DON’T LOOK NOW, but Senator James M. Jeffords, denounced in some circles as a cad and a turncoat, may have secured a second term for George W. Bush. He has saved Bush from his friends; taken key issues away from the Democrats; and given Bush the chance to focus on long-term objectives, instead of short-term and partisan gains. Just as the rightward pressure of a Republican Congress kept Democrat Bill Clinton safely in channel, somewhat to the left of center, which is where most of the country wanted to see him, so the leftward pressure of a Democratic Senate will keep George W. Bush safely in channel, somewhere to the right of center, which is where most of the country wants him. A Democratic Senate deprives the Left of its optimum issues. “No way will there be drilling” in the Alaska wilderness, says Barbara Boxer. No way too will this now be a large issue for future elections, and the environment is the one thing largely responsible for driving down Bush’s favorable ratings. No one who came near a television set in the last several months could escape the deluge of stories about the rape of the land, the rape of the wilderness, the rape of the courts by fierce right-wing judges—all guaranteed to whip the liberal base into frenzies, and stir tremors in undecided soccer moms. If the land is unraped, if the courts are no more than gently molested by the kind of judges who pass through a post-Jeffords Senate, then the Left will have run out of red flags to wave in front of people who would otherwise be happy enough with a Bush administration that managed to skirt catastrophe on the economic and the foreign fronts. Since Democrats tend to run mainly on fear, this is no small thing. And because this will no longer be an option, Bush will be freed from the temptation to push through conservative hobbyhorses on narrow party-line votes. This moves him closer to his real objective: the longer, harder, more complicated job of building a broad, stable, center-right governing party that provides the basis for long-term conservative rule after he himself has passed from the scene. Let us look closely at the perils and promise of what Bush is attempting to do. He is trying to build a governing party after a decade of failed “mandates” (in 1992 and 1994). There are no strong political winds in any direction; the public has repeatedly made clear that it trusts neither party; and the last election ended in an utter and absolute tie. This is the situation exposed by the flip of the Senate. “While unitary government describes the formal situation of the national government, it does not capture the reality,” wrote James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch in The Perfect Tie, a book on the 2000 election published just before Jeffords’s defection. “Republicans clearly have no reason to apologize for their precarious ‘control’ of the government, but the truth is that the results of 2000 have nothing in common with the other moments of achieving unitary government…when at the minimum a claim of a ‘party’ victory could be plausibly entertained.” Bush perhaps had no choice but to claim a mandate, but the truth was closer to being that he had a mandate to build one, which in fact he was trying to do. Since the end of the Reagan era, it had become clear to some people in both political parties that a governing majority around the idea of a small, activist government was attainable, and available to both major parties; the Republicans having to prove they were sincere about “activist,” and the Democrats having to prove they were sincere about “small.” Bush understood this better than Gore, which is the reason he now is the president. The fact that he, and his ideas, are still works in progress is the reason his edge was so narrow. George W. Bush is the second president to have sensed this potential, and he may be the first one to bring the thing off. Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 partly on the idea that he could transform his party, occupy the center, and build a center-left coalition that could dominate the next generation in politics. But he lost his one chance for his elusive “legacy” when he deferred instead to his wife and his party’s liberal activists, pushing a plan for a large-scale expansion of government for which there was no wish beyond his own base. Smacked in the face by the midterm elections, he retrenched, practiced the tactics of self-preservation, and saved himself for his next reelection, while doing nothing to salvage his party. As he skipped nimbly along on his small, dopey programs, his party was sinking around him, hemorrhaging seats on the state and congressional levels. A brilliant tactician, Clinton in fact had a poor sense of strategy, and so for that matter did Gore. While Gore flailed away at differing themes and tried out a variety of personae, Bush steadily pursued his strategic endeavor, understanding that, with the Cold War over and the wedge issues vanished, there were new constituencies to be gone after, and new issues to be raised. His campaign was a two-year exercise in building a party, drawing in people not always Republican by way of issues appealing to Democrats, on which he put a conservative spin: education reform through school choice and accountability; poverty relief through private and faith-based institutions; Social Security reform through privatization; Medicare reform through market forces and consumer choice. In 2000, Bush did not go quite as far as he wanted, but he made a good start on his ongoing project, winning back territory once held by Bill Clinton, and planting his flag on new ground. He did well in the three main swing groups in the country, winning independents (47 to 45 percent); winning white Catholics; winning the group with some college experience (the single cohort most watched by the pollsters) by 51 to 45 percent. He won working families. He won white women, barely. He won all income groups except the two lowest, and all education levels except the extremes. The red-and-blue map concealed some near-misses: He came close in Oregon, Wisconsin, and Washington; close in Maine, Minnesota, and Iowa; very close in New Mexico, which, like Florida, was decided by a few hundred votes. “Bush has managed to achieve two of his strategic goals,” observed David Broder two days before the election, citing his reach both in states and on issues. “He has put more resources into more places than any non-incumbent presidential candidate in my experience. Win or lose, his effort has strengthened the Republican party, and positioned it to compete for votes where before it had only a foothold.” Since the election, Bush has continued these efforts, through the Republican National Committee and the Republican Governors Association; through Hispanic outreach; through massive outreach to Catholics (and others in the religious community) that could put Michigan and Pennsylvania in his reach in 2004. This has the makings of a stable majority that could govern the country for years. What might derail this strategy? Irrational arrogance. Exuberant hubris. And the spending of capital not yet in the bank. For many years, conservative true believers have been complaining loudly about the profound irritation of dealing with RINOs (Republicans in Name Only), and wondering why they had to bother with them in the first place. Well, now they know why. It is ironic, and perhaps expected, that the people who raged the most about Jeffords are now most irate that he’s split. According to most polls, the percentage of the electorate that defines itself as “conservative” maxes out at around 35 percent. Until and unless they find some way to bump this up to the 50s, conservatives will have to cut deals with the less pure in spirit if they wish to get anything done. In a sense, then, the shift of the Senate is the fruit of conservative weakness: If they had made their case better, run stronger campaigns, found more attractive candidates, their Senate majority would have been more substantial, and Jeffords’s complaints would
have been his own business. Elections have consequences. One consequence of the 2000 election is a Republican president. Another was the loss of four Republican seats in the Senate, which was not the fault of Jim Jeffords. So live with it; stop whining; and see it for the blessing that it is. A Democratic Senate breaks the illusion of Republican dominance, brings the balance of power in line with reality, gives the administration something to counterpunch, and puts a much-needed rein on its base. Bush can now go back to rebuilding his party—with the knowledge the fringe is in hand. He should move not to the left, but to the empowerment ground where he won the election, where the radical middle now lives. For some time, there has been a muted rivalry in policy circles between the New Democrats and the empowerment wing of the Republican party, as to which side will capture the flag of small, active government and bend the agenda its way. Now, as Bush starts to get with the program, there are signs the liberal Third Way has maxed out. First came Bush himself, then Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, both upending left-centrists in times of great prosperity, causing Michael Barone to note that both Gore and Clinton failed to break 50 percent in optimum circumstances, and E.J. Dionne, a leading proponent of the Third Way, to admit it is lacking pizzazz: “The parties of the moderate left—Democrats included—face the prospect of being politically prudent folk…only to see their opponents hijack the public’s yearning for a vision with a promise of low taxes and a small government utopia. That’s not where the Third Way was supposed to lead.” Indeed. With the Senate now gone (if just by a whisker), Bush will have to seek support for his views from the general public, beyond his own partisan base. This, if he does it, is all to the good. Less facile than Clinton, he is also more serious, and might do what Clinton did not. Clinton helped himself, but he did not move his party, which is now back at Square One. As Peggy Noonan wrote at last summer’s convention, “Clintonian moderation was as evanescent as a Clintonian promise or a Clintonian statement; it was just meant to get through the moment….In Los Angeles, it looked as if his footprints too had been washed away in the tide.” Bush on the other hand wants to change his party, and to leave something more solid than sand. But this is something that has to be done slowly and calmly, on a base as broad and as stable as possible, not via a few narrow votes. His career from the start has been one of party-building, coalition-attaching, and taking next steps. Bush, it appears, is playing for history, for a role as a major definer of party, a description that has fit few men. He is, says Tod Lindberg, “embarked on the ambitious project of defining a conservative mainstream politics that supercedes (while incorporating many elements of) the ideological conservatism of the Reagan-Gingrich era. This is a big deal, folks, and the future of the GOP is riding on the outcome.” And so it is. Noemie Emery is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard.
