The Beginning of the Bush Epoch?
CANNON, FRANK & BELL, JEFFREY
The Beginning of the Bush Epoch? Conditions may be ripe for a long-term realignment in 2004. BY JEFFREY BELL & FRANK CANNON IF THE LAST 180 YEARS of American politics are any guide, the 2004...
...In 1824, Andrew Jackson won a strong plurality in the popular vote and in the Electoral College...
...If there is one reason why 2004 may not see a realignment, it is, paradoxically, the strong political hand enjoyed by President Bush in the wake of the surprising GOP gains of 2002...
...He has condemned failed education policies as perpetuating a "soft bigotry" that expects too little of young Americans in minority communities...
...He has endorsed a ban on human cloning that respects the fundamental sanctity of the person...
...In 1968, the upheavals of the 1960s shattered the New Deal coalition and made Richard Nixon president...
...Thus the bizarre self-remaking of Al Gore from the pro-growth, pro-defense New Democrat of the 1990s into the antiwar, anti-capitalist, anti-traditional-family Al Gore of his 2002 book tour may prove to be, for Democrats, not aberrational but central...
...The pattern of strong presidents seeking reelection is that they tend not to risk running on the kind of defining issues that make for realignments...
...The events of September 11 called for a direct response to terror abroad and a coordinated response at home through the formation of a Department of Homeland Security...
...In contrast, President Bush is attempting to set forth a domestic agenda of national purpose founded on service to others and collective responsibility to address the social pathologies brought on by drug addiction, poverty, the dissolution of families, and the failed education system...
...In a speech at Notre Dame University in the spring of 2001 he outlined a war on poverty and drug addiction designed to replace failed top-down bureaucracies with community and faith-based healing...
...He continues to articulate the view that immigrants bring economic strength and vitality to our national life...
...They defend sexual freedom and individual expression as unqualified goods...
...In response, Democrats have returned again and again, perhaps at times unconsciously, to their view of America as a collection of interest groups...
...presidency for only the two terms of war hero Dwight Eisenhower...
...According to the Democrats, Republicans were opposed to seniors' interests, women's rights, and the economic well-being of workers...
...He has endorsed fatherhood initiatives and efforts to strengthen marriage...
...They oppose the faith-based initiative at the behest of the gay rights lobby and educational choice on behalf of the teachers' unions...
...But the circumstances are not normal, and the decision is not exclusively in the hands of the president and his party...
...If that seems a bit deterministic, consider these facts...
...It is in this context that Bush now has an opportunity to forge Republican majorities for the next generation...
...Recent presidents who won their second election—Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton—started ahead, or pulled ahead early in the cycle, and played not to lose...
...On the foreign policy front, the president continues to make the case that Islamic terrorism is an enormous, worldwide threat to our way of life...
...There is a compulsion among top Democrats to take their various disagreements with Bush to their logical conclusions, and an implacability in their desire to deny Bush even limited victories, particularly on domestic issues related to his vision of America...
...In fact, a long-term partisan realignment has never been triggered by a sitting president successfully seeking reelection...
...President Bush countered with an appeal to the larger national purpose...
...Reacting to their setback, Democratic elites seem to have concluded that they were too tepid in their attacks on Republicans, that they failed to make an aggressive enough case against Bush's interventionism abroad and his conservative economic and social policies at home...
...In 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president...
...Republican nominee William McKinley took advantage of the rupture, scoring a breakthrough in the rapidly growing cities of the Northeast and Midwest...
...Our guess is that in normal circumstances the outcome of such a decision would be an Eisenhower-Reagan-style "lonely landslide" that would continue to see the nation closely divided in Congress and at the state and local level, perhaps with the mild Republican edge that emerged in 2002...
...America must rise to this danger by confronting outlaw regimes, with military force if necessary, to deprive them and their terrorist allies of weapons of mass destruction...
...In the subsequent 36 years, Grover Cleveland's two non-consecutive terms were the only exceptions to Republican control of the White House...
...On the domestic front, Bush in his first two years has begun a line of argument that also appeals to the collective strength of the nation...
...For 36 years, only Woodrow Wilson's two terms interrupted a GOP hegemony significantly more one-sided than the regionally based Civil War alignment of 1860-96...
...Remarkably, the parties of these winners all suffered net losses in the U.s...
...He personally challenged the Democrats' division and incoherence on Iraq and their seeming placement of labor-union interests above homeland security...
...Democratic counterarguments all rest, at least implicitly, on minimizing the implications of the devastation and loss of life that occurred in the orchestrated attacks of September 11, 2001...
...The fault lines, they believe, need to be sharpened...
...In the subsequent 36 years, Republicans held the Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon are principals of Capital City Partners, a Washington con-sultingfirm...
...In 1896, rural-based populist forces led by William Jennings Bryan crushed Cleveland's followers at the national convention and took over the Democratic party...
...No one would be surprised, and few Republicans would complain, if the president and his team decided that winning a world war was enough to focus on in the coming two years...
...BY JEFFREY BELL & FRANK CANNON IF THE LAST 180 YEARS of American politics are any guide, the 2004 election will see one of the two major parties become dominant in presidential politics for 36 years...
...It is at root a simple and direct moral argument...
...He has called for a renewed commitment to citizenship through volunteer service...
...In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt scored a colossal landslide, which inaugurated the New Deal era...
...Since the rise of split-ticket voting after World War II, a successful presidential reelection has invariably turned into a "lonely landslide...
...Even though Nixon's was a failed presidency and Democrats retained predominance in Congress until 1994, they still managed only three victories in the nine presidential elections of the post-New Deal era...
...Something similar to the phenomenon that enabled him to break all the rules and make gains in both the House and Senate in his first midterm: a continuation and acceleration of the significant breach between the Democratic party and the electorate that began to be obvious this fall...
...The allotted 36 years are up year after next...
...The Democrats' 2002 campaign involved little more than a series of constituent-group attacks on the Republicans...
...They largely avoided mistakes and won handily, but provided little in the way of coat-tails to their party...
...senate, and none scored a gain of even 15 seats in the House...
...What would have to happen for George W. Bush to break this pattern and trigger a decisive Republican trend in the middle of a two-term presidency...
...Though Jackson was denied the presidency by the House of Representatives, his showing was the harbinger of a 36-year period in which the mass-based Democratic party he and his followers fashioned lost only two subsequent presidential races...
...If it is, and if the president responds by defending his vision and his program without apology, 2004 may after all be remembered as the Bush realignment...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 13
