After 4 Years, Bush Is No Closer to Building a GOP Majority

It’s a testament to the strength of President Bush’s connection with his base that he’s still running stride for stride with Democrat John F. Kerry, and possibly half a step ahead, in the presidential campaign’s final hours.

Bush won admiration from virtually all Americans for his initial response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But he’s pushing for the finish line carrying burdens that probably would have doomed most presidents.

During his term, the economy lost jobs, the number of Americans in poverty and without health insurance increased, and the federal deficit reached record heights.

The war in Iraq, after initial success in deposing Saddam Hussein, has become a grueling, grinding conflict that has claimed more than 1,100 American lives. Along the way, Bush’s original justification for the war -- the charge that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that he might provide to terrorists -- evaporated.

For him to be so close to gaining a second term under such adverse conditions shows how strong a floor of political support Bush has built. But absent a decisive last-minute break, Tuesday’s results are also likely to show a low ceiling for Bush. The two facts are not coincidental. The design of Bush’s presidency has left him with a firm hold on about half the country, but with the other half increasingly beyond his reach.

In the 2000 race, Bush and senior political advisors such as Karl Rove had visions of broadening the Republican coalition into a stable electoral majority. Bush portrayed himself as “a different kind of Republican” -- a compassionate conservative who would reach across partisan and ideological lines as a “uniter, not a divider.”

Bush may well survive Tuesday. But his prospects for achieving those original goals appear slim. He has generated rapturous enthusiasm among his core supporters. But almost all the constituencies and regions that rejected him last time are hostile to him again -- perhaps even more hostile.

“If he wins, he will have squeezed every ounce that he could have gotten out of his base,” said Tony Fabrizio, the pollster for GOP nominee Bob Dole in 1996.

Any win in this environment would count as a political achievement. But a victory based primarily on further consolidating conservatives (especially religiously observant social conservatives) would be very different from what Bush initially set out to accomplish.

“Karl Rove used to talk about William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt,” said Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek. “These were presidents who expanded the party base. I think that was the aspiration [for Bush]. They saw compassionate conservatism as the ideology of a governing party that was going to take its base and expand it. And I think that has failed.”

The highly contentious atmosphere in Washington that the new president inherited after Bill Clinton’s eight bruising years and the lengthy postelection dispute in Florida probably limited Bush’s ability to expand his support. But it’s worth remembering that in the first months of his term, a majority of Democrats approved of his job performance in polls.

That didn’t last, largely because of choices Bush made. Although he worked across party lines on his education reform initiative in 2001, on such issues as taxes, energy and judicial appointments he aimed his proposals squarely at the preferences of his Republican base.

Consistently, Bush placed a higher priority on passing his ideas unaltered than making compromises that would attract more supporters from the other party. Maybe Democrats never would have met Bush halfway -- but he never tried very hard to find out. Within months of his inaugural, the inevitable result was rising partisanship in Congress and rising polarization in the polls.

After Sept. 11, Bush received the most precious opportunity in politics, or life: a second chance. His firm response earned him a new look from millions of voters who were initially skeptical of him. His approval rating soared among Americans in both parties.

But he soon reverted to his initial strategy, offering a highly partisan agenda capped by his decision to invade Iraq amid great division at home and even greater resistance abroad.

Clinton, for one, believes that if Bush loses this week, the reason will be that when Democrats united behind the president after Sept. 11, “he took our patriotism as weakness and tried to push the country to the right, and push the world around, and there was a predictable reaction,” as Clinton said in an interview last summer.

Victory on Tuesday would give Bush a third opportunity to court voters beyond his core coalition. But in a campaign in which he’s stressed his resolve and defined the race as a stark choice between left and right, he’s given very little indication that he would govern differently in a second term from the first.

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a leading conservative political action committee, said that “if Bush wins, I actually think he’ll be more conservative than he was in his first term, because he doesn’t have to face the voters again.”

As a new president, Kerry might have more flexibility to reach out. Like Bush in 2000, Kerry is pledging an inclusive presidency. He’s hinted that he would appoint Republicans to top jobs, especially in national security.

But the senator’s domestic agenda is keyed to repealing the Bush tax cuts that benefit the most affluent, which guarantees a collision with congressional Republicans. To pass his ideas, and avoid another round of hyper-partisanship, Kerry would need to think more creatively about striking a grand bargain with at least moderate Republicans.

Whoever wins will face the same question: Is he willing to compromise to rally a consensus in a closely divided country?

Unless the next president builds bridges, he won’t build the decisive electoral majority that is likely to elude both men Tuesday.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times’ website at www.latimes.com/brownstein.