Bush’s Big Problem

Virtually all presidential campaigns at some point become identified with earlier races. A campaign, if it’s smart, can take lessons from such a comparison. So, if I were Texas Gov. George W. Bush, I would go to school on the lessons of Hubert H. Humphrey and the 1968 election. For election 2000 has all the makings of a repeat of the Democrats in ’68. How could I draw such a parallel? I was at that horror show.

1968 was the beginning of the end of the Democrat’s majority coalition in America. It split apart on social and economic issues, and it took 24 years and the election of President Bill Clinton to repair the damage. Of course, signs were there before 1968--as civil-rights legislation split Democrats North and South--but it was the war in Vietnam and the emergence of the Democratic Party as the “government interventionist party” that brought the house down.

The concept of “Reagan Democrats” is false. It was Richard M. Nixon, with the help of George C. Wallace, who created a place for disaffected Democrats. Mostly blue-collar Catholic voters, they believed in a moderate level of government involvement and possessed unquestioned loyalty to the country. As they watched their party add government program after government program to its agenda and saw their taxes going to pay for that agenda, they grew hostile. To them, these programs benefited poor people and punished hard-working middle-class Americans like themselves.

At the same time, they saw younger, mostly college-educated Democrats burning draft cards and bras and literally peeing on the U.S. flag. This was not just unpatriotic, it was unacceptable. From all this came a decade-long collapse of the Democratic Party.

Now comes Bush and the GOP establishment in 2000, watching their party disintegrate over moral issues and the role of the federal government. As with the Democrats before them, these divisions have been growing for years. But with the exception of abortion, the Republicans--specifically Ronald Reagan--could keep the divisions covered up. No more.

Many moderate Republicans and fiscally conservative Democrats have watched their party be taken over and used as a moral crusade by the Christian right, the National Rifle Assn. and other special interests, notably tobacco. They have watched their party--which stood for limited government--morph into one that imposes a moral agenda from Washington on everything from abortion to library books. In other words, they have seen their party become the “moral interventionist” party--and they don’t like moral interventionists any better than government interventionists.

But not only “family issues” have driven moderate Republicans, huge numbers of women and conservative Democrats away from the GOP. It is also the insistence of the party establishment on major tax cuts that jeopardize an economy that, for the first time, has benefited not only the rich and the middle class, but the poor as well. Not that they are against tax cuts--they aren’t--but they have ironically allied themselves with Clinton’s view of targeted tax cuts.

If Bush becomes the nominee, what he will find is that he is sitting atop a party that used to stand for the tolerance of Abraham Lincoln, the fiscal responsibility and disdain for big corporate interests of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the principled bipartisanship of the late Sen. John H. Chafee. But their Grand Old Party now symbolizes to the great middle of the U.S. electorate an intolerant and brutish party dominated by white Southern males like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

For a while, I believed Bush understood this and knew the GOP had to become the party of compassion without abandoning its conservative values. Hence: “compassionate conservatism.” He may have understood, but moving a political party requires programs, principles and leadership. It is increasingly apparent that Bush is sorely lacking all three. But it also appears likely the GOP establishment will prevail and give him the nomination anyway. What I find incredible is that the Democrats had no acceptable option to Humphrey in ‘68, but the GOP has Arizona Sen. John McCain, a real compassionate conservative who might win.

Some may remember that Humphrey came within 510,000 votes in 1968, but Nixon had the advantage of a Democrat-turned-American Independent named Wallace on the ballot. It was this Wallace vote that eventually became the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s. Most were loyal Democrats who could not bring themselves to vote for a Republican like Nixon, but could vote for a Democrat like Wallace, who walked their walk and talked their talk. Eventually, these voters did dance to the Republican tune, but the GOP music of the ‘90s has driven them away.

McCain understands the symphony that is American politics and might well have beaten our nominee like a drum. Alas, Bush is now only just learning to pick up a baton.