Evan:
I think you’re right that ideologues in the Republican Party (and I’m using “ideologue” here as a euphemism for “people of principle,” rather than “wild-eyed nut cases”) are going to wake up one morning early into the Bush presidency with a terrible hangover. Bush is considerably less conservative than many of his fans believe, not that he’s ever made any secret of it. He’s run so far as an out-of-the-closet moderate, someone who genuinely cares about bipartisan compromise, or the appearance of it anyway. He brags about his friendships with Democrats. He hired Mark McKinnon, who’s not only an excellent media consultant but also an old friend of Paul Begala and Mandy Grunwald (not to mention a former songwriter for Kris Kristofferson and by far the coolest person on the Bush campaign).
The message of all this is unmistakable: I’m no winger. It’s been a terribly effective strategy so far–and it leaves no messy pandering to clean up during the general–but I think it has consequences for conservatives. Bush, as you point out, is in some ways a Reagan-like figure. But here’s one difference: Reagan came to office in 1980 with a large outstanding debt to the right, particularly evangelicals. He rewarded them by giving them jobs and access, and in many cases real power. It was the ideological conservatives who worked for Reagan–Bill Bennett and Gary Bauer, to name two who are still very much around–who pulled his domestic policy to the right and kept it there.
Bush is the first GOP front-runner in memory who owes no such debt to conservatives. Congressional Republicans squandered their leverage over him almost immediately. They threw their endorsements to Bush at the very beginning of the cycle, and without demanding anything in return. They shouldn’t have been surprised when Bush repaid the favor by casting Denny Hastert as Sista Soulja.
But they were. And wounded, too. But by that point there was nothing they could do. My guess is, they’ll be every bit as shocked when President W. strikes up a warm personal friendship with Dick Gephart, doubles the budget of the Department of Education, and appoints several more David Souters to the Supreme Court. Republicans never learn.
Though I must say they’ve been pretty good about the drug thing. Bush has all but admitted cocaine use (or admitted that it would be a bad idea to admit it, which strikes me as roughly the same thing), and nobody apart from Gary Bauer has thrown a fit. Good for everyone involved, I say. Admittedly, I hold the minority view on the drug question–pro-drug but anti-legalization–but I’m convinced a lot of people must feel the way I do: Who’d want a 53-year-old president who’d never done a line? A dork, in other words. Not me.
Then again, maybe a lot of people don’t feel the way I do about it. I’m taken by Bush’s loudmouth frat-boy shtick, for instance. Just about everyone else I know thinks it’s odd, even “troubling” to see a serious presidential candidate run around punching people in the arm and giving nicknames to strangers. They use the phrase “towel-snapper” as an epithet, like there’s something hideous about being mildly boorish with your male friends.
I don’t get it. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of America, Evan. I’m not the man to figure out who buys Texas Monthly and why. Sorry.
Best,
Tucker
