A New Majority?
EMERY, NOEMIE
A New Majority? Can either Bush or McCain follow in the footsteps of FDR and Reagan? BY NOEMIE EMERY Can YOU CALL your campaign a hostile takeover V>_-/of the Republican party?" one of the boys on...
...He was wiped out by Reagan, who was not as fastidious, and was also a great politician...
...Clearly, conservatives or core Republicans come nowhere near being a governing party...
...New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled a motley crew of urban ethnics, crypto-Communists, and southern Bourbons behind his domestic agenda...
...But for Republicans facing the 2000 election, the Year-to-Fear is 1912, when the establishment broke with the hell-raising center, and let Woodrow Wilson slip in...
...Ronald Reagan joined the Goldwater backers to the neoconservatives who had voted against them, and linked both to lunchbucket Democrats...
...A Pew poll last month showed conservatives at 31 percent, moderates at 47 percent, and liberals at 22 percent...
...Coalitions are often unlikely, impure, messy, and difficult, and tend to annoy true believers of any description...
...There is a majority for cutting the scope of the government, but not one for no government...
...Surely there are some bridge issues that can join the right to the common-sense center, and mark both of them off from the left...
...Unless one enjoys being marginalized, it is better to join, or to construct, a winning coalition...
...electorate...
...By pollsters...
...He got them, and not one vote beyond them, on his way to losing 49 states...
...Republicans like 1984, with Al Gore cast as Fritz Mondale...
...But coalition building is an art, not a science...
...He has not explained to conservative critics why his way is better for them...
...They are also crucial, if one wants to hold power...
...McCain and Bush so far seem to be suffering from largely self-inflicted wounds...
...Building a coalition of the center-right should be possible, as both Republicans are conservative moderates, close to the center of public opinion...
...or because they find that together they all can have more power than any one could have on his own...
...Bush, the vice president...
...Or are they more like the Jesse Ventura contingent, who helped the flamboyant ex-wrestler streak past the respectable but unexceptional Republican, and some of the Democratic party's best-known brand names in Minnesota...
...And it has shut him out in return...
...McCain has let the Republican base think he is giving it nothing...
...Are the Democrats, who managed to lose both houses of Congress, and who haven't delivered a clear majority for a presidential candidate since the 1976 election, really capable of controlling in a Machiavellian way hundreds of thousands of voters...
...A Gallup poll taken in December 1999 showed core Republicans at 29 percent of the population, Democrats at 32 percent, and independents at 31 percent...
...This is the language of a Walter F. Mondale, who said in his 1984 fight with Gary Hart that he wanted only "real" Democrats...
...But allied with the moderates—those who lean in their direction—they become an unstoppable force...
...Reagan's self-described heirs could learn a lot from him...
...If McCain should guard his right, Bush has to move to the center...
...Astonishingly, he has failed to make an issue of any of their core concerns...
...a function of talent, not intellect...
...Some Bushies like to think about the 1896 election, when William McKin-ley ushered in an age of Republican dominance...
...This is not the way a great party grows, and renews itself...
...If McCain does not connect with the right, his crusade will not flourish...
...And what about the stunning infusion of new, first-time voters...
...Why did the man who took Goldwater's seat provoke and ignore the core of his party...
...If either can't figure out how to build a whole one, an administration steeped in lies will hold on...
...Do they control the independents, who vastly outnumber the Democrats who voted for McCain in this season's primaries...
...As Dr...
...If McCain now seems in danger of becoming TR in his Bull Moose incarnation, George W. Bush has to guard against becoming President Taft, with establishment backing, and damned little else...
...Political parties, and the coalitions they shelter, are groupings of disparate interests, united for one of two reasons: because the interests involved have a common goal that overrides their differences...
...He would do well to stop whining about independents trying to kidnap "his" party, and start trying to appeal for their votes...
...A hostile takeover...
...He has not explained, in these terms, why it is better for the conservative base to belong to an inclusive party that can enact some of its measures, than to see liberals rule, and get nothing...
...If Democrats are making mischief in Republican primaries, why are they supporting a man who has Gore's people frightened, and who leads Gore by 24 percentage points in recent polls...
...Candidates trailing in the polls like 1948, with themselves cast as Truman...
...He should stop referring to his party as a closed corporation, and independents as interlopers...
...There is a governing majority in this country that is right of center, but not one that is truly right-wing...
...In 1792, small farmers and the southern slave-holding gentry joined the New York machine of Aaron Burr to found the Democratic party (then the Democratic-Republicans), bound by their dislike of the Federalists' policies...
...There is a reason why so many fail at it, why success is so fleeting, why Reagan and Roosevelt are viewed in political circles with such reverence...
...No party can win without its base, but no party can win with only its base...
...Consider the three-way split in the Noemie Emery is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Is there a second gunman on the grassy knoll...
...When cries of a liberal plot to nominate McCain went up after New Hampshire, he should have been quick to address them directly...
...Each has part of one now...
...Yes, said the candidate cheerfully, adding that the party would learn to love it later on...
...This is not the language of a Ronald Reagan, who would have welcomed "intruders," wooed them, and then charmed their socks off...
...Learning from this, McCain has ignited the center, and even disarmed many Democrats, showing the fine touch of Reagan and Roosevelt...
...If Bush cannot appeal to "intruders" (even some Democrats), he will inherit a party that is quite pure and quite small and quite dead...
...But he has also done something both of this century's great coalition builders would have tried to avoid: annoyed and ticked off his party's base...
...they could be lessened still...
...one of the boys on the bus asked John McCain in South Carolina...
...Democrats like 1988, with Al Gore cast as George H.W...
...Each of these men could build a great coalition...
...Quotas could do it...
...Are these numbers made up by the press...
...All the efforts since the 1994 election have failed to make a libertarian consensus emerge...
...In presidential elections, the core vote of each party is around 37 percent, with an unaligned 25 percent moving between them...
...This is the case that McCain hasn't made...
...Ideological breakdowns are similar, with the electorate self-defining as roughly a third conservative, a quarter liberal and two-fifths moderate...
...Politicians like to go back in time, searching for scenarios that suit their wishes...
...Addressing these fears should not be so difficult...
...Coalitions are creatures of discord, but they survive via balance: No one bloc gets it all, but no one is wholly neglected...
...We will know later, but the stresses could have been lessened by a little better planning early on...
...During impeachment, Clinton's core defenders were about 30 percent, his core critics another 30 percent, with the rest hostile to both, or indifferent...
...When his main concern became foreign policy, he broke apart that coalition and assembled a new one, including businessmen and the Stimson Republicans...
...Why did the inclusive, new-model, New Conservative governor of Texas find himself fighting inclusion and novelty, and more or less boxed in by the very far right...
...Bush should realize that McCain's appeal is authentic, and not a ruse dreamed up to distract him...
...So might the devastation wrought by this administration upon the armed forces, which would surely get worse under Al Gore or Bill Bradley, who have made clear that they will take their advice about unit cohesion not from Colin Powell but from Patricia Ireland and Barney Frank...
...If McCain loses the nomination, it will be in part because he allowed this idea to take root...
...In 1992 and 1996, Republicans nominated establishment figures, who placated the base of the party but excited no one outside it, and lost twice to Bill Clinton, who made deft verbal appeals to the center...
...Has he still time...
...Are they, too, directed by the Democrats...
...They might remember this later...
Vol. 5 • March 2000 • No. 24
