Whichever Candidate Loses, It Won’t Be a Soft Landing

Nine days from today, somebody will lose the presidential election. Whether it’s Al Gore or George W. Bush, he is going to be seen as having let the election slip away. The consequences of his failure will be grave for the individual and serious for his party.

If Bush loses, the Republican Party will dissolve into chaotic, factionalized conflict. Bush’s national political career will be finished, and the dynastic hopes for his brother, Jeb, will be shunted to the back burner. There will be blood on the floor. “It could look a little like 1929, with Republican establishment types jumping out windows,” says the Hudson Institute’s Marshall Whittmann.

The central appeal of Bush has always been his inevitability. This is why the Republican Party establishment signed on with him more than two years ago. When the establishment joined up with the Austin, Texas, crowd, all sorts of odd marriages were consummated: the religious right, movement conservatives, the K Street crowd and squishy moderates all compromised on their issues in the name of the greater Republican good. The Bush camp promised inevitability even in the face of a strong challenge from an unorganized and underfunded John McCain. Republicans needed to win, so they believed, anyway.

However, a Bush loss would burst one of the great bubbles in modern politics. There will be some in the GOP who will try to rationalize the loss by saying that the vice president of a successful two-term president is nearly unbeatable under the best of circumstances, and that Bush waged as good a fight as possible.

The counter-argument will be that the Republican establishment has selected three consecutive losers for the first time since the New Deal and shouldn’t be allowed to pick a fourth. Bush, it will be pointed out, was in a position to win just two weeks before the election, and yet couldn’t close the deal.

In a post-Bush world, there will be several different warring groups. Some will say that the GOP must abandon its pro-life stance, while others will say they need to be more committed to it. Some will say that the party needs to go farther than even Bush’s “affirmative access” to court minorities, while others will say they need to take a firmer stance on constitutional principle.

But the main conflict would be a challenge to the Republican establishment itself. The GOP has always been a party that chooses its candidate by mass group-think. Going back from Bob Dole to George Bush Sr. to Ronald Reagan to Richard M. Nixon (Barry S. Goldwater is the exception that proves the rule), the Republican establishment almost always comes together around the consensus choice, the fellow who seems to have waited his turn. As one Republican strategist mused, “The next nominee will be a guy who challenges the GOP establishment orthodoxy. They won’t have the power to anoint in 2004. The money men, the governors, their power will be diminished.”

Should Bush lose, the “devolution” that Republicans love so much in government might come home to haunt them where they live.

A Gore loss would be even more devastating for Democrats. “There would be a lot of bloodletting,” says Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. Democrats have always believed that this election was theirs to lose. Yet, despite President Bill Clinton’s high job-approval ratings, despite the eight years of peace and prosperity, Gore may well lose the election.

Keep in mind that a Gore loss means that Republicans almost certainly hold both houses of Congress. We would have undivided GOP control of government for the first time since [Dwight D.] Eisenhower. The Democratic civil war that would ensue could be quite gothic.

In one corner will be the New Democrats. Clinton broke through in 1992 as a result of triangulation. He was the first to run for the presidency as a New Democrat. Gore has lurched left since the conventions and has wound up using pollster Stanley Greenberg’s version of middle-class populism. In the course of his migration, Gore has discarded much of Clinton’s moderate rhetoric and any pretense of challenging Democratic interest groups on issues such as education. “He abandoned a winning formula to adopt populism,” says a Democratic strategist.

In the other corner will be the old-guard liberals. It’s no secret that the left has been mostly unsatisfied with Clinton. They sacrificed on such big issues as health care, welfare and the North American Free Trade Agreement so the party could win. In return, the only support they consistently got from the president was on abortion. While Gore has moved somewhat left of the Democratic Leadership Council, it’s really just a half-measure. In California, Washington, Oregon and Wisconsin, Ralph Nader is polling near 5%, a figure that would be impossible if Gore was satisfying his left flank. The New Democrats and the traditional liberal wings of the party have always been distrustful of one another, even in victory. In defeat, the long knives would be out.

There is, however, one additional scenario that hinges on the outcome of the New York Senate race. If both Gore and Hillary Rodham Clinton were to lose, it seems possible that Democrats might finally come out of the closet and turn on Clinton. Impeachment has been so conspicuously absent from the race that it is undeniably a major issue: the elephant in the living room. The Democratic Party lashed itself to Clinton in an unprecedented way in 1998. If the president’s chosen successor and his wife are both rejected by voters, there would be no rational way to interpret the election without blaming the president. Faced with evidence of public dissatisfaction with Clinton, the party might finally cut itself loose of him and his legacy.

Democrats could argue that while it was important to stand up to Republicans during impeachment, it is now safe to admit that Clinton was, in many ways, bad for America and worse for the party. New Democrats could claim that Gore’s troubles weren’t with NAFTA but with the tainted Clinton legacy. Liberals, particularly organized labor and feminists, could finally admit their distaste for the man and then link the Clinton problem to the New Democrats, making way for a more ideologically pure party in the future. By washing their hands of Clinton’s legacy, both wings of the Democratic Party could profit.

In the first week of October, Gore led by five points in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll. Two weeks later, Bush established a five-point lead in the same poll. It is difficult to underestimate the amount of blood that will be shed by the losing party, because it hurts to lose the close ones. On Nov. 8, the post-election battle begins.