archived: 28 May - 3 Jun, 2006         Back                 Next

                        FRACTURE 

The fracture of the Republican Party is gaining momentum in some quarters.  Regan Republicans, who principally believe in economic conservatism rather than radical religious fundamentalism, are in open revolt.  Two recent examples reflect the fault lines opening wider in the Republican Party.  

First, fiscally conservative Republicans are increasingly abhorrent of Congressional Republicans advancing radical social policy; constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage as the most recent example, while spending the federal government deeper into debt.  One Republican expressed it well in the Boston Globe: 

LIKE A LOT of conservatives, I won't be voting Republican in the congressional elections this fall. Admittedly, I won't have a choice -- in Massachusetts, Republican candidates for Congress generally spare voters the trouble of defeating them by not bothering to run in the first place.

But millions of conservatives will have a choice. And the closer Election Day draws, the clearer it becomes that plenty of them will choose not to vote Republican. Unless something changes dramatically -- and soon -- the GOP is poised to lose its most reliable voters, and with them any hope of keeping its congressional majority.  . . .

Liberals and Democrats who grow apoplectic when talking about Republican governance in Washington must find it weirdly gratifying to see conservatives and GOP loyalists spitting nails when they talk about them, too. National Review, the influential conservative journal, depicts ``A View of Congress" on the cover of its May 22 issue with a large, unflattering photo of an elephant's rear end. Inside, editor-in-chief Rich Lowry and Washington editor Kate O'Beirne write: ``The Republican majority has lately been notable for its bungling, fecklessness, self-serving defensiveness, and hysteria -- sometimes all at once."

Many on the right are no less acid in describing Bush. One conservative commentator described him recently as a ``dime-store Democrat" and ``something of an embarrassment" and wrote that ``a Republican president and a Republican Congress have lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to stop raiding the public fisc." It says something about Bush's willingness to listen to such criticism that the author of those words -- Tony Snow -- has just become the White House spokesman.

But it will take more than merely listening to its critics for the Republican Party to stanch the hemorrhaging of its base.

Reaganite conservatives have been the mainstay of the GOP for more than 20 years, and many of them are disgusted with the abandonment of Reaganite principles at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. If they had wanted skyrocketing budgets, new federal bureaucracies, more regulation of political speech, and stalemates on immigration, energy, and Social Security, they say, they would have voted for Democrats. Instead they voted for Republicans -- and what did they get? Skyrocketing budgets, new federal bureaucracies, more regulation of political speech, and stalemates on immigration, energy, and Social Security.

Though the conservatives' exasperation isn't new, it was muted after Sept. 11 to preserve a common front in the war on terrorism. But now the pot is boiling over. Conservatives are shifting into Howard Beale mode: They're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Many may simply sit out the election this November, even if that means letting Democrats take over Congress. Maybe then, they reason, Bush will remember why the Constitution gives him a veto. And maybe then Republican officeholders will remember why they were elected.

For the party's Reaganite core, the list of outrages is a long one, everything from steel tariffs to McCain-Feingold to gasoline demagoguery. Most troubling of all has been the explosive growth in the size and cost of government. On Bush's watch, the federal budget has grown twice as fast as during the Clinton years. Expenditures this year will come to nearly $24,000 per household -- the most, in real terms, since World War II. Not since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House has spending soared so recklessly.

In the election campaign of 1994, the first item on the Republican manifesto -- the Contract With America -- was to control the federal budget. ``Isn't it time we hold Congress accountable?" they asked. ``The American people demand responsibility . . . The spending madness must stop." To a lot of voters in 1994, that sounded like an excellent idea. Twelve years later, it still does.            

In Kansas, the former State Chairman of the Republican Party is switching his Party to Democrat, reportedly to be named as the Democratic candidate for Lt. Gov. under the current incumbent Democratic Governor, Kathleen Sebelius. It is a breakup of moderate and radical right Republicans: 

Former Kansas Republican Party Chairman Mark Parkinson switched his party affiliation to Democrat on Tuesday . . . .

For years, Kansas Republicans have been split between moderate and conservative factions, and . . . Parkinson [is] moderate . . . .

Also among prominent Kansas Republicans who have switched parties is Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison, who switched to challenge conservative Republican Attorney General Phill Kline in the November general election. Parkinson is co-chairman of Morrison's campaign.

A former House member also recently switched from Republican to Democrat to challenge the woman who beat her in 2004. Cindy Neighbor of Shawnee filed for office as a Democrat and faces Rep. Mary Pilcher Cook in a rematch in November. . . .

Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, D-Topeka, has known Parkinson since he was a teenager and served with him in the Legislature. He said Parkinson is qualified to be lieutenant governor and that his party switch was significant.

"My guess is that he's been thinking about this for a long time, that this isn't a fly-by-night decision to change parties," Hensley said. "It's not a case of them leaving the party, they feel the party as left them for a long time. This is not an isolated deal."

Mays said Republicans need to find common ground rather than defecting. He doesn't consider the rift in the party surprising, considering the GOP has dominated Kansas politics since statehood. Mays said while the party recently has shifted to the right, it inevitably will shift back to the left.

Sebelius is courting Parkinson's fellow moderates in her re-election bid, something she did successfully in 2002 when she defeated conservative GOP challenger Tim Shallenburger. 

For Democrats, the fault lines are more than passive opportunities.  Democrats should be making the case to Republican moderates that the social engineering of the radical religious right will divide America for generations to come.  And, the last President to have a balanced budget was not a Republican, but a Democratic.

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Updated: May 30, 2006

                        QUESTION/ANSWER 

Arianna Huffington pens an excellent article on former VP Al Gore asking the question that is on the minds of many Democrats: 

            AL GORE TAKES CANNES BY STORM - WILL THE OVAL OFFICE BE NEXT?             

Gore sends a quick and, to some, disappointing reply: 

"I'm not planning to be a candidate again, ever. I have no intention of being a candidate," Gore says again and again. But he also notes, "I haven't made a Shermanesque statement because it just seems odd to do so."

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                        THE NEOCONS 

Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly, authors perhaps the best analysis of the failure of neoconservative ideology TPJ has found to date.  

In the beginning, neoconservatism was a movement of onetime liberals enraged at the wave of violence and disorder that overtook the cities in the 1960s. Riots convulsed urban America in that stormy decade, crime rates soared, student radicals seized campuses. How could anyone see all this, the first generation of neocons inquired, and still remain a liberal?

For it was all the liberals' fault. Wafted along by their vaporous good intentions, indifferent to any unintended consequences those intentions might engender, wrapped up in their dizzy notions of the perfectibility of humankind, the liberals (at least, as the neos caricatured them) crafted criminal codes devoid of punishment, welfare programs requiring no work. In the world the liberals made, civic order took a back seat to individual rights, and as order vanished, the urban middle class vanished with it, abandoning once-vibrant neighborhoods for the safety of the suburbs. A neoconservative, the movement's founding father, Irving Kristol, famously observed, was a liberal who'd been mugged by reality. While liberals dithered, neoconservatives argued first and foremost for more cops.

Fast-forward four decades and we've come full circle. The neocons have refocused their attention on foreign policy and, in championing the Iraq war, have come to embody everything they once mocked and despised in '60s liberals.

Bolsheviks in the cause of their vaporous intentions, so bent on ignoring reality that they dismissed and suppressed all intelligence that prophesied the bloody complexities of the post-Saddam landscape, they conjured from nowhere and guaranteed the world an idealized postwar Iraq.

The sharpest irony was their stunning indifference to the need for civic order. When the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, said that the occupation would require many hundreds of thousands of troops to establish and maintain the peace, he was publicly rebuked by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the administration's foremost neocon, and quickly put out to pasture. When the first U.S. official to take charge in post-invasion-Iraq, Jay Garner, called for a massive effort to train Iraq's police and restore order, he was summarily dismissed. When looting far more widespread than anything the United States had ever known swept Iraq's cities after Saddam's fall, Don Rumsfeld shrugged and said, "Stuff happens" - a two-word death sentence for the possibility of a livable Iraq.  . . .

Irving Kristol initiated neoconservatism at least partly in revulsion at the disorder of John Lindsay's New York. Now his son William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and the single leading proponent (going back to the mid-1990s) of invading Iraq, has helped convert neoconservatism into a source of a disorder infinitely more violent than anything that once disquieted his dad. To do so, he and his fellow war proponents ignored all credible information on the actual Iraq and promised an Eden more improbable than anything that '60s liberals ever imagined. "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America," he told National Public Radio listeners in the war's opening weeks, "that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's been almost no evidence of that at all," he continued. "Iraq's always been very secular."

He wasn't entirely wrong. Iraqi professionals were disproportionately secular. Now they are packing up their secularism and taking it to other lands. The war, and the failure to establish order that led to the barbarism that's driving Iraqis away, can't be laid solely on the neocons' doorstep, of course. These second-generation neos needed a trio of arrogant, onetime CEOs - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld - to actualize their vision. But actualize it they did, and the ideologues whose forebears once argued that the drugged-out Bronx was a monument to liberal folly have now made blood-drenched and depopulating Baghdad the monument to their own neocon obsessions.  

Democrats should be circulating Meyerson’s article widely.  

                        RECAPTURING CONGRESS      

Every poll in 2006 has reflected that Democrats enjoy a lead in the generic Congressional ballot for the US House of Representatives asking voters if they plan to vote Democrat or Republican in their congressional races, but without referencing specific candidates.  A plethora of articles cite the generic Congressional ballot for the proposition that Democrats are destined to make substantial gains in the US House this fall. 

Democrats should avoid excessive exuberance. 

The correlation between the generic ballot and actual voting patterns on Election Day, particularly this far from the election, is tenuous at best.  Mystery Pollster (a TPJ favorite) summarizes the proper perspective (emphasis added): 

The surveys we are seeing now typically report results among registered voters, a distinction that according to various reports by the Gallup organization consistently tips the scale in favor of the Democrats.  For example, a recent (subscribers-only) analysis reports that "Democrats almost always lead on the generic ballot among registered voters, even in elections in which Republicans eventually win a majority of the overall vote for the House of Representatives."   

In another report released in February, Gallup's David Moore put it more plainly: "Our experience over the past two mid-term elections, in 1998 and 2002, suggests that the [registered voter] numbers tend to overstate the Democratic margin by about ten and a half percentage points."  Similarly, taking a somewhat longer view ("most of the last decade") Gallup's Lydia Saad reported last September that "the norm" a five point Republican deficit among all registered voters that "converts to a slight lead among likely voters."   Make "some adjustments" to the generic vote, she wrote, and one can "make a fairly accurate guess about how many seats each party would win."

Not everyone agrees.  For example, in a recent column entitled "Don't Bet on the Generic Vote," Jay Cost argued that the problem is less about a "consistent Democrat skew," than about the weak predictive value of the question this far out from an election.   

Mystery Pollster’s full analysis is an excellent read for those who want to understand how to interpret polling results. 

If there is a 5% to 10% skew towards the Democrats, the results from the Congressional generic ballot below simply suggest that Republicans and Democrats are essentially at parity at this stage of the election process. 

The message for Democrats?  Continue to work every day if we are to recapture majority control of the US House.   

                        BUSH 

Just one new poll has been released since TPJ’s previous report earlier in the week; from Diageo/Hotline, pegging Bush’s approval rating at 37%. Diageo/Hotline is actually in line with other polling as this polling firm’s results are usually on the high side of Bush’s averages.  And, Diageo/Hotline’s May poll reflects a substantial drop from its previous results in February, 45% approve, 52% disapprove.  

TPJ has been looking for a “bounce” from Bush’s national address on immigration earlier in May.  It usually takes approximately ten polls to clearly identify and confirm.  Five more polls are needed before the assessment can really be made.   

For the moment, Bush’s average approval rating for May clearly remains below the April average and his disapproval rating remains above 60%, clear indications that his administration is still floundering with the public.