It was a bad night for Colin Powell last week at Washington s Omni Shoreham Hotel, where the American Conservative Union held its annual dinner. The General himself was nowhere to be seen. His transoceanic book tour completed, Powell was in seclusion deciding whether to seek the presidential nomination of a party he has not yet joined.
But his absence did not avert adverse comment about Powell, in table talk and from several of the eight announced Republican presidential hopefuls who addressed the right-wing diners. David Keene, the ACU’s longtime chairman, concluded the evening by reading a statement about the general unanimously approved that afternoon by the organization’s board: “His views thus far expressed put him outside the mainstream of the party whose nomination some say he covets and should make him unacceptable to conservatives.”
Such criticism of Powell from the conservative movement is characteristically ideological, not political. The complaint by Keene and his allies is that Powell is doctrinally a Rockefeller Republican at best, or perhaps even a Clinton Democrat. There is little concern about what he would do politically to the Grand Old Party. But there should be.
On September 27, Wall Street Journal political columnist Gerald E Seib compared Powell’s potential impact in 1996 to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s actual impact in 1952. He wrote that Eisenhower’s candidacy “brought into the polls, and into the GOP column, millions upon millions of new voters,” starting with an “astonishing” 54 percent increase in the party’s 1952 presidential vote over four years earlier.
Citing WEEKLY STANDARD editor William Kristol as his inspiration, Seib argued that a Powell candidacy, like Eisenhower’s, would transform the Republican party into something quite different from what “exists in the wake of the 1994 election.” His suggestion was that Powell “could take the current Republican party and extend it to reach minorities and independents.”
The first of many problems with Seib’s thesis is that party politics today bears so little resemblance to the landscape of 40 years ago. The two major parties are structurally less powerful and ideologically more homogenous. The Democratic right wing and the Republican left wing, both atrophied today, were alive and well in 1952. Accordingly, the transplant of a leader foreign to the doctrine and tradition of the party was not rejected by the 1952 GOP It might be in 1996.
While many Republican state and local leaders covet Powell as a winner, they were not the driving force behind the great Republican victory of 1994. The money and foot soldiers of the Christian Coalition, the National Rifle Association, and U.S. Term Limits were the heart and soul of that historic triumph. Might they abandon not only a Powell-led ticket but GOP congressional candidates as well? The unanswerable question is whether Powell would sweep to an Ike-like victory or, instead, guarantee Clinton’s re- election, perhaps even generating a serious independent conservative candidacy.
Shortly after the 1994 election, I asked speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich if he worried that the Republican 104th Congress would suffer the same fate as the Republican 80th Congress, which after two years of substantial accomplishment was rejected in the 1948 election. Historian Gingrich has given it considerable thought and has come to admire Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio as the dominant figure of the 80th Congress.
“If you took Taft’s integrity and Taft’s ideology,” Gingrich told me, “and combined it with Roosevelt’s political skills, then the victory of ’46 would have ended the New Deal — if Taft had won the [presidential] nomination in ’48 and explained why the 80th Congress made sense. The Republican party nominated [New York Gov. Thomas E.] Dewey, who didn’t believe in the 80th Congress.”
Then came Gingrich’s greatest fear: The GOP chooses “somebody who spends the summer of ’96 running away from this Congress. The only hope Bill Clinton has is not in Bill Clinton. It’s in the Republican party.” Talking a year ago in the flush of victory, he seemed to regard this as a most remote possibility. However, the notion of Powell as the Republican nominee was truly remote then, just one short year ago.
But assume that Powell is elected president. “I’m much more worried about what Powell would do to the party if he were elected — which I think he would be — than if he lost,” says one prominent Republican, who publicly expresses nary a contrary thought about Colin Powell.
What he fears is what I observed some 40 years ago as a young Washington reporter when Eisenhower was president. He was not only vastly more popular than his party but consciously distanced himself from it (until, ironically, the last two years of his presidency, when for the first time confronting huge Democratic majorities in Congress, and looked a little more like a partisan pol).
Eisenhower’s memoirs and those of his aides reveal he felt closer to the Democratic leaders in Congress than the Republicans. This posture contributed to the irrelevancy of the GOP, which was obvious then to anyone in Washington.
Contrary to the Seib column, Ike lacked coattails. His landslide election in 1952 produced but 48 Republicans in the 96-member Senate and only an eight- vote GOP margin in the House (compared to 51 Senators and a 55-seat House advantage in the 80th Congress). And the 1952 election was the high point of the Eisenhower years for the party. The Republican congressional majorities were lost in 1954, the second Ike landslide of 1956 resulted in two fewer Republicans in Congress than were elected in 1954, and the 1958 election was a Democratic tsunami (followed, oddly, by a slight GOP congressional gain in 1960, when John E Kennedy was elected).
The Gallup Poll showed that voters professing Republican sympathies were 12 percentage points behind the Democrats just before Eisenhower was elected and 17 points down when he left. People who liked Ike did not care much for either Republican candidates for Congress or the party itself.
The Republican party in 1952 was starved for power, without a presidential election victory the past 28 years, and demoralized after its severe losses in the elections of 1948 and 1950. Today’s Republican party, winner of five of the last seven presidential elections, is on the rise nationwide. Is it really a politically opportune time to bring in another general?
Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist and regular panelist on CNN’s Capital Gang and Crossfire.
