President Bush was supposed to be obsolete this election.
“No Thank You, Mr. President,” blared an Oct. 28 Chicago Tribune headline, relating how endangered Indiana Rep. John Hostettler had declined a Bush campaign visit because, as he put it, “George Bush is not a message I want to talk about.”
All over the country, supposedly, worried Republicans are repudiating the man who is considered responsible for the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, the confusing Medicare reform, weak immigration policy and the overconfident what-me-worry? rhetoric that gives people the impression the Republican Party is one that simply cannot confront big problems.
After all this rejection from his own, it would seem likely Bush will finish out his presidency a struggling, irrelevant lame duck.
Except that, as this year’s midterm campaign pulls to a close, Bush is really as strong a selling point as ever.
Instead of staying home and letting Laura Bush work her magic for struggling Republican incumbents, Bush has spent the last weeks aggressively touring areas where Republicans are in trouble. He’s stumped both for those slightly up in the polls and those down and out, those representing areas that overwhelmingly voted for him in 2004 and those in swing regions.
Bush began his closeout tour with a bold move: He campaigned for four Republicans in a row damaged by ethics scandals, choosing to lend his credibility and appeal to Reps. Richard Pombo and John Doolittle in California, both tainted by their connections to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff; Rep. Don Sherwood in Pennsylvania, whose mistress of five years last year accused him of choking her; and Sen. George Allen in Virginia, caught on tape mocking a young opposition volunteer with a perceived racial slur. Then on to Georgia, where he helped out two Republicans trying, improbably, to unseat Democratic incumbents; and to Texas, where he worked to save resigned Rep. Tom DeLay’s seat. At the end of last week, he rushed to shore up Sens. Conrad Burns in Montana and Jim Talent in Missouri, arguably caught in the most crucial and closest Senate races in the country.
Bush’s frenzied schedule before the election includes Iowa, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Florida, Arkansas and Texas again.
All the candidates Bush is visiting have reason to pull a Hostettler and turn down his helping hand:Jim Talent is in swing-state Missouri; Conrad Burns has chosen to try to portray himself as a moderate; and so on.
So why are they making a Bush visit the last image seared into their constituents’ minds before Tuesday? Probably because, despite hopped-up Democrats and increasing defection among independents, a big Bush-loving conservative base still exists, and they care more about what Bush has done than any work, good or bad, done by their own man in Congress.
After all, unlike in Newt Gingrich’s era, the Republican legacy in this decade will be defined by Bush’s tax cuts and the Bush Doctrine, not by the sleepy and ineffectual Congress. And that doctrine is so widely and philosophically formulated as to make congressional politics seem petty by comparison, which provides motivation to both go out and show support for it by pulling the Republican lever, and a consolation if Republicans lose on Nov. 7.
As one Republican friend of mine put it to me in an e-mail: “This new era has a great deal in common with the beginning of the Cold War during the Truman administration. Control of Congress see-sawed a great deal in those days, but overall the country remained true to FDR’s social agenda and Truman’s conception of containment. … So yes, we may lose on Tuesday, but politics is really only a sideshow compared to what is really at stake. In the larger struggle for freedom around the globe, genuine conservatives remain as assured as ever.”
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
