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Base to Bush: It's Over
Let's say you're a Republican president, a bit more than midway through your second term. You're scrambling to salvage what you can of a deeply unpopular war, you're facing a line of subpoenas from Democrats in Congress and your poll ratings are in the basement. What do you do? You estrange the very Republicans whose backing you need the most.Republicans aren't mad at Bush for the same reasons that Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the devotees of MoveOn.org are; there's no new anti-Bush consensus among left and right. Conservatives are unhappy because the president allied himself with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) over an immigration deal that leaned too far toward amnesty for illegal immigrants. They're unhappy because Bush has shown little interest in fiscal responsibility and limited government. And they're unhappy, above all, because he hasn't won the war in Iraq. All of this has left Republicans saying, at least among themselves, something blunt and devastating: It's over. The problem is there for anyone to see: Bush's approval ratings could not have collapsed to 30 percent unless a lot of his base deserted him. In a number of recent polls, his job-approval rating among Republicans has been in the low- to mid-60 percent range. Despite all this, the president has behaved in recent weeks like a man with political capital to burn. On immigration reform, he defied the GOP base as if his well of support were so deep that he could draw out as much of it as he liked. He also gave himself the worst of all worlds in the case of Libby, Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff. By commuting Libby's prison sentence -- as opposed to pardoning him outright -- for perjuring himself to CIA leak investigators, Bush outraged his Democratic opposition while leaving his base vaguely disappointed. But for the base writ large, the case wasn't about Libby. It was about the politics of the Iraq war. A lot of conservatives had hoped for a full pardon because they wanted a strong White House statement that the CIA leak investigation had spun out of control, that it had grown from a set of crazy political circumstances and that the whole mad imbroglio should never have gotten as far as it did. In short, they wanted something like the impassioned statement President George H.W. Bush issued in December 1992, when he pardoned former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, former national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane, former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams and three other participants in the Iran-contra affair. So the commutation won no more than tepid approval from the base. And it certainly didn't offset the terrible damage the president did to himself during the immigration debate by backing a bill that would have put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. Many conservatives are still hopping mad over the president's description of the bill's opponents as people who "don't want to do what's right for America." Things got so bad that a top White House aide recently tried to reassure a group of conservative journalists that the president isn't out of touch. "He gets it," the aide said. "He gets it." But he didn't get it enough to avoid a major defeat -- one that probably sounded the official death knell to Bush's attempts to turn his brand of compassionate conservatism into law. So now the president has 18 months left in office, and they won't be quiet ones. Absent the committed backing of his party, he will be forced to exercise power based not on his political clout but rather on the authority the Constitution gives the office of the president: He is commander in chief. He can veto bills. He can issue pardons. And that's about it. The deterioration of the base will be particularly critical when it comes to the Iraq war. September will bring the most important moment of the president's second term, when Gen. David H. Petraeus is set to report to Congress on progress in Iraq, thereby starting an intense and protracted debate over funding and withdrawal timetables. If Bush cannot convince conservatives who are already unhappy with him about domestic issues that his Iraq plan is working, he'll see Republicans in Congress -- and on the presidential campaign trail -- peel away. That would put him in danger of losing control of the war. If Bush is energetic with his vetoes, he might see a bit more enthusiasm from the base. It's always good to have an enemy, after all. "These days, the only time he gets support is when Democrats attack him," says one Washington-based GOP strategist. But that will take him only so far. George W. Bush's time to get big things done has passed. Even his most ardent fans, the ones who wish him the best, are looking forward to Jan. 20, 2009. Byron York is National Review's White House correspondent and the author of "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy." Posted by: Pappy 2007-07-09 |
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