Is the race to the Anointed?

No Republican has ever been elected president without having won the New Hampshire primary. So Texas Gov. George W. Bush, after Tuesday’s stunning 19-point defeat--enlivened by winner Sen. John McCain having earlier dissed Bush as the candidate of “every lobbyist in Washington”--is clearly not the invincible force the GOP believed.

But it’s hard to see McCain as a winner for the GOP nomination because he represents reforms--covering such basics as campaign finance, regulation of lobbyists and party tax policy--that the Republican leadership doesn’t want.

George W. is, for now, still the favorite to win the nomination, because he represents what the GOP establishment does want: restoration of the House of Bush and revenge on those who exiled George the First. But Bush the Younger is no longer such a good bet for November. Moreover, the Republican strategy of banking on anti-Clinton sentiment and the Bush family aura to outweigh George W.’s lack of experience parallels what’s long been a risky gamble in European history: the restoration of a ruling family after the upstarts who overthrew it turned out to be worse. Restorations are a profound form of reaction, just when the public, if not a majority of Republicans, seem to want reform.

Meanwhile, Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat front-runner, has burnished his own credentials by his four-point Granite State victory over former Sen. Bill Bradley, who briefly led there earlier. Some polls now show Gore drawing even with Bush for November.

Despite Tuesday’s New Hampshire excitement, McCain probably doesn’t have much real chance to get the GOP nomination. The next three February primaries are in South Carolina (Feb. 19), which always did well by George I, and Arizona and Michigan (Feb. 22). McCain has momentum, guts, hero status and the banner of reform, but not much money. Bush has bushels of money and the backing of every big-cigar GOP politico who smells favors and patronage.

Besides, even if McCain makes a strong showing in South Carolina and wins Arizona, the odds are that he’ll lose ground March 7. That’s when 11 states, with more than a quarter of the U.S. population, vote, which suggests a victory for canned speeches, regular party organizations and a $75-million war chest. This spells B-U-S-H.

Gore stands to wrap up the Democratic race March 7 for many of the same reasons. When Bradley was a U.S. senator, his low charisma level prompted jokes that if he gave a fireside chat, the fire would go out. It didn’t quite go out in New Hampshire, but Bradley’s showing there came from scoring with independent voters; he lost Democrats by 3:2. In the March 7 primaries, it will be mostly Democrats who make the decision.

In a November race between Bush and Gore, the odds still favor Bush. A surging economy in early fall could tip the edge back to the vice president, but, for now, Bush’s strongest dynamic for his party’s nomination is simple: restoration. If he can win, who cares if he’s not very experienced. His father will tell him who to call if North Korea invades the South, or if the Balkans blow up. He’ll cut taxes, ease regulation and make the world safe for upper-bracket America.

The GOP feeling is that Bush can beat President Bill Clinton’s vice president because many Americans are sorry they dumped Bush’s father in 1992 for a former governor of Arkansas given to using the state police as a dating service. Indeed, 1999 Gallup polls showed a considerable rise in the percentage of Americans who think the House of Representatives was right to impeach Clinton, and that the Senate should have convicted him.

Psychologies like these are powerful. If they weren’t, Gore would be well ahead. Vice presidents can only follow the retiring president who selected them when times are good: Martin Van Buren in 1836, George Bush in 1988. If times are bad, the vice president doesn’t make it. By these standards, Gore should be in like Flynn.

For not only are we in a 108-month recovery, the longest in the record books, but Clinton is the first president in history to keep a recovery going for the length of two full terms (so far). This success should make his vice president highly electable, especially against an inexperienced Texas governor whose only real claim to fame is being his father’s son.

But Clinton is not just the first president to keep a business recovery going for two terms. He’s also the first president in history to fess up to being sodomized by a White House intern--and the second president to be impeached. This, and not the economy, has, so far, created the central variable of the 2000 election. Unless McCain can make reform the new reference point.

The Bush team apparently favors a tougher version of its existing strategy. After he won the GOP’s Iowa caucuses in January, the Texas governor told supporters that the vote marked the beginning of the end of the Clinton era. In a recent interview, Donald L. Evans, Bush’s campaign-finance chairman, referred to “America’s family, the Bush family,” as if they were Windsors or Hapsburgs, entitled to pass a crown by descent. They may still succeed.

The two big restorations in the history books were European. In 1660, Charles II was restored to the British throne. His father had been executed 11 years earlier, but the son was brought back after the public became disillusioned with Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War. Then, 150 years later, the same thing happened in France. Louis XVI had been guillotined during the French Revolution, but disillusionment with the later years of Napoleon Bonaparte brought the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty under Louis XVII.

Democracies can have the same psychologies as monarchies. Back in 1992, remember, voters politically executed President Bush because of a botched economy, a fumble against Saddam Hussein and annoying preppy mannerisms. In August 1992, his job approval hit a low of 29%, and he got only 38% of the vote in November, a massive repudiation.

Then along came Clinton, the upstart who shamed America. Disenchantment with him pumped up Bush family memories just as the revolutionary interregnums did with the English Stuarts and French Bourbons. The former president’s approval ratings are back up in the 70s, a godsend for an heir who is, at best, marginally qualified.

Restorations, however, tend to be both delusionary and innately reactionary. People in Britain and France suppressed their memories of why the Stuarts and Bourbons had been thrown out in the first place. But after being restored, the families were as bad as before, and they had to be chased out again. As for 2000, if there is an issue that can snap Americans out of their Bush reverie, it’s the McCain reform package of demonetized elections, no more tax cuts focused on the wealthy, cleaning up Washington and putting lobbyists on the equivalent of a slow boat to China.

McCain made those issues ring out in New Hampshire, but he was greatly helped by independents; in the March megaprimaries, he’ll be facing mainly electorates of registered Republicans. His issues, bluntly, strike right at the heart of interest-group Republicanism, and it’s hard to believe the party power structure won’t do whatever it has to do to stop him.

If McCain doubts that, he should remember what happened to his hero, Theodore Roosevelt, when, four years out of the White House, he decided to run for president again in 1912. Roosevelt went into the brand-new GOP presidential primaries, called the Republican organizations corrupt and said his opponent in the primaries, President William Howard Taft, was controlled by big corporations. The voters loved it, and Roosevelt won most of the primaries: Pennsylvania, Nebraska, all the way to California. But the GOP’s party regulars controlled the delegate seating and pushed through Taft’s nomination. At that point, Roosevelt--a fighter who had led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill--blew the trumpet again and decided to run for president as an independent, a Bull Moose Progressive.

If McCain believes in his commitment to reform like Roosevelt did, he may have to follow TR’s independent example. All over the country, there has been quiet talk about somehow putting the two clean-government independents on one ticket: McCain-Bradley or Bradley-McCain, though McCain now seems logical for the top slot. Sure, it’s unlikely, but if they were willing, they could probably get the Reform Party nomination, which remains open.

All of a sudden, in an event that could spark the hoped-for revitalization of American democracy, the GOP race for president is creating an extraordinary, exhilarating choice: on one side, a politician of no particular stature or achievement, save that his name is Bush and he is a plausible instrument of a conservative restoration. On the other side, a war hero who says the two major parties have put America up for sale to the highest bidder, that the system is corrupt and that the ex-president’s son is the favorite of every lobbyist in Washington--and then wins a stunning landslide victory in a record turnout.

On Wednesday morning, after his victory, McCain said, “The great national crusade has just begun.” For Republican voters, the challenge is to rise above a narrow party leadership. For the rest of America, it is to measure up to the people of New Hampshire, who have just spent days, weeks and even months in a civic enterprise that would have made the founding fathers proud. *