[diotima]

The GOP's real base (i.e., those who actually vote for Republicans) actually turned out. But the self-proclaimed "base" didn't--as they've done since 1992.

Either you need to support this claim, or you need to stop making it. If you are referring to this quote:

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Exit Polling data.. religious right
2000.... 14% of which 19% claimed to have voted for Gore...
1996.... 17%

The following is the Rove quote that gets bantered about.......

"We probably failed to marshal support of the base as well as we should have," President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, said yesterday. And by "the base" he means evangelicals.

There should have been 19 million of them, and instead there were 15 million of them. So four million of them did not turn out to vote. … But we also may be returning to the point in America where fundamentalists and evangelicals remain true to their beliefs and think politics is corrupt and therefore they shouldn't participate. … If this process of withdrawal continues, it's bad for conservatives, bad for Republicans, but also bad for the country. … It's something we have to spend a lot of time and energy on.
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then you need to provide some evidence that Bush has written off his base, other than your speculation. This quote doesn't support your claim.

[Poohbah]

Bush may not have actually written off that portion of the vote--but it's been obvious that he hasn't counted on it since 2000, either.

Like I said, the self-proclaimed "base" have been no-shows since 1992. Now, they're working very hard to fracture the rest of the party, because they've lost pretty decisively. They have no hope of victory; they merely wish others to share their misery.