Regardless of what happens to John McCain on Nov. 4 — and, with two weeks to go, it's not promising —
there's going to be a new Republican Party come Nov. 5, a post-George W. Bush GOP where long-suppressed (and not so suppressed) resentments are likely to come to the surface. The unknown at this point is which way the party goes in the wake of these resentments.
Colin Powell, hardly an active, partisan Republican, but a Republican nonetheless, had his say on Sunday, on NBC's Meet the Press. In endorsing Barack Obama, the former secretary of state under Bush said he was concerned that the GOP has moved more to the right than he would have liked, that the party has become more narrow-minded, that he fears the effect of two more conservative Supreme Court justices. The move was damning for McCain, though not unexpected.
Another moderate, former Michigan Gov. William Milliken, has also spoken out against the direction of the party, but that is not surprising, either. Milliken, who was his state's longest-serving governor (1969-82) and is now 86 years old, endorsed John Kerry over Bush in 2004. Jim Leach, the liberal Republican who lost his Iowa House seat two years ago, spoke on behalf of Obama at this year's Democratic convention in Denver. There is no lack of party faithful who have expressed unease over McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, and her views about cultural issues, or dismay at the campaign's focus on Bill Ayers — that "washed-up terrorist," in McCain's own words. Lest we forget, there was also the spectacle of Christopher (son of William F.) Buckley declaring for Obama.
At the same time, the party is likely to feel a post-election tug toward the right. Newt Gingrich is ready, willing and available, having offered himself as a sage who will bring the party back to its principles. There are some in the GOP who have privately said that Gingrich, the former House speaker, would be less than heartbroken if McCain went down to defeat, enabling the party to turn to new (read: Newt) leadership for 2012. But he has no shortage of ideas about how to bring the party back to life.
One issue sure to be contentious in a post-Bush GOP is immigration. Bush, McCain and the business community have long worked for an inclusive policy with the goal of more legal avenues of employment. Others in the party, especially in Congress, have a different perspective: They see immigration as a broken system that needs fixing (securing the border) before anything else. And then there are the issues of spending, earmarks and taxes, a consensus on which continues to elude Republicans.
Republicans are also likely to purge their leadership in Congress, certainly in the House. The party seems headed for another double-digit loss of House seats — the first time it has suffered such back-to-back losses since the 1930s. Minority Leader John Boehner and Whip Roy Blunt somehow managed to survive the loss of their majority in 2006 with their leadership posts intact; it's hard to envision a repeat performance.
Let's be honest here: The party was going to be in trouble no matter who the standard-bearer was going to be. The president is unpopular; the war is unpopular. The price of gasoline and food has skyrocketed. Add to that the undeniable fact that Obama — with a flawless campaign, unprecedented fundraising and millions of new voters signed up on his behalf — is proving to be an elusive target.
But it's the turning south of the economy that has put a huge burden on McCain's shoulders. His post-St. Paul convention bounce has been replaced by depressingly large drops in the Dow and, more important, large drops in confidence in the country's economic stability. That's really not McCain's fault. But let's face it: At 72 years of age, he was never the guy to take the party into the future.
Part of it is that McCain was never a right-wing pinup, not with a history of battling conservatives on everything from campaign finance to the Bush tax cuts to overhauling the nation's immigration system. He did move noticeably to the right this year, embracing more of the Bush administration's agenda than he had in the past. But no one outside of the DNC can say with a straight face that he is emblematic of a third Bush term (for better or worse).
For all his talk about cutting spending and waste, McCain's proposal to have the government buy up troubled mortgages is anything but conservative and instead will surely add to the debt. The selection of Palin did help his cause with many on the right, but nobody will confuse him with Ronald Reagan — or even Barry Goldwater, his idol and predecessor in the Senate.
But if the McCain-Goldwater comparison is not quite apt, we might compare the state of the GOP today to what happened in 1964, in the aftermath of Goldwater's crushing defeat. Liberal and moderate Republicans who were ignored or pushed aside during that campaign, such as New York's Nelson Rockefeller and Michigan's George Romney, claimed after the LBJ landslide that the party had lost its bearings by moving so far to the right. Ray Bliss, an Ohio Republican known for his nuts-and-bolts approach to politics, was brought in to run the national party. The GOP had a major comeback in the 1966 midterms, picking up 47 House seats, and it won back the White House two years later with Richard Nixon.
To be sure, there were recriminations after Goldwater's defeat in '64, and in retrospect, the Republicans' fall from grace didn't last that long. But one gets the sense that another battle is approaching, win or lose on Nov. 4, and it could get ugly before it turns pretty.
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