Michael Steinberger says a hefty defeat might be the best result for the Republicans
Political parties exist to fight elections, and with the presidential campaign now in its climatic weeks, Republicans are gamely battling to keep the White House. Barack Obama has opened a large, possibly insurmountable lead over John McCain, whose every gambit, not least his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, has failed amid the relentlessly dire news about the economy. But it is not just McCain who is facing possible humiliation on 4 November; the entire Republican party, weighed down by George Bush and beset with profound internal divisions, may be headed for electoral armageddon. As bleak as the party’s immediate prospects are, the long-term picture looks even worse. Indeed, the theory that the faster they are dispatched to oblivion the sooner they might find their way back suggests that the most propitious outcome for the Republicans at this point would be a crushing, cathartic defeat.
They have unquestionably earned it. The Bush presidency has been a disaster for the country and his party, a point that even many Republicans now concede, if still only sotto voce. Bush’s public statements on Wall Street’s meltdown and the fast-sinking economy have been dreadful even by his sorry standards; his dazed and confused performance sent his approval rating tumbling to a new low of 25 per cent and has pretty well assured that his reputation is beyond rehabilitation. To say that the country wants him gone is putting it gently; Republicans and Democrats may be locked in a bitter campaign, but they are united on one point — Inauguration Day cannot arrive soon enough. Some Republicans must surely regret now that they did not forgive McCain his apostasies eight years ago and instead chose Bush as the party’s standard-bearer in 2000. As he faces the prospect of being denied the presidency a second time by Bush, McCain undoubtedly shares their regret.
Rick Perlstein, a left-of-centre historian who has chronicled the rise of the American Right, has observed that, in the minds of US conservatives, conservatism never fails; people fail it. But after the Bush years, this is a distinction without a difference. Bush has not only marked himself as a failure; he has thoroughly discredited his party and the conservative movement that has long propelled it. Republicans were once considered the sure hands when it came to foreign affairs
and the economy; under Ronald Reagan, certainly, the GOP became synonymous with security and prosperity. But Bush’s bungled handling of the Iraq war cancelled out the first part of that equation, and having presided over a massive increase in government spending (3.8 per cent annual growth since 2001, according to the
Cato Institute, versus 2.9 per cent for Reagan and just 1.5 per cent for Bill Clinton), record budget deficits, and now the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, he has erased the second part too. Bush took office pledging to continue the Reagan revolution; he has instead brought it to an ignominious end. Rather than evoking comparisons to the Gipper, he is now widely seen as Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover rolled into one.
On his watch, the fabled Reagan coalition of social conservatives, libertarians and foreign policy hawks that catapulted the former California governor to the presidency in 1980 and turned American politics decisively rightward has completely splintered. Bush’s open-chequebook conservatism, tailored to the party’s evangelical wing, alienated small-government types, as did his push for warrantless spying on US citizens and other abridgements of civil liberties.
His pursuit of a neoconservative foreign policy created a rift with more traditional conservatives, many of whom ended up switching teams and embracing the Democrats as the party less likely to lead the United States to calamity abroad. All this has come against the backdrop of a rapidly changing electoral landscape. Four years ago, 47 per cent of registered voters identified themselves as Democrats, against 44 per cent who claimed to be Republicans. Now, the Democrats hold a 51-38 per cent edge, a gap that may widen in the years ahead. America is becoming more ethnically and racially diverse and younger voters are increasing in numbers, trends that overwhelmingly favour the Democrats. The Republicans need to reinvent themselves to remain competitive, and given the deep fissures within the party and the anger over what Bush has wrought, change will likely come only after a long period of internal bloodletting.
Despite the ominous look of things, McCain is not entirely out of the running. The American public is seething at the moment, and angry voters are, by definition, volatile voters. An October surprise, perhaps in the form of a bombshell revelation or a well-timed message from Osama bin Laden, might yet swing the election in McCain’s favour. And, of course, there is a wild card in this year’s campaign: the colour of Obama’s skin.
Many analysts suspect there may be a stronger racial dimension to the voting than the polls now indicate. However, a McCain victory would merely keep the Republicans circling the drain for another four years. Were he to win, he would be saddled with a Democratic Congress, thwarting many if not most of his initiatives. The country has no appetite (or money) for the muscular foreign policy he has promised, and domestic policy appears to be a subject that McCain thinks about only when he needs help falling asleep. His disastrous foray into the negotiations over the financial bail-out package revealed not only his thin grasp of economic issues, but his slender hold on the loyalty of Republican backbenchers, who would likely cause him even greater headaches than the Democrats. Given his own limitations and the limitations that would be imposed on him, it would be hard to imagine McCain lasting beyond a single term (and this is to say nothing of age considerations, which are not insignificant with a 72-year-old candidate). Purely as a political calculation, the Republicans would almost certainly be better served by losing this year rather than risking the damage that a McCain presidency might do to their already tarnished brand.
Indeed, defeat may well offer the Republicans the swiftest path to redemption. A President Obama would inherit quite possibly the most daunting set of challenges an American leader has faced since Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office. Between the carnage on Wall Street and the collapse of the housing market, the US economy has entered a slump that may prove to be as intractable and enduring as Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s. At the same time, the country is mired in two protracted wars; the American public long ago gave up on Iraq, and with events spinning out of control in Afghanistan, support for that effort is being tested. The next four years are going to be spent not just cleaning up the debris from the Bush presidency, but helping Americans adjust to their straitened circumstances at home and diminished influence abroad, which promises to be an utterly thankless task. It is also a situation that could well split the Democratic party.
Should Obama win, Congressional Democrats, citing the economy, will inevitably push to bring the Iraq war to an immediate conclusion, on the principle that money spent in Baghdad would be better spent in Biloxi. The choice for Obama would be a deeply unpalatable one: a precipitous US withdrawal from Iraq and all that this might entail, or a disgruntled Democratic base. Already, some on the Left are griping about the possibility that Obama’s domestic agenda might have to be rolled back on account of the financial crisis; they are certainly not going to tolerate seeing billions of additional dollars siphoned off by the Iraq war, which they hated from the start. And then, of course, there are the Clintons, whose frustration must now be truly off the scale, given the growing likelihood o f a Democratic romp on election day. An Obama victory will end any chance of a Clinton restoration, which will surely not incline either Hillary or Bill to be especially helpful to the new president.
Moreover, the Democrats have a habit of flubbing opportunities. The last time they controlled both the White House and Congress was early in the Clinton presidency; within two years, voters had seen enough and put the Republicans in charge of the House and Senate. True to form, the Democrats nearly committed hara-kiri over the Wall Street
rescue plan. No sooner did the Bush administration propose the $700 billion bail-out than the Democrats on Capitol Hill took the lead in attempting to secure the passage of this wildly unpopular initiative. For three decades, the Democrats had tried in vain to stir public anger over rising income inequality; yet now, at just the moment the peasants were finally reaching for their pitchforks and preparing to declare war on the rich, the Democrats placed themselves front and centre on legislation intended to save investment bankers from the consequences of their own greed and ineptitude. Had the House Republicans not torpedoed the bail-out bill when it first came to a vote, the Democrats would almost certainly have been held responsible for arguably the most controversial act of corporate welfare in US history. This party’s capacity for self-inflicted injury should not be underestimated.
At the same time, though, it would be foolish to underestimate Obama. From the moment he entered the race, the Illinois Senator has waged a brilliant campaign, and while political acumen does not necessarily translate into effective governance (George Bush was an ace at winning elections), the organisational and tactical skills that he has demonstrated augur well for an Obama presidency. He will have a formidable deputy in Joe Biden and will inevitably staff his administration with the brightest, most capable people that the Democratic party has to offer. And while the problems that will await him in the Oval Office are immense, the potential rewards for a job well done are equally so.
If Obama were to succeed in lifting the United States out of its deep rut, he would very likely put his party in a position to dominate American politics for years, possibly even decades to come. Karl Rove had hoped the Bush presidency would yield a political realignment as sweeping and durable as the one ushered in by Roosevelt in 1933. That goal now appears to be within reach, just not in the way that Rove intended.
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