US Diary: The millstone round the neck of the Republican Party: George W. Bush

A funny thing happened to the GOP after they chose George W. Bush as their leader. After winning them the White House twice, and counting him as a tremendous asset to the party -- perhaps more for the brain of his strategist Karl Rove than for W himself -- now he is their biggest negative. In fact, there are people who claim that Bush helped the Republicans lose races in Virginia and New Jersey.

It's going to be amazing to watch an entire party distance itself from its leader over the next three years. In fact, Republicans who publicly criticize Bush will probably enhance their chances of success. Running against your leader may be how to keep your seat in 2006.

It used to be that America worked well when the White House was in the hands of one party, and Congress in the hands of the other. Well, now it looks like it's going to be that way again, with Congress against the president, even though he is a Republican like them. Take the fight over torture: Bush threatens to use the first veto of his presidency against an amendment sponsored by a Republican, John McCain, and approved by the Senate 90 to 9.

In fact, if the Republican Party wants to regain the country's respect, and not be stigmatized for its "culture of corruption," it may end up having to actually repudiate the man who hasn't simply been our worst president ever, but is fast turning into the most unpopular president we've ever had. Now wouldn't that be something to see?


1. Republicans Losing Control of Agenda -- by Richard Cowan

President George W. Bush's political woes are rattling the Republican-led Congress where his majority party is starting to lose control of its conservative agenda, congressional officials and political analysts say.

Republican strains could be seen and heard last week when a proposed $50 billion spending-reduction plan that targeted some programs for the poor suddenly unraveled.

With little time before the U.S. Congress broke for a three-day holiday weekend, an apparently weary House of Representatives Majority Leader Roy Blunt announced he was canceling a budget vote. "We had not quite gotten there yet," said Blunt, a Missouri Republican.

Simultaneously, tax cuts, which Republicans have used for years to ride to power, started to lose their political appeal.

While Bush's approval ratings sink and questions mount about whether Republicans will retain control of Congress in next year's elections, the spending-cut bill has become their high priority.

"I think they have to do something prior to November 2006, to show they understand they have overspent and are determined to do something about it," said Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

As a result, Republicans are engaged in a high-stakes fight largely among themselves.

They are attempting to determine if they can finance the increasingly unpopular Iraq war, secure U.S. borders, repair cities devastated by hurricanes and prepare for a possible flu pandemic - while upholding two pillars of conservatism: cutting taxes and government spending.

Wide-Ranging Woes

The Republican majority's problems in Congress have been on a slow boil for months, and have ranged from fiscal to political to legal matters.

Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas had to step down as House Republican leader after being indicted on felony charges in September, and Senate Republican leader Bill Frist of Tennessee found himself the subject of a stock insider-trading probe.

Democrats were particularly heartened last week when they won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, dealing Republicans still another setback.

On the fiscal front, given all the demands on the government, coupled with four consecutive years of huge budget deficits, Republicans "don't have much room to maneuver," Sabato said.

"But whose fault is that? They've spent everything that can be spent. It's hard to have any sympathy for them," he added.

Sabato and others predicted that as long as Bush's poll ratings remained low - they have been under 40 percent for weeks - Republican conservatives and moderates would challenge the president and congressional leaders.

Robert Walker, a former member of the House Republican leadership who now heads a Washington lobbying firm, said that with Democrats boycotting the majority party's fiscal agenda, congressional leaders would have to focus on sweetening the pot for wavering Republicans.

"Typically in these kinds of circumstances they find ways of dealing with it," Walker said, referring to provisions important to particular congressional districts that could be added or deleted from the budget plan.

That already has been tried to some degree, by adding winter-heating funds for Northeastern lawmakers and deleting some food-stamp cuts or oil drilling provisions that were problematic for others. A retooled spending-cut plan could reach the House floor next week.


2. A Tent Divided -- by Alan Ehrenhalt

One thing we used to know for sure about the two political parties was that only one was really a party. That was the Republicans. They were a distinct minority in the country, but they did have a certain cohesion and a more or less consistent view of the world, built on a faith in limited government.

Democrats didn't have anything like that. They were a big, sloppy bundle of contradictions, a coalition of convenience in which Mississippi segregationists and Manhattan socialists pretended to have something in common. The only thing keeping them together was a desire to win elections and head Congressional committees. Sooner or later the sheer absurdity of it had to sink them, and it did.

Now we are entering a political era defined by a similar contradiction, except that the roles are reversed. Democrats are the minority party, but one that, for better or worse, consists of people and interests with a similar political and cultural language. Any differences in strategy and policy choice are essentially at the margins. On the issues that Democrats care about most these days - abortion, the role of religion, the war in Iraq - there aren't that many dissenters. The dissenters have left.

Republicans, meanwhile, have built a sprawling, wobbly tent in which libertarians, Christian moralists and suburban business owners all pretend to have similar goals. But as it was for the Democratic Party of 30 years ago, that tent is too flimsily constructed to stay up forever.

This month's election results don't suggest when its collapse will occur, but they offer a few clues to how it might happen. Exhibit A is Virginia, where the Democratic governor-elect, Timothy M. Kaine, tore through the fragile Republican constituencies, winning almost every populous suburban county, even the conservative exurbs outside Washington and Richmond, and leaving his Republican opponent stuck with a rump coalition of rural diehards, Christian activists and anti-tax militants that lost by more than 100,000 votes.

Exhibit B is California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, tried to rally the majority that elected him in 2003, only to find that it no longer existed. Virginia was a Republican defeat; California was a humiliation. All four of Mr. Schwarzenegger's favored ballot measures, labeled as a package that would reform California politics, failed by substantial margins, driven to defeat not so much by the governor's tactical ineptitude as by his inability to construct a viable coalition of interests that cared about enacting it as much as the opponents, led by public employees, cared about defeating it.

But perhaps the most striking exhibit is Colorado, which passed Referendum C, a ballot proposition that suspends one of the Republican anti-tax movement's proudest national achievements: the 1992 state constitutional amendment forcing Colorado to return budget surpluses to the voters regardless of the fiscal climate or any perceived need for public investment.

Referendum C is the product of an alliance between the state's Republican governor (long a supporter of the amendment) and the Democratic House speaker. That partnership brought together organized education, Chambers of Commerce, suburban mayors, real estate developers and conventional labor Democrats, all of whom believed that the state couldn't meet its education and transportation needs while systematically emptying its treasury every year.

Left on the other side were a Christian right that didn't particularly care about the issue, some urban blue-collar populists and an anti-tax militia that lacked sufficient strength to be competitive.

Perhaps no one looked sillier in the aftermath of the Colorado vote than Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, who barnstormed against Referendum C and declared after the vote that Gov. Bill Owens, the referendum's chief supporter, had forfeited his future in national politics. Mr. Owens responded that he didn't want a career in national politics.

Indeed, it is Mr. Norquist's informal political alliance, what he calls the "Leave Us Alone" coalition, that points up the most serious rents in the 21st-century Republican fabric. Over the past decade, the coalition has grown from its original libertarian base to include Christian Right activists whose agenda of moral regulation represents a flat rejection of libertarian values. It is the modern-day equivalent of Bella Abzug, the New York feminist, and James Eastland, the Mississippi segregationist, attending Democratic conventions together in the 1960's. It is too ridiculous to last, and it won't.

The potential for schism in the unwieldy Republican ranks is nothing new; it goes back to the debate between libertarians and Christian moralists that played out in the National Review in the 1950's. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won a presidential election as head of a movement that improbably fused together disciples of Jerry Falwell and disciples of Milton Friedman. But all the factions could agree on the need for a tough stand against Communism, no matter what their differences might be over abortion or federal spending.

The danger to Republicans of life without an evil empire became clear in 1992, the first post-cold-war presidential election. In that contest, the dominant role of social-issue conservatives - especially at the national convention in Houston - led to the defeat of George H. W. Bush and the election of Bill Clinton as president.

Mr. Clinton made his mistakes, but he never failed to understand that the Republican alliance was tenuous and easily sundered, which is why he won two terms and would have won a third. Al Gore, utterly inept at exploiting the same vulnerabilities, still managed to outpoll George W. Bush by more than 500,000 in the popular vote in 2000.

What Republicans desperately needed after Mr. Clinton was an international enemy threatening enough to replace the Soviets, and by a remarkable turn of events, they soon had one. The terrorist attacks of 2001 not only unified the country for a brief time; they also gave the Bush administration a grace period of more than three years in which anti-terrorist rallying cries were sufficiently compelling to paper over factional and ideological differences that the party ultimately would have to confront.

The grace period has ended. The results in Virginia, California and Colorado are the first serious warning to Republicans that they now must deal with political life largely as it existed on Sept. 10, 2001, and for nearly a decade before that. They are a hyper-extended family whose members are starting to realize that they have very little to say to each other. The internecine arguments over the year's Supreme Court nominees and last week's House budget bickering only serve to underscore the discomfort.

None of this means that the Democratic Party will return to majority status any time soon. What it does suggest is that running against Republicans, in much of the country, is no longer the political equivalent of rocket science. It requires candidates who can find the torn places in the tent and then push through them. Bill Clinton knew how to do that; incumbent governor Mark Warner and his successor Tim Kaine learned how to do it in Virginia. John Kerry never quite figured it out and didn't become president.

It remains to be seen whether the next Democratic applicant for the job will grasp the opportunity. But it is there for the taking.

(Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing magazine, is the author of "The United States of Ambition" and "The Lost City.")