RSS 2.0 FeedHow George Bush Destroyed The Republican Party
by Doug MataconisA possibly pre-mature post-mortum from Peggy Noonan:
The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom–a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.
As Daily Pundit’s Bill Quick said:
In the vein of LBJ and Walter Cronkite, I think it is fair to say that if George W. Bush has lost Peggy Noonan, then he has lost the Republican Party.
Or, to be even more emphatic, George W. Bush has succeeded what even a scandal ridden President like Richard Nixon could not do. He has completely shattered the Republican Party alliance, alienated both it’s libertarian and conservative wings, and tainted nearly every Republican official on the national level with the stink of an Administration that is clearly, as Noonan notes, not at all concerned with preserving anything resembling a Republican majority:
The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.
(…)
They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!
Noonan is talking principally of course about the immigration bill, which has outraged conservatives nationwide, and which has led to a dramatic drop off in GOP fundraising.
But this is about more than immigration. Bush has essentially lost credibility within his own party, and the Republican Party as a whole is suffering for it. Things are going to get worse before they get better, and 2008 is shaping up to be a very rough year for Republicans.
The question is, what will they do to rebuild the party from the mess that it will be in when George Bush leaves on January 20, 2009 ?
Frankly, I have no idea what it means to be “conservative” anymore. Is it the Wall Street Journal wing or the The Weekly Standard Wing that are squaring off over “open borders?” Is it the James Dobson wing that wants a strong centralized federal government to enforce/preserve it’s definition of cultural decency? Is it the Michelle Malkin Wing that would excuse Atilla the Hun as president as long as he was a registered republican? Is it the Paleoconservative wing of Pat Buchannan, who are against the Iraq War but despise Free Trade? Or is it the Milton Friedman/Hayek wing, whose views would be represented by the likes of Cato?
Peggy “Thousand Points of Light” Noonan is now just waking up to the fact that the “Bushies” aren’t movement conservatives. No shit, Sherlock. I think we’ve known that since 1988.
And her utterly ridiculous notion of a “small bill” to seal off the borders is just silly. We’ve 30 years of a failed drug war to empirically inform us just how well that would work.
The simple fact is that the modern GOP has always depended on a “National Security” glue to cobble together it’s various elements, including independents, to forge a “coalitional majority.” In 1988, it appeared that with the election of George H.W. Bush over a clueless Dukakis, that the GOP had a permanent hegemony over the presidency. That fallacy dissipated just a mere 2 years later in the aftermath of the end of the cold war and perceived neglect and incompetence in the throes of a recession.
In 2004, we were once again treated to a permanent GOP majority, this time at the hands of Rove who had supposedly woven together a permanent mix of WOT security voters with Christian Evangelicals. By 2006, however, when the consequences of a pre-emptive war against War aginst Iraq came home to roost, the permanent GOP majority was routed. Even worse for the GOP, according to the PEW Research Center, for the first time in 30 years, the GOP had lost their National Security advantage over the democrats.
At this point, it’s perhaps accurate to say that the GOP base is largely white evangelical men and married white females. If this base thinks going authoritarian is the way to preserve the political viability of the GOP, it’s sadly mistaken.
Comment by Kaligula — June 2, 2007 @ 9:33 amWhy wouldn’t George Bush destroy the Republican party, He’s destroyed everything else in this country!
Comment by Bison — June 2, 2007 @ 11:00 amBTW, Why should we care, The Republican Party is responsible for the scourge that is GWB, Let them spend the next forty years in the political wilderness as atonement.
Noonan has complained about more than immigration. In case that interests, try the links in DP post Peggy’s Revenge.
Comment by Lastango — June 2, 2007 @ 12:01 pmThe demise of the Republican Party(well deserved, by the way) will hopefully open the door for the rise of a truly limited, constitutional government party.
Comment by Ken H — June 2, 2007 @ 2:12 pmThe Republican Party and other Republican leaders must distance themselves from this crazed and arrogant President. Someone like Senator Sessions comes to mind as I watched his thoughtful and methodical derailment of this horrible immigration bill. He also told the President (during the summoning of Republicans to the Oval Office)that he could not support this bill. I believe the Party would surge if they upheld their core principles such as the rule of law, less government, American families first and fiscal responsibility. How could any Republican leader support any immigration bill that is already predicted to cost TRILLIONS if the illegal aliens are legalized? So, the answer is, we need the Republican party to say, “this President is wrong”. At this point, they have supported this most unpopular President in modern times and angering their base. When called by the RNC before the last election, I told them NO DONATIONS because of illegal immigration. Their response was “Do you want Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker”. That’s the sort of arrogance we are up against. To add fuel to the fire, after the Republicans lost seats in the last election, the elected Mel Martinez to head the RNC and supported a “National Republican Hispanic Assembly” whose racist goals were to elect Hispanics. Why would I support that? Let all the aliens become voters and see how much Republican support they give. I doubt much. Of course, this was all so obvious to most..several years back. An now our President wants to legalize millions of would-be Democrat voters. Really dumb.
Comment by Marge — June 2, 2007 @ 2:56 pmThis may sound trite, but George Bush IS the Repulican party. Bush does NOTHING on his own, except say stupid things like, “I’m the decider.” He is merely a figurehead for the elite American robber barons, the Saudi shieks and somewhat ironically, Israel. All Bush has really done is make it painfully obvious what the real neocon-republican agenda is since he is neither tactful nor intelligent; he just blurts things out and doesn’t cover his tracks very well. He is not dangerous on his own, in fact, he is afraid to make a move (remember My Pet Goat?) I lump the neocons and the republicans together because they have a symbionic replationship, feeding off one another, but mostly they are feeding off the American middle class and benefit from the same things which harm most average Americans. Bush has NOT destroyed the republican party but he HAS exposed them in being the very obvious frontman and typical republican that he is. This was one of the republican party’s biggest mistakes in putting a “good ol boy” type in the Whitehouse instead of a sharp cookie. The good ol boy came out for all to see, and it wasn’t (and isn’t) pretty, but there it is for all to see, and that’s actually a good thing, for now it is more than obvious what the republicans are made of…
Comment by nikolai — June 2, 2007 @ 5:45 pmPeggy Noonan qualifies as a classic sociopath and all-around compulsive pathological liar who vomits smears and gibberish the way other people breathe. As the speechwriter for Bonzo the Chimp’s co-star, Noonan covered herself with shame by inaugurating every infamy of which she now complains. So it’s beyond hilarious to hear her raise hypocrisy to a new level by complaining about lack of “wisdom” and “political hacks.”
Comment by mclaren — June 2, 2007 @ 7:33 pmThe people in the White House today are merely fulfilling the policies initiated by the senile cirminal Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who first pissed all over the base of the Republican Party, talking the religious-right talk while breaking every implicit promise he made to them. It was the senile criminal Reagan who crammed the West Wing with more corrupt hacks than Nixon ever dreamed — with the result that more White House staffers got indicted under Reagan than under any other president in history. Even the Attorney General of the United States got indicted and convicted and went to prison, fer cripes sakes! That never even happened under Nixon.
The senile criminal Reagan tried “to lay down markers for history” by running a criminal conspiracy from the basement of the White House, violating the constitution in the process.
As the most widely hated president in history, Reagan remains the paragon and unexcelled paragon of bad judgment, corruption, syophancy, fringe lunatic religious beliefs (it was Reagan who first started talking about the Rapture), incompetence, stupidity, blind ideology and mindless appointer of loyal crooks. But Reagan went even farther than the current drunk-driving C student inhabiting the White House — Reagan was so deluded that he hired an astrologer to work out the times of his important public announcements.
American began its downward trajectory under the presidency of Bonzo the Chimp’s co-star. The current drunk-driving C student infesting the White House has just carried through on all of Reagan’s promises.
Bush never was a conservative. But he has moved to the left of “Chappaquidick” teddy he last 2.5 years. He has betrayed Ronnie if not the GOP.But he, like his daddy, will insure the next presidnt is a Dem.
Comment by Rodney A Stanton — June 2, 2007 @ 8:08 pmmcclaren,
While I too dislike Reagan, I would like to point out that very little of what he did was new. In my list, the top three presidents who did the most to wreck the country would be FDR, Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln.
In fact, most of our modern problems can be laid at the door of old Woodrow, who made them all possible (with alot of help from FDR).
Comment by tarran — June 2, 2007 @ 8:28 pm