A “Tainted Brand” for Sale - Who’s Buying?
I read this in a column by E.J. Dionne today:
The old conservatism is in crisis, Bush Republicanism (of the son’s variety but not the father’s) is a tainted brand, and no candidate has emerged as the Next New Thing that the party wants or needs.
That reminded me of another article that I had read about a month ago by Ross Douthat in The Atlantic Monthly. Douthat suggests that the “working class conservatism” of Reagan and now George W. Bush will continue to “dominate American politics.” I nearly spewed beer all over my magazine when I read that. I wondered what the hell this guy was thinking and read on. He wrote:
Since the Republicans’ stinging defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, Bush’s distinctive ideological cocktail—social conservatism and an accommodation with big government at home, and a moralistic interventionism abroad—has similarly been derided by many as political poison. The various ingredients of “Bushism,” it’s been argued, have alienated fiscal hawks and foreign-policy realists, Catholics and libertarians—in short, everyone but the party’s evangelical base.
But someone must have forgotten to tell the GOP presidential field. If you consider how the nation’s most ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves for 2008, Bushism looks like it could have surprising staying power.
…
And although Brownback is the only candidate in the field so far with Bush’s personal connection to the party’s religious conservatives, everyone—even McCain, even Giuliani—is actively courting them. This is partly because without evangelical Christians, there would essentially be no Republican Party anymore: Evangelicals provided more votes to the Republicans in last year’s midterms than African Americans and union members combined gave to the Democrats. Their influence within the party more or less requires that primary candidates endorse Bush-style moralism, not only on gay marriage and abortion but in foreign policy as well—which means continued support for Israel, a continued drift toward confrontation with Iran, and further ventures in conservative humanitarianism, along the lines of Bush’s AIDS-in-Africa initiative.
…Keeping the party’s socially conservative base happy without losing the country’s religious middle is a challenge, but Bush met it successfully across three election cycles.
…
While journalists and historians debate where Bush went wrong, Republicans are likely to spend the next decade trying to imitate his successes.
Right there is where I just about lost it again. What successes? George Bush hasn’t succeeded at anything but somehow managing to make it into the White House with the help of his dad’s buddy Jim Baker and the Supreme Court, and then getting re-elected in 2004 even though none of his policies succeeded as planned. Pretty amazing when you think about it, and I do every day. How did this incompetent, dishonest, drunken, born-again little frat boy become our president? Why would anybody embrace “Bushism” as Douthat calls it? None of it has worked. Everything he’s done has been a total failure.
A “tainted brand” as Dionne says is an understatement. Republican candidates should avoid “Bushism” like they would a two-day-old opened bottle of Two-Buck Chuck. It’s swill! Stay away from it!
But Douthat goes on to say how it’s not the policy that has failed, it’s Bush who has failed.
Indeed, as in the Nixon era, it’s possible that what has made the last six years so polarizing isn’t the president’s ideology but the president himself—his tongue-tied speeches and lack of interest in policy detail, his mix of incompetence and abrasive self-assurance, his cronyism and disdain for compromise. Once Bush has been ushered offstage, a Republican Party fashioned in his image could actually help unite the country, as Bush-the-candidate famously promised to do, rather than divide it.
So what he’s saying is that the Republicans can continue to push forward their agenda of privatizing government, rewarding big business instead of the average American, shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor, gutting social programs, ignoring environmental concerns, bullying the rest of the world, and starting wars any damn time they please.
I don’t care who’s pushing that agenda. I don’t think the American people want anything close to four more years of that shit.
Democrats! This coming presidential election is yours for the taking. Don’t screw it up again.
