain to a conservative audience ??? ironically enough, given McCain's conspicuous no-show this year, at CPAC's 1974 conference. McCain was one of three former Vietnam POWs in attendance. With their release, Reagan said, "this country had its spirits lifted as they have never been lifted in many years." Twenty-five years later, McCain was a fiscal conservative and security hawk serving his third term in Barry Goldwater's old Senate seat when Nancy Reagan picked him to accept the American Conservative Union's Conservative of the Century Award on behalf of her husband, who was too incapacitated by Alzheimer's to do it himself.But the right's view of McCain changed when he ran for President in 2000. What bothered conservatives wasn't just the fact that he challenged the Anointed One in a party that treats its primaries like a royal accession. It was also the glee with which he went after all its institutions, from the special interests to the theocrats to Big Business. "Remember that the Establishment is against us," he exulted after winning the New Hampshire primary. "This is an insurgency campaign, and I'm Luke Skywalker." Then again, as both Reagan and Goldwater showed, there is nothing more fundamentally conservative than an insurgency.On his second try, McCain seems to have become much of what he used to fight against. The deficit hawk who had opposed Bush's tax cuts voted to extend them. The apostate who counted the Rev. Jerry Falwell among the "agents of intolerance" seven years ago delivered the commencement speech at Falwell's Liberty University last May. Ask the candidate what his message is this time around, and he tells TIME, "Experience, background, record and vision. Who is best capable to address the challenge of the 21st century, which is the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism?" But what about reform? These days McCain has to be prompted on that one, which he lumps into "all of those things."McCain veterans insist their candidate hasn't changed, just his prospects. "The key difference is, hopefully, this is a winning campaign," says his chief strategist John Weaver. Trying to rekindle the old magic, they rearranged his schedule to put him back on the Straight Talk Express bus this month. But that could distract him from another goal in this critical period: building up his campaign coffers so that he has the financial muscle of a front-runn
er when the tallies are released for the first reporting period, which ends March 31.Certainly, McCain's operation has an institutional feel, for better or worse. Whereas he ran his 2000 campaign from shabby offices with a single toilet, McCain 2.0 is housed on the 13th floor (superstitiously identified by the building as the "M" floor) of a soulless office high-rise in northern Virginia. McCain's 2000 campaign was a free-for-all, but his 2008 operation is more conventional, with far more hands on the wheel.Being embraced by the Establishment isn't such a good thing when the Establishment is in disrepute. And on the biggest issue on which McCain has shown backbone and hasn't wavered ??? his support for the war and Bush's troop buildup ??? he happens to find himself on the opposite side of the fence from 72% of Americans in the latest TIME poll.If McCain is playing up to the right, it's not working all that well. He is still at odds with the conservative base: flexible on immigration, opposed to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and dedicated to preserving the Senate's right to filibuster judicial nominees. "The problem with McCain, and I don't know how he fixes it," says evangelical leader Richard Lands, "is that he's so unpredictable. What makes him appealing to independents makes him worrisome to social conservatives. They say, 'Yeah, he's pro-life, but will that have anything to do with who he nominates to the Supreme Court?' People don't like unpredictability in candidates."But then the only person who beats McCain in the polls is even further out of line with conservatives. Just out on YouTube is a 1989 video, which quickly made its way to the Drudge Report, in which Giuliani declares, "There must be public funding for abortions for poor women. We cannot deny any woman the right to make her own decision about abortion because she lacks resources." Also getting fresh play are the unsavory details of his second divorce (familiar to anyone who picked up a New York City tabloid at the time): Giuliani's wife got the news that they were splitting when he announced it at a press conference, and then the couple squabbled over whether she or his mistress would get to stay in Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence. Now there is an additional, painfully raw story line about how his third marriage has left him estranged from his children.What draws conservatives to Giuliani, though, are his other qualities: the leadership and strength he showed as New York City's mayor on 9/11; his record transformation of a crumbling, crime-ridden city into a safe and clean one; and the need for that kind of toughness in a dangerous world. Giuliani is talking to conservatives now in a language they want to hear. He promises that whatever his personal views, the judges he appoints as President would be "strict constructionists" in the mold of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts, which is generally understood to mean against abortion and gay marriage.Romney, meanwhile, has taken a whisk broom to his record in liberal Massachusetts, where he twice ran for statewide office as a pro-choice candidate dedicated to "full equality for America's gay and lesbian citizens." He now says he opposes Roe v. Wade and describes himself as "a champion of traditional marriage." In Massachusetts, he bucked the National Rifle Association by supporting the Brady Bill and an assault-weapons ban, boasting, "I don't line up with the NRA." Lately he brags that he has joined the gun-rights organization as a life member. He did that in August.Romney registers a meager 9% in TIME's poll of Republicans, but there are plenty of signs that conservatives are trying to overlook his past and fall in love. He won the straw poll at CPAC, and the endorsements are piling up. Romney has also picked up much of the political operation of Jeb Bush, who is the could-have-been candidate most longed for on the right. Money doesn't seem to be a problem either; Romney raised $6.5 million on a single National Call Day in early January. The campaign is flush enough to be on the air at this early date with ads to introduce Romney to voters as a "business legend" who "rescued the Olympics" and "turned around a Democratic state." The Mormon in the race also points out ??? jokingly, but with an edge ??? that he is the only leading contender who is still with his first wife.Some on the right have been keeping a light in the window for the last conservative to have led a revolution. Newt Gingrich recently confessed his past marital infidelity on the Christian radio show of James Dobson, admitting he was carrying on with the House aide who became his third wife even as he was lambasting Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the upside-down leap of reasoning that this campaign season has wrought in the movement, hanging his dirty sheets from the window was enough to convince everyone that Gingrich is running ??? and landed him an invitation from Falwell to be this year's Liberty University commencement speaker. "He has admitted his moral shortcomings to me, as well, in private conversations," Falwell wrote in his weekly newsletter. "And he has also told me that he has, in recent years, come to grips with his personal failures and sought God's forgiveness."It's no wonder that other potential Republican candidates, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and former Senator turned television star Fred Thompson, are deciding that they can afford to wait a while before making up their minds. There is a full lineup of conservatives who are already in the race and looking for lightning to strike: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and California Congressman Duncan Hunter, to name just a few. Many conservatives say a long election season offers the advantage of letting conservatives work through their doubts about their options for 2008, especially when they turn their attention to November. "When it's Hillary vs. Giuliani," asks antitax activist Grover Norquist, "who's going to vote for Hillary?" But others on the right say they are looking at this election as a write-off. "I'm not focusing on 2008," Viguerie says. "Realistically, it will probably take until the year 2016" before the movement regains anything resembling its former glory.And where will those new ideas and leaders come from? In this magazine, conservative columnist William Kristol has cited two possible sources, both of which focus on the very middle-class voters that Reagan so successfully peeled away from their Democratic moorings. In a forthcoming book, conservative authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam identify these voters as "Sam's Club Republicans," who could benefit from market-friendly health-care and tax policies that are aimed at families and especially at at-home parents. Another conservative thinker, Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues along a similar vein with a set of policy proposals that he calls "Putting Parents First." Bush's signature approach to domestic policy fell short in that regard, Levin wrote in the Weekly Standard. "Compassionate conservatism, for all its virtues, does not even try to address itself to parents. A conservative agenda that did so would not only cement a relationship with these voters, it would also appeal to many with similar worries who do not share the strong cultural predilections that have drawn middle- and lower-middle-class parents to vote for Republicans."The Gipper would probably have had little patience for all the fretting his party is doing over its brand. But he also understood, because he embodied the idea, that progress comes from going up against the status quo. To become "creators of the future," as he called his compatriots, he might have suggested that they look back to their past.???with reporting by Jay Carney and Michael Duffy/Washington and Nancy Gibbs/New York
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/washin...agewanted=print
April 1, 2007
Ex-Aide Says He???s Lost Faith in Bush
By JIM RUTENBERG
AUSTIN, Tex., March 29 ??? In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush???s early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.
A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched parties, joined Mr. Bush???s political brain trust and dedicated the next six years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was appointed the president???s chief campaign strategist.
Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was misplaced.
In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush???s leadership.
He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a ???my way or the highway??? mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.
???I really like him, which is probably why I???m so disappointed in things,??? he said. He added, ???I think he???s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled in.???
In speaking out, Mr. Dowd became the first member of Mr. Bush???s inner circle to break so publicly with him.
He said his decision to step forward had not come easily. But, he said, his disappointment in Mr. Bush???s presidency is so great that he feels a sense of duty to go public given his role in helping Mr. Bush gain and keep power.
Mr. Dowd, a crucial part of a team that cast Senator John Kerry as a flip-flopper who could not be trusted with national security during wartime, said he had even written but never submitted an op-ed article titled ???Kerry Was Right,??? arguing that Mr. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat and 2004 presidential candidate, was correct in calling last year for a withdrawal from Iraq.
???I???m a big believer that in part what we???re called to do ??? to me, by God; other people call it karma ??? is to restore balance when things didn???t turn out the way they should have,??? Mr. Dowd said. ???Just being quiet is not an option when I was so publicly advocating an election.???
Mr. Dowd???s journey from true believer to critic in some ways tracks the public arc of Mr. Bush???s political fortunes. But it is also an intensely personal story of a political operative who at times, by his account, suppressed his doubts about his professional role but then confronted them as he dealt with loss and sorrow in his own life.
In the last several years, as he has gradually broken his ties with the Bush camp, one of Mr. Dowd???s premature twin daughters died, he was divorced, and he watched his oldest son prepare for deployment to Iraq as an Army intelligence specialist fluent in Arabic. Mr. Dowd said he had become so disillusioned with the war that he had considered joining street demonstrations against it, but that his continued personal affection for the president had kept him from joining protests whose anti-Bush fervor is so central.
Mr. Dowd, 45, said he hoped in part that by coming forward he would be able to get a message through to a presidential inner sanctum that he views as increasingly isolated. But, he said, he holds out no great hope. He acknowledges that he has not had a conversation with the president.
Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, said Mr. Dowd???s criticism is reflective of the national debate over the war.
???It???s an issue that divides people,??? Mr. Bartlett said. ???Even people that supported the president aren???t immune from having their own feelings and emotions.???
He said he disagreed with Mr. Dowd???s description of the president as isolated and with his position on withdrawal. He said Mr. Dowd, a friend, has ???sometimes expressed these sentiments??? in private conversation, though ???not in such detail.???
During the interview with Mr. Dowd on a slightly overcast afternoon in downtown Austin, he was a far quieter man than the cigar-chomping general that he was during Mr. Bush???s 2004 campaign.
Soft-spoken and somewhat melancholy, he wore jeans, a T-shirt and sandals in an office devoid of Bush memorabilia save for a campaign coffee mug and a photograph of the first couple with his oldest son, Daniel. The photograph was taken one week before the 2004 election, and one day before Daniel was to go to boot camp.
Over Mexican food at a restaurant that was only feet from the 2000 campaign headquarters, and later at his office just up the street, Mr. Dowd recounted his political and personal journey. ???It???s amazing,??? he said. ???In five years, I???ve only traveled 300 feet, but it feels like I???ve gone around the world, where my head is.???
Mr. Dowd said he decided to become a Republican in 1999 and joined Mr. Bush after watching him work closely with Bob Bullock, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Texas, who was a political client of Mr. Dowd and a mentor to Mr. Bush.
???It???s almost like you fall in love,??? he said. ???I was frustrated about Washington, the inability for people to get stuff done and bridge divides. And this guy???s personality ??? he cared about education and taking a different stand on immigration.???
Mr. Dowd established himself as an expert at interpreting polls, giving Karl Rove, the president???s closest political adviser, and the rest of the Bush team guidance as they set out to woo voters, slash opponents and exploit divisions between Democratic-leaning states and Republican-leaning ones.
In television interviews in 2004, Mr. Dowd said that Mr. Kerry???s campaign was proposing ???a weak defense,??? and that the voters ???trust this president more than they trust Senator Kerry on Iraq.???
But he was starting to have his own doubts by then, he said.
He said he thought Mr. Bush handled the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks well but ???missed a real opportunity to call the country to a shared sense of sacrifice.???
He was dumbfounded when Mr. Bush did not fire Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld after revelations that American soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Several associates said Mr. Dowd chafed under Mr. Rove???s leadership. Mr. Dowd said he had not spoken to Mr. Rove in months but would not discuss their relationship in detail.
Mr. Dowd said, in retrospect, he was in denial.
???When you fall in love like that,??? he said, ???and then you notice some things that don???t exactly go the way you thought, what do you do? Like in a relationship, you say ???No no, no, it???ll be different.??? ???
He said he clung to the hope that Mr. Bush would get back to his Texas style of governing if he won. But he saw no change after the 2004 victory.
He describes as further cause for doubt two events in the summer of 2005: the administration???s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the president???s refusal, around the same time that he was entertaining the bicyclist Lance Armstrong at his Crawford ranch, to meet with the war protester Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq.
???I had finally come to the conclusion that maybe all these things along do add up,??? he said. ???That it???s not the same, it???s not the person I thought.???
He said that during his work on the 2006 re-election campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, which had a bipartisan appeal, he began to rethink his approach to elections.
???I think we should design campaigns that appeal not to 51 percent of the people,??? he said, ???but bring the country together as a whole.???
He said that he still believed campaigns must do what it takes to win, but that he was never comfortable with the most hard-charging tactics. He is now calling for ???gentleness??? in politics. He said that while he tried to keep his own conduct respectful during political combat, he wanted to ???do my part in fixing fissures that I may have been part of.???
His views against the war began to harden last spring when, in a personal exercise, he wrote a draft opinion article and found himself agreeing with Mr. Kerry???s call for withdrawal from Iraq. He acknowledged that the expected deployment of his son Daniel was an important factor.
He said the president???s announcement last fall that he was re-nominating the former United Nations ambassador John R. Bolton, whose confirmation Democrats had already refused, was further proof to him that Mr. Bush was not seeking consensus with Democrats.
He said he came to believe Mr. Bush???s views were hardening, with the reinforcement of his inner circle. But, he said, the person ???who is ultimately responsible is the president.??? And he gradually ventured out with criticism, going so far as declaring last month in a short essay in Texas Monthly magazine that Mr. Bush was losing ???his gut-level bond with the American people,??? and breaking more fully in this week???s interview.
???If the American public says they???re done with something, our leaders have to understand what they want,??? Mr. Dowd said. ???They???re saying, ???Get out of Iraq.??? ???
Mr. Dowd???s friends from Mr. Bush???s orbit said they understood his need to speak out. ???Everyone is going to reflect on the good and the bad, and everything in between, in their own way,??? said Nicolle Wallace, communications director of Mr. Bush???s 2004 campaign, a post she also held at the White House until last summer. ???And I certainly respect the way he???s doing it ??? these are his true thoughts from a deeply personal place.??? Ms. Wallace said she continued to have ???enormous gratitude??? for her years with Mr. Bush.
Mr. Bartlett, the White House counselor, said he understood, too, though he said he strongly disagreed with Mr. Dowd???s assessment. ???Do we know our critics will try to use this to their advantage? Yes,??? he said. ???Is that perfect? No. But you can respectfully disagree with someone who has been supportive of you.???
Mr. Dowd does not seem prepared to put his views to work in 2008. The only candidate who appeals to him, he said, is Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, because of what Mr. Dowd called his message of unity. But, he said, ???I wouldn???t be surprised if I wasn???t walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work.???
He added, ???I do feel a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world.???
I think this is a wonderful, and as you pointed out, inevitable movement within the party. Hell, I find myself sympathetic to many conservative ideals (yo...anti-gay marriage amendments are ANYTHING but conservative) and I'd love to see people move away from the 'mutant strain' of conservativism that has infected the Republican party, and get back to a more responsible and less self centered (dude...governing just to set up some permanent majority? mutually exlusive ideas, homies) movement.
ALL THAT SAID (and not too well, on a second take) I don't think Dowd is the guy to point to as an example of this. I think he's more of a campaign mercenary, who will go where the money and the challenge are. And that's fine- that is his skill set, and talent. But, as far as his soul searching? I'm not buying it- he's already angling by the end of the article to move onto the next campaign...and fancy that! Its back to the Dems.
Like I said...I have no problems with what he does for a living, and he's very good at it, by all accounts. But, pardon me if I was less than moved by his soul searching when I read that article yesterday.
lol @ my 'dem loyalty'
haha even Rush has been convinced by Obamania
really though he just hates clintons.
Also, a nice thing about the Republican party is that its okay to have a different view withoiut having to fear that you'll get stabbed in the back like the Dems did to good old Joe.
authoratative? dude these aren't exactly news pieces. they're commentary. I mean, do you seriously dispute that there's a crisis on the right? principled conservatives abandoned Bush a while ago, and now even some of the punch-drinkers like yourself are wising up.
lol. "different view." dude your hopeless little libertarian-social conservative/neocon-isolationist "coalition" has totally dissolved under Bush. are you blind?
I'm sure Chuck Hagel appreciates the sentiment (as does Lincoln Chafee).
At any rate, what we're seeing with the crash-and-burn of Bush is, in my view, the dismantling of neoconservatism. Francis Fukuyama, one of the intellectual architects of neoconservatism, has even said that it should be relegated to the scrap heap of history along with all the other failed ideologies.
On an even more generalized note, a lot of people are reacting with disgust to the way the Bush administration has politicized absolutely everything. A lot of us were objecting to that years ago, but now, as the results of that politicizing are being truly realized, more and more people are seeing that when you make loyalty the first, last, and only real qualification, (George Deutsch, holla!) you end up with a crap-tastrophe.
There's the old quip that Republicans run on the platform that government doesn't work, then they get elected and prove it. It's a decent political laugh line as such things go, but in a lot of ways, Bush really is demonstrating just how bad things can be when you put people in charge of things they already think are useless/stupid/pointless. The lying, hypocrisy, and unbelievable stubbornness isn't exactly helping, either.
One would hope that this "soul searching" will lead to the relegation of the crazies back to the margins where they belong so that actual rational conservatives can take the reins of the party. That would certainly be a welcome development in all this.
Yes, they tapped into the white middle class. They also took advantage of the splintering of the New Deal alliance that had kept the liberal Democrats in power.
Starting from the latter, during the 1960s the Democratic alliance broke apart. On the one hand you had white working class and middle class whites moving towards the suburbs hoping for the American dream of owning a new home, car, etc. that were strongly anti-communist, pro-Vietnam war, anti-civil rights, and largely racist. As part of their success having lived through the Depression and WWII they also began to think that they shouldn't be paying high taxes, especially home owners taxes.
The split was with the younger generation of white middle class baby boomers, that were against the Vietnam war, pro-civil rights, and black voters.
The conservatives tapped into the fears and hopes of the older generation and helped split the Democats in two. This is shown in voting trends up to the present where large urban areas are mostly Democratic and suburbs mostly voting Republican.
During the 1980s the Republicans added the religous and cultural conservatives to their ranks as well.
can anyone do a good booklist of the history of conservative thought? I took a class on this back in college and only remember a few books ... road to serfdom, atlas shrugged, god & man at yale, etc.
The question is "did the Repubs 'get it' right"? Will history say that they had the right ideas for their time, like how the new deal is largely written about?
The Grand Old Party
hope this helps
It's already being done.
Nixon is given the nod for breaking the Chinese off from the Russians. Ronald Reagan is credited for ending communism. Prop. 13 in CA that cut property taxes is still widely popular. Etc.
Just like the New Deal however there will be criticisms. That'll probably focus upon the cultural conservatives and the religious Right, and also probably on their inability to be fiscal conservatives despite all the talk, i.e. Reagan's and Bush's budget deficits, Republican Congress' spending spree, etc.
I have yet to read this book although it's on my list. It's called "Suburban Warriors." When it came out it got a good review. It's about the growth of the Right in Southern CA.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691096...d=36STPZW5D900H
i cant remember for the life of me whether i read it or just skimmed
nagl
As for Reagan winning the cold war, I think his role is overblown and has led to the hubris of the neo-cons.
Why would lefties ever agree with the Right?
If you want my personal opinion on a couple topics you brought up then:
1) Welfare reform cut the number of people in welfare by more than half. The problem is that most of those people still remain poor. If the goal was simply to get people off government assistance than it was a great success. If the point was to try to find an answer to poverty, which in MO it wasn't, than it didn't work. History books will probably just point out that there were less people on welfare and call it a success.
2) Prop. 13 in CA is one of the holy grails of the state's politics. It was one of the first tax revolts in America. Anyone that tries to talk about it usually can be counted on to be attacked and usually go down to defeat. If the goal of the law was to give home owners a tax break than it's only been partly successful. Older home owners that bought their homes before the law pay exceedingly low tax rates on average. The younger generation however pays much higher rates so it created an unfair system based upon when you bought your house. It also gutted the public school system since property taxes were the only funding for schools from the state. If a larger goal was to somehow constrain the state legislature's spending by cutting their revenues that hasn't worked either. As history shows it doesn't matter what party you belong to or whether you're a conservative or liberal. When elected to office the number one priority is to spend in your district so that you can get re-elected.
3) Trickle Down Economics doesnt' work. Reagan presided over a huge economic boom after a recession, but it was also during deindustrialization where many working class whites and blacks loss their economic standing. Many found new jobs but at less pay than before. Hence poverty went up under Reagan and the middle class actually shrank. Under the current Bush poverty is also up, while job growth, if you start from when he became president instead of after the recession, and economic growth have been average. The U.S. is also facing offshoring which is again changing the face of jobs in the U.S. Neither president seemed interested in those changes as long as there was some kind of growth in the U.S. economy.
You also seem to be changing your question because in the original post you asked about whether the conservative era will be written about in the same positive terms as the New Deal was, but now you're asking about how lefties think about it. Those seem to be two very different questions.
If you're asking about how history will remember it you need to think about how mainstream American history is constructed, taught and written about in schools. American History is a lot about myth and maintaining the image of the country just like in every other country in the world. 2 major themes of American history are that we're about progress and that leading men are at the forefront of these changes. Therefore the country runs into problems but they're always solved. Conservatives will be seen in the same light. They ran into some problems like Iran-Contra or budget deficits, but they did more good than bad. Bush will probably be seen something like a mix of Johnson and his dad Bush I. He started a war he believed in, but it didn't go the way he wanted and that caused problems for his legacy and his party. Like his father the Iraq war will probably be the only thing that he's really remembered for, his father obviously more successful than the son.
Saba, two questions:
what sources would you recommend? And please, think outside the usual tabloids & Fox News... national review? wall street journal?
and, you have to admit, the GOP isn't exactly known for the 'differing' views, especially in the last 7 STAY ON MESSAGE years. well, no- you don't have to admit anything. but, it is true.
dude.
ok wrong thread but seemed apropos
Ok here was my original intent. What do (we) lefties make of the 30 years of ascendancy of the conservatives? In light of the fact that they were able to hold on to power for so long and that the country is not in a complete shambles (economically, socially), should we acknowledge that they got some things right? I make no judgments either way but I am interested in hearing what people think. It is simple to say that all conservative ideas suck. Conservatives fall into the same trap when talking about liberal ideas. For example, many conservatives deride the New Deal on ideological terms. But if you ask them was it successful they would probably admit yes.
Message discipline is the dumbest fucking thing. "For the love of Jebus, don't say what your stances and opinions are--we will tell you what your stances and opinions are and how to express them. Please see attached talking points. Recite them as often as possible, and never, ever deviate from them."