Shortly after our stunning if not surprising defeat in the last general election, I published a vanity entitled
WHY WE LOST . It is not surprising since it was authored by me that it was a long vanity and I received not a few complaints about its length. Nothing daunted, I nevertheless presume the layout some portions of the vanity because I think they relate to this thread and to Bill Buckley's conclusion, "There are grounds for wondering whether the Republican party will survive this dilemma." I am afraid I am even more pessimistic than Mr. Buckley because I fear the party is likely headed into the redoubt of the old Confederacy, utterly walled out of the blue states and recently chased out of the border states and Ohio and even the Old Dominion itself. Here are selections from that vanity:
America has repudiated the war in Iraq.
The American people have spoken respecting the war in Iraq: they do not tolerate the war in which they see no plan for victory but where they do see blood and treasure being spilled to no purpose with no end in sight.
In fact, growing restiveness with the war in Iraq, predictable at least since the Bush reelection by such a narrow margin in Ohio in 04, is the overwhelming reason for the Republican debacle. The Democrats nationalized the election by converting it into a referendum on the war. In the process they managed successfully to demonize George Bush as an incompetent bumbler. They defeated candidates by morphing them into George Bush.
The essential reason for the defeat was that it was anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush.
85 percent of Americans said the “major reason” was disapproval of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq, 71 percent said disapproval of Bush’s overall job performance, 67 percent cited dissatisfaction with how Republicans have handled government spending and the deficit, 63 percent said disapproval of the overall performance of Republicans in Congress, 61 percent said Democrats’ ideas and proposals for changing course in Iraq. Tellingly, just 27 percent said a major reason the Democrats won was because they had better candidates. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15667442/site/newsweek/
George Bush is a singularly inarticulate man. When he is not delivering a prepared speech, his sincerity and goodness of character come through, but his policies often die an agonizing death along with the syntax. The truth is that Bush has never been able, Ronald Reagan style, to articulate well the three or four fundamental issues which move the times in which we live. One need only cite the bootless efforts to reform Social Security as an example. His inability to tell America why we must fight in Iraq to win the greater worldwide war against terrorism, or how we are even going to win in Iraq, has been fatal to the Republicans' chances in this election. Of course, one can carry this Billy Budd characterization too far and it is easy to overemphasize its importance, but it is part of the general pattern which has led us to this pass. It is a very great pity that the bully pulpit has been squandered in the hands of a man so inarticulate. That the bully pulpit was wasted means that there are no great guiding principles for the country, for the party, for the administration, for Congress to follow, or for the voters to be inspired by. If the voters went into the booth confused about what the Republican Party stands for, the fault is primarily George Bush's
Perhaps now is not the time but certainly after Santorum is defeated we conservatives must face the reality that the electoral map is shrinking. We are unable to make inroads into the blue states (these New Jersey an anomaly due to parochial corruption) while we remain vulnerable and virtually all of the border states, Tennessee, Missouri, West Virginia, Maryland (actually a lost cause). Now even the Old Dominion is threatened. Ohio may be as difficult as Pennsylvania after this cycle.
Demographics will soon turn Florida and Texas away from us and, with the loss of either one of them, conservatism has no hope of putting a president in the White House
All of these factors so far cited are in themselves not party breakers and could have been managed and mitigated but for the elephant in the room: The war in Iraq. Indeed, the superficially inconsistent results of this election cannot be understood unless one accepts the centrality of the issue of the war in Iraq. It was the fulcrum upon which all else turned. Why did the voters overlook the corruption of Democrats and punish disproportionately Republicans? The war in Iraq. Why did the electorate conclude that the administration has been incompetent in handling hurricane Katrina while resolutely declining to consider other explanations? The war in Iraq. The Democrats and the media contrived to make Katrina a metaphor for Iraq and the people largely bought it because they were uneasy about Iraq but patriotic enough to want victory. So they could resolve their ambivalence by reacting to Katrina. The same analysis applies to the issue of the culture of corruption. Why were conservative issues respectfully treated by the electorate when it came to referenda? Because they were not tainted by the war in Iraq. Why was Lincoln Chafee turned out in Rhode Island even though he was adamantly against the war in Iraq? Because his identification as a member of the party responsible for the war overcame his individual posture. The rabidly antiwar voters in Rhode Island knew that Chafee would be casting his votes for control of the Senate with the Republican war party. Why was Senator Lieberman returned in Connecticut as independent despite his support for the war? I have no explanation except to say this anomaly can be explained in terms of Republican defection into his camp and the extraordinarily high personal appeal and integrity of a man who only two cycles ago was his party's vice presidential nominee. Besides, Lieberman made it clear that he would cast his votes for Senate control with the Democrats-the antiwar party in this election. Why do polls show that the administration and the party have lost the confidence of the people in conducting the overall war against terror? Because the people have concluded that the war in Iraq has been conducted incompetently. Katrina or Iraq, chicken or the egg, it all feeds upon itself.
When an uneasy independent voter drew the curtain in the booth he had to choose, statistically speaking, between a Democrat and a Republican. Uneasy about the war, this voter could resolve this dilemma by rationalizing his choice for the Democrats on other grounds like corruption, or incompetence. When a thinking conservative entered the booth, or more likely considers whether to travel to the polling place at all, he could resolve his logical dilemma by staying home where he would not have to choose between his party and his logic because he could justify that decision out of anger over spending and immigration. This conservative voter is like the man who comes home unexpectedly from a business trip, goes upstairs, enters the bedroom where he finds his wife naked in bed, opens the closet door and finds a naked man there with an erection, and hears his wife say, "who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" Well, the conservative voter, deeply troubled by what he sees concerning the war in Iraq, can avoid the dilemma by not opening the closet door, by not going to the polling place.
Let us consider how the Rumsfeld resignation was stage managed as an example of everything that's been wrong with the public face of the Bush administration. First, why in the world was the resignation not done before the election? Who knows how many seats it might have saved. Second, why did Bush expose himself extemporaneously to the country in a setting which plays to his weakness? Predictably, he fell into the media's trap and made a tremendous gaffe to the effect that he lied to the American people about Rumsfeld's impending removal before the election. These kinds of gaffes are the inevitable consequence of playing defense. Tony Snow should be handling these inquiries. George Bush should be reading prepared text. Third, why did not Bush inveigle Speaker Pillosi and majority leader Reed (how I hate writing those words) into expressing approval or even disapproval of his replacement? Had they disapproved, all their talk of bipartisan cooperation would have been exposed on the very first day. If they had approved, Bush gets the credit for a bi-partisan choice. So, the stage management of this affair was mangled but the overall and long-term effect will have its purpose.
The truth is the Republicans now face an agonizing decision which will reveal whether they are entitled to rule or not, they must change course in Iraq,- that has already been decided by the election. It has been virtually acknowledged by Bush in so many words. It has been acknowledged by deed (the firing of Rumsfeld,). The Republicans task must be to implicate the Democrats in the change of course of the war from here on out, but the Republicans must also choose for the country and not for the party. Ideally they can find a solution to the dilemma in Iraq which is also beneficial to the party, but that is by no means assured. We must take a page from Slick Willie's book when he looked into the camera and lied, "the era of big government is over." Clinton then successfully blunted the Gingrich revolution with a series of small triangulations which put him on offense while pretending to have learned his electoral lesson about big government. We must be supple but, we are Republicans -- even conservatives after all, and we are dealing with the actual survival of the Republlic, not school uniforms, so we must do what is right (emphasis added to original post).
Since posting this vanity the Republicans managed to devise a strategy which might just work which is to compel the Democrats to choose defeat in Iraq on the issue of the war funding. Much depends on the skill with which this is handled, whether the Republicans can hang together, and of course whether general Petraeus can turn things around with his surge. I confess that I was extremely skeptical before the surge but I believe it is the best course of action both for the Republican Party and because it is right. I believe that most of the Americans may not recognize that the surge is the right thing to do but I think their instinct tells them that to oppose it is the wrong thing.
Excellent.