Republicans run right

GOP contenders are betting on an ideological struggle as their post-Bush strategy; it's a risky plan, but there is some logic to it.

In the 2006 election, Republicans suffered devastating losses in the center of the electorate as Democrats powered their takeover of the House and Senate by amassing lopsided margins among independents and moderates.

The response of the 2008 Republican presidential contenders has been somewhat counterintuitive: In both their proposals and their rhetoric, they are moving to the right. All of the leading candidates are staying close to George W. Bush on the big issues, particularly taxes and Iraq. And they are denouncing the leading Democrats with ideologically charged language that accuses them of advocating "surrender" in Iraq and "socialized medicine" at home.

That positioning, of course, partly reflects the imperative of winning a party-nomination process dominated by conservative voters. But the approach of the Republican candidates also advances the dominant party narrative about the reasons for the party's rout last year.

The Republicans are betting that voters disillusioned with Bush have rejected his implementation of a conservative agenda — not the agenda itself. And they are wagering that they can survive what's likely to be a powerful public demand for change after Bush's tumultuous two terms by framing the 2008 election as a stark philosophical choice over the form that change should take.

"Everyone agrees it is a change election," says veteran GOP strategist Ron Kaufman, an advisor to Republican contender Mitt Romney. "But [the Democrats'] change equals a change to the left. We're saying that's not the change the American public wants."

Yet by hugging Bush so closely on the major issues, the Republicans are increasing the risk that Democrats can portray their 2008 nominee as the extension of a presidency that polls show has lost the country's confidence. And by offering an agenda so centered on conservative policy priorities, they are swimming against a current of public opinion now running toward the center on many issues.

A major survey of American attitudes released earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, for instance, found that since the mid-1990s Americans have grown warmer toward activist government, less inclined to believe that the best way to ensure peace is through military strength rather than diplomacy and somewhat less likely to hold conservative views on social issues.

"The Republicans have two problems for 2008," says Andrew Kohut, the center's director. "They have the problem of performance and the desire for change based upon the Bush years. They also have the problem that the landscape has shifted out from under them. The public is more centrist and a little more left-leaning than it was in the 1990s."

Numbers like those haven't dented the Republican confidence that the more ideological the fight, the more likely they are to prevail in 2008. In some ways, the most revealing measure of the GOP attitude is a dog that hasn't barked.

Often parties respond to electoral losses by trying to occupy some of the ground of the party that defeated them. After Democrats were routed in the presidential elections of 1980, 1984, and 1988, for instance, Bill Clinton won in 1992 with a "new Democrat" agenda that aimed to advance traditional liberal goals (such as expanding opportunity) through means (fiscal discipline, personal responsibility) traditionally associated with conservatives. Likewise, after Clinton's two victories in the 1990s, George W. Bush presented himself in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative" and a "different kind of Republican."

But this year, no leading Republican candidate is offering such a hybrid appeal; even former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who comes closest, is emphasizing the most conservative elements of his record. None of the Republicans are arguing that their party needs to sand down its ideological edges to broaden its coalition. In effect, they are arguing the opposite: that the way to win back the center is to turn right, especially on the size of government and national security.

"We have a different analysis of what it takes to win back the middle," says Jim Dyke, a former Republican National Committee communications director now advising Giuliani.

Among the top-tier Democrats, only former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is following a similar path as the Republican contenders, insisting the best chance for Democrats next year is to offer bold liberal ideas that create a bright-line contrast with the GOP. But both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — even while serving up their share of invective against Bush — have run more ideologically muted campaigns in which they have touted their ability to work across party lines and promised to pursue bipartisan compromises.

The sharper edge of the Republican contenders upholds a party consensus that coalesced within hours of the Democratic sweep in Congress and the states in November.

Support for the GOP among centrist voters collapsed in 2006. Exit polls showed that independents preferred Democrats by 57% to 39% in House races nationwide and by crushing margins in almost all of the most competitive Senate races. But despite those results, virtually no major Republican leader suggested the center rebelled because Bush and the Congress had tilted too far to the right — for instance by intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, seeking to carve out individual investment accounts from Social Security or, above all, resisting any rollback of the American military commitment in Iraq.

Instead, the dominant Republican analysis was that the party lost Congress because it had strayed too far from conservative principles — spending too much and becoming entangled in corruption and scandal.

The 2008 contenders appear to be operating under much the same theory today. Romney has stated the argument most explicitly: "We didn't suffer losses last year because we were conservative," he often says. "We suffered losses because we strayed from conservative principles." But all of the leading Republicans are offering a back-to-basics conservative message built on the assumption that the party prospers when it sharpens, rather than blurs, ideological differences with Democrats.

That impulse is evident both in the candidates' agenda and their initial efforts to frame a potential general election debate with the Democrats.

As Janet Hook noted recently in The Times, on the major issues the 2008 Republicans are sticking close to President Bush, even though he is suffering through a longer and more intense period of public disapproval than any president since Harry Truman during the Korean War. I'd add one nuance to her analysis: Where Bush embraced conservative thinking, they are generally standing with him. But where Bush deviated from traditional conservative thinking, they are mostly reverting back to the old orthodoxy.

All of the leading Republicans, for instance, have embraced Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 (even McCain, who voted against them at the time). On spending, by contrast, the 2008 contenders are pledging to take a harder line than Bush, who is often accused by spending hawks of pursuing "big-government conservatism."

"All of the rhetoric, all the tone, all the body language has been in the direction of limited government," says Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth, a leading economic conservative group. "It is bad form to overtly criticize the sitting president of your party, but the implicit message is we are not interested in big-government conservatism."

On other domestic issues, a similar pattern holds. On healthcare, where Bush stands firmly in the conservative mainstream, the leading Republican candidates have joined him in endorsing tax incentives for the uninsured, deregulation of the insurance industry, and a veto of legislation to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program. But on immigration — where Bush challenged conservatives by supporting a path to legalization for illegal immigrants — the contenders have renounced him, reverting to the traditional conservative priorities of enforcement and border security.

On national security, all of the top contenders are backing Bush's determination to extend his "surge" in Iraq through next summer. And while the candidates have gestured toward mending fences with allies, Giuliani recently penned an article in the journal Foreign Affairs in which he criticized the United Nations even more sharply than Bush has done. Exceeding Bush in criticizing the U.N. isn't easy; it would be like topping Britney Spears in public meltdowns.

The same ideological current crackles through the way the Republicans talk about their Democratic counterparts. Presidential candidates always try to court their base during the primaries by demonstrating their willingness to throw haymakers at the other side, and as they pursue primary voters, the Democratic candidates are also directing plenty of jabs at Republicans.

But even by those standards, the Republican candidates are making their case against the Democrats with remarkably heated and even hyperbolic language. Romney and Giuliani routinely describe Democratic healthcare proposals as "socialized medicine" -- although none of the leading Democrats have, in fact, embraced a single-payer government takeover of the healthcare system. McCain says Democratic proposals for a deadline for withdrawing American troops from Iraq are proposing "a date for surrender." Romney has even charged that Clinton's economic agenda amounts to "out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx" — as if repealing Bush's tax cuts for high earners is only a short step from granting workers control over the means of production.

In next year's general election, the eventual GOP nominee is likely to moderate his tone at least somewhat and find some issues attractive to voters outside the party's usual coalition (the way Bill Clinton did with welfare reform and George W. Bush did with education). But there's reason to expect these early volleys will, in fact, echo through the 2008 election and produce a dynamic in which the Republican nominee consistently tries to ignite ideological firefights and the Democrat tries to extinguish them.

With Americans so unhappy about the state of the nation, Democrats have little incentive to provoke a big ideological debate: Their principal challenge is to establish themselves as an acceptable alternative for Americans already predisposed to change direction after the Bush years. That same public hunger for change will encourage Republicans to try to transform the election from a referendum on Bush's record to a broader philosophic debate about the principles that should guide America's course. A resolute ideological stand will also position the Republican nominee to reprise a strategy that worked for Bush against John Kerry in 2004: presenting himself as a candidate of conviction while accusing the Democratic nominee of vacillating and obfuscating his (or her) views.

The obvious threat for Republicans in this approach is appearing shrill and dogmatic to the centrist voters who delivered the 2006 election to the Democrats. Even conviction may seem less attractive to Americans after eight years in which Bush has often seemed to define it as refusing to learn from experience.

Kohut says that in his center's polling one reason the leading GOP contenders run relatively well in general election tests against the top Democrats despite the public dissatisfaction with Bush is that Americans now see the 2008 Republicans as more moderate than the president. But in both their language and agenda the Republican contenders are providing Democrats no shortage of ammunition to undermine that assessment. "The less [the Republicans] hold on to that perception," Kohut says, "the greater the risk that whoever gets to the general election will run into problems with independents." And as Republicans were painfully reminded in 2006, problems with independents can translate into big headaches on election day.

Ronald Brownstein is The Times' national affairs columnist. Send us your thoughts at opinionla@latimes.com.