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Shooting an Elephant
Why Republicans are screwed.
By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, April 25, 2006, at 7:28 PM ET

When George Bush and Gerald Ford met this week, it's unlikely the president asked his predecessor for advice about how to weather midterm elections. In 1974, Ford alienated conservatives by picking moderate Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. Then he alienated everyone else by pardoning Nixon just two months before the elections, leading to a 20-point plunge in his approval rating. The Republican National Committee could only rally the troops through commiseration, running an ad that asked, "When has it been easy to be a Republican?" Ford's party dropped 43 seats in the House and four in the Senate.

It isn't easy being a Republican these days, either. Bush's approval rating is at an all-time low, gas prices are near an all-time high, and Iraq continues to burn. Voters have an even lower opinion of the GOP-controlled Congress. Ideological disputes within the party make it hard for believers to pick sides, and incompetence at the top makes it difficult to follow through on the agenda items Republicans do agree on, like reducing the deficit. Bad news from Iraq and any number of scandals tied to the GOP erupt regularly. A month ago, the Republican political class was merely worried. Now its members are talking about "avoiding catastrophic losses." Conversations about the state of the party used to have two parts: all the bad news followed by signs of hope. I'm just hearing a one-act play now.

On the stump, presidential hopefuls John McCain and Newt Gingrich are openly prophesying doom. When party leaders try to act, their base slaps them for it. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Denny Hastert penned an urgent letter imploring President Bush to investigate price gouging. The National Review and Wall Street Journal thumped them like a tub. "Few things are less becoming in a political party than desperation," began the Journal's editorial. "Republicans can blame business all they want for high [gas] prices, but sounding like liberal Democrats won't save them in November." The blogosphere echo chamber has also turned sharply critical.

Diehard conservatives are upset over record spending levels and timidity by their leaders, who they think should have responded to high gas prices with renewed calls for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and streamlined regulation. More moderate and realist-minded Republicans have been turned off by Bush's aggressive, interventionist foreign policy. Military families may still support the war but are fed up enough with lengthy deployments—particularly of the National Guard and reserves—that it's possible they won't turn out. Party inroads with Hispanic voters may have been squandered by vocal members of the GOP who want to seal the border and lock up illegal immigrants. All this has some arguing that the Republicans can't whittle their coalition down much more. "We're in a white cul-de-sac," says John Weaver, strategist for John McCain.

It seems safe to assume that the party with the more motivated voters will win in 2006. Right now, that looks overwhelmingly like the Democrats. Forty-eight percent of voters "strongly disapprove" of George Bush's performance, less than half of that number "strongly approve." Democrats are relying on that anger to get out the vote. Republicans will continue to spook their voters with dark images of terror and life under a liberal regime, but while that may bring in cash, it's not changing public opinion, especially when, on issues from the response to Hurricane Katrina to the Dubai port deal, the administration has created a pretty sorry image of life under a conservative regime.

So, what can President Bush and his party do? It might help to stop arguing about what will happen if they don't get elected and start talking a bit about what will happen if they do. It might help to romance the base, which needs to turn out if the GOP is to avoid big losses. But beyond that, there may not be much Bush, Karl Rove, or the congressional wing of the party can do to reverse the tide. The public mood appears impervious to Bush's many speeches on Iraq. The administration has oversold progress before, and people are reluctant to buy it now even when there is tentative political progress. To address the issue of high gas prices, Bush took the extraordinary step of halting deposits to the strategic petroleum reserve. He also promised to look into price gouging by oil companies and called on Congress to take away from the oil companies about $2 billion in tax breaks over 10 years. None of these moves is likely to have any significant effect. As the president has candidly admitted, "You can't wave a magic wand." Prices are likely to stay high for a while, possibly a very long while.

In such moments, politicians have followed a simple formula: Play to the base. Congressional leaders will try to cut taxes and pass a constitutional amendment to forbid gay marriage. Bush's reported strategy for doing this also includes adding more money for border patrols as a part of immigration reform and boasting more about the Medicare prescription-drug plan passed in 2004. These issues may have broad electoral appeal, but they won't motivate conservatives to get to the polls. Money on the border will not buy off the armchair minutemen angry that Bush supports what they say is amnesty for illegal immigrants. Whisper the Medicare prescription-drug plan around a fiscal conservative and you'll get a blizzard of spittle. That was the spending transgression that enraged so many of them. The largest expansion of Medicare ever will cost $792 billion from 2006 to 2015, according to last month's Congressional Budget Office estimate, and does little to reform the larger program.

If vulnerable Republicans are going to motivate moderates and independents, they're going to have to do it without the president's help. Bush can still raise money and turn out a loyal crowd, but there's not much chance he'll grow coattails. One top Republican strategist involved in shaping party strategy believes voters have so soured on Bush and the direction of the country that even if the president had more tools to work with, he couldn't improve people's feeling about his administration. Short of an announcement that Osama Bin Laden has been apprehended at JFK customs, Bush's numbers don't have much chance of settling into the 40s until next year.

George Bush is not the only one responsible for his party's condition. Faced with the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, the GOP Congress missed its chance to enact any serious lobbying reform or change the practice of budget "earmarks." Republicans were sent to Washington to change it but have become co-opted by it. Even if Bush wanted to suddenly become a fierce budget hawk, Republicans in Congress wouldn't go along. Congress has expanded federal spending by 45 percent since 2001 with expansive agriculture, education, energy, and highway bills. It has resisted Bush's spending cuts in this election year and plan to lard as much as $20 billion onto Bush's $92 billion request for Iraq funding. Included in that grab is funding for the "railroad to nowhere," the requisite transportation pork that, like the "bridge to nowhere," seems the perfect metaphor for the directionless GOP.

If Republicans manage to hold on to their majorities, it will be because they have perfected the ability to use gerrymandering, pork-barreling, and other toll-keeping powers to maintain themselves in office, much like the Democrats they turned out of office in 1994. Retaining control by a narrow margin will do nothing to solve the struggle at the heart of the party between moderates and social conservatives, neoconservatives, and realists, and between fiscal conservatives and big spenders or fanatical tax cutters. In some sense, if the GOP wins ugly and keeps control, they'll be worse off, retaining undivided responsibility, without much actual ability to do anything, heading into the 2008 election. Even the nomination of Hillary Clinton may not unite the factions. Antipathy toward her husband didn't keep Republicans from a debilitating primary struggle in 1996.

Change may come only if a more bruising internal fight between these factions breaks out into the open. During Ford's presidency, the ideological thicket was cleared by Ronald Reagan, who spoke out against the sitting president of his own party, declaring that the national government had "become more intrusive, more coercive, more meddlesome, and less effective." Perhaps no Republican can make a broad assault on GOP leaders while the country is at war. And it may be harder for, say, John McCain, to moderate a reckless, radical party than it was for Reagan to radicalize Ford's limp, idealess one. But if the GOP doesn't have that fight this year, it's going to have it in 2008.

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Registered: Sep 2003
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32% for the pres as of this morning by CNN. it says something when the president of China is more interested in visiting with Bill Gates than with the president of the US...

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Also able to go in here, purportedly the White House's upcoming 5 Point Electoral Recovery plan. I'm still not convinced it's legit even, but if it is, that'll sure feed into this thread title. I hope it is real.

quote:

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1 DEPLOY GUNS AND BADGES. This is an unabashed play to members of the conservative base who are worried about illegal immigration. Under the banner of homeland security, the White House plans to seek more funding for an extremely visible enforcement crackdown at the Mexican border, including a beefed-up force of agents patrolling on all-terrain vehicles (ATVs). "It'll be more guys with guns and badges," said a proponent of the plan. "Think of the visuals. The President can go down and meet with the new recruits. He can go down to the border and meet with a bunch of guys and go ride around on an ATV." Bush has long insisted he wants a guest-worker program paired with stricter border enforcement, but House Republicans have balked at temporary legalization for immigrants, so the President's ambition of using the issue to make the party more welcoming to Hispanics may have to wait.

2 MAKE WALL STREET HAPPY. In an effort to curry favor with dispirited Bush backers in the investment world, the Administration will focus on two tax measures already in the legislative pipeline--extensions of the rate cuts for stock dividends and capital gains. "We need all these financial TV shows to be talking about how great the economy is, and that only happens when their guests from Wall Street talk about it," said a presidential adviser. "This is very popular with investors, and a lot of Republicans are investors."

3 BRAG MORE. White House officials who track coverage of Bush in media markets around the country said he garnered his best publicity in months from a tour to promote enrollment in Medicare's new prescription-drug plan. So they are planning a more focused and consistent effort to talk about the program's successes after months of press reports on start-up difficulties. Bolten's plan also calls for more happy talk about the economy. With gas prices a heavy drain on Bush's popularity, his aides want to trumpet the lofty stock market and stable inflation and interest rates. They also plan to highlight any glimmer of success in Iraq, especially the formation of a new government, in an effort to balance the negative impression voters get from continued signs of an incubating civil war.

4 RECLAIM SECURITY CREDIBILITY. This is the riskiest, and potentially most consequential, element of the plan, keyed to the vow by Iran to continue its nuclear program despite the opposition of several major world powers. Presidential advisers believe that by putting pressure on Iran, Bush may be able to rehabilitate himself on national security, a core strength that has been compromised by a discouraging outlook in Iraq. "In the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose," said a Republican frequently consulted by the White House. However, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this April 8-11, found that 54% of respondents did not trust Bush to "make the right decision about whether we should go to war with Iran."

5 COURT THE PRESS. Bolten is extremely guarded around reporters, but he knows them and, unlike some of his colleagues, is not scared of them. Administration officials said he believes the White House can work more astutely with journalists to make its case to the public, and he recognizes that the President has paid a price for the inclination of some on his staff to treat them dismissively or high-handedly. His first move, working with counselor Dan Bartlett, was to offer the press secretary job to Tony Snow of Fox News radio and television, a former newspaper editorial writer and onetime host of Fox News Sunday who served George H.W. Bush as speechwriting director. Snow, a father of three and a sax player, is the bona fide outsider that Republican allies have long prescribed for Bushworld and would bring irreverence to a place that hasn't seen a lot of fun lately. "White Houses are weird places," he told a 2004 panel on White House speechwriting. Snow had his colon removed after he was found to have cancer last year, but his doctors have approved the possibility of his taking the grueling post.

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