Here are two articles that should be read together: Howard Fineman's "Rove Unleashed" and Jonathan Chait's "Seeds of Downfall in GOP's Victory." Chait wrote his piece in direct response to Fineman's article.
Fineman discusses Karl Rove's long history of involvement with President Bush as well as Rove's plans for a permanent GOP majority.
Those plans, according to Fineman, take the following form:
. . . to design a legislative and philosophical agenda that will lead to further GOP gains, and beyond that to a political dominance that could last for decades, as FDR's New Deal did. The core principles are clear to anyone who listened to a Bush stump speech. They are drawn from a well of conservative (and, in the 19th-century sense, "liberal") dogma: that only free-market democracies respectful of traditional moral values can bring us a planet of fulfilled citizens secure from terror. In fact, Rove's formulation is a new hybrid, willing to use big government in the service of markets and morality. Asked to name Bush's biggest accomplishment thus far, Rove replied in a flash: "His clear-eyed explanation of how to win the war on terrorism. It was the defining moment of our time." In other words, the Architect plans to be fully engaged in formulating foreign policy — and, while he isn't thought of as a leading neocon, his views are squarely within that camp.On domestic policy, Rove has a theme at the ready: "the ownership society" he says the president wants to build. It's a bland phrase, but the ideas behind it are hardly status quo. One is to consider abolishing the income-tax system, replacing "progressive" (meaning graduated) rates with a flat tax or even a national sales tax or value-added tax. Another is to rechannel massive flows of tax money from Social Security to private savings accounts and into expanded medical savings accounts. Yet another is a crusade Bush and Rove have been pursuing since Texas: a national cap on damage awards in lawsuits.
In all cases, Rove wants to force Democrats to defend taxes and lawyers. Trained in the ways of direct-mail targeting, he doesn't want to seduce the whole country, just an expanded version of what he's already got. He's aiming at fast-growing exurban areas, where small-business entrepreneurs — mostly Gen-Xers — tend to distrust the New Deal paradigm of government. "We want to pay increased attention to those vibrant small-business climates," says Rove.
And it is in these places, where suburbs meet what's left of the countryside, that the GOP's conservative stands on social issues are welcome even (perhaps even especially) among younger families searching for stability and reassurance in a world of Darwinian economics. In the next term, Rove said, Bush will push — hard — for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union of man and woman, and for "strict constructionist" judges. "Voters like the president because he doesn't blink and he doesn't waver," says Rove, "and he isn't going to start. He says he values life, and he means it." The cold calculus: force Democrats to defend gay rights and unfettered access to abortion.
Getting from here to there is, of course, the hard part. Rove will have little trouble within the administration, where his reach is expanding as friends from the old Austin days are seeded throughout the government. They include Alberto Gonzales to attorney general at Justice, Margaret Spellings to Education, Harriet Miers to White House counsel, Ken Mehlman to the RNC and Condi Rice to State. Other key allies remain in place, led by Dan Bartlett, Rove's trusted communications aide. This posse's been riding for years. (Karen Hughes will keep a hand in, at a distance, from back home in Texas.)
Controlling the rest of the city won't be as easy. "Look, nobody is going to agree with the president 100 percent of the time," Rove says. For now, conservative power brokers say they trust him. "He gives us a sense that he is one of us," says Richard Viguerie. But they will castigate him — and the president — if the administration doesn't show sufficient enthusiasm for what Viguerie calls their "pro-Christian" agenda. And yet some of the party's biggest stars (Rudy and Arnold) want nothing to do with the Vigueries of the world.
Other forces are even harder to control. Reality may not match hopeful rhetoric in "elections" in places such as Ukraine, the Palestinian territories or Iraq. The falling dollar and soaring federal budget deficits may rob Bush of the chance to overhaul the tax code. Rove is hopeful about the 2006 midterms, but even FDR — the last president to win re-election and increase his congressional majority at the same time (in 1936) — saw his Democrats hammered in his second-term off-year election.
Chait argues that the above strategy, especially as it addresses fiscal policy, will continue to work for a while, but that it will eventually fall apart:
The Republicans are living in a fool's paradise. It's true that over the next few years Republicans will have enormous power. In the long run, however, they're doomed. Doomed, I tells ya! Doooomed! OK, I may have gotten slightly carried away there. Perhaps "doomed" overstates things a tad. But President Bush's political formula does carry the seeds of its own demise.The classic example of a political realignment, as Newsweek notes, is the New Deal coalition. The New Deal succeeded politically because it delivered popular social programs to its constituents. As FDR's advisor Harry Hopkins famously described the formula, "tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect." The Democrats' New Deal coalition eventually died of two main causes. First, it contained both those Americans most adamantly in favor of segregation (Southern conservatives) and those most adamantly opposed (liberals and blacks). The civil rights movement split that fissure wide open. Second, the Vietnam War — and the Democrats' reaction to it — destroyed the party's credibility on foreign policy.
Republicans have social fissures of their own. A huge part of the GOP base (the religious right) votes Republican in the hope of enacting a radical social agenda that another part of the GOP base (suburbanites and the business elite) has no intent or desire to carry out. And it's also possible that Republicans will suffer a Vietnam-style external shock of their own — a severe recession or a bungled war. (Can't possibly imagine where the latter could happen, can you?)
The Republicans' main problem, however, is that their basic political and economic strategy is totally unsustainable. Where the Democrats had tax and spend, Bush has tax cut and spend. One core element of the Bush strategy is to lock in the allegiance of the business community through breaks for corporations, investors and the wealthy, in return for which they will gratefully give the GOP a huge fundraising advantage. Spending is another key element of the plan. Bush wooed the elderly with a prescription drug benefit and rural America with lavish agriculture subsidies.
Politically, it's working great so far. It may well continue to work great for the next four years. But the government can't run large structural deficits forever.
When conservatives are confronted with Bush's record on spending and deficits, they usually reply by admitting that it's a terrible shame the president hasn't slashed spending and he really ought to do something about it. Many hoped that Bush, having bribed enough voters to win reelection, would use his second term to enact a single-rate tax code and privatize Social Security. These are ways to get voters to swallow middle-class tax hikes and cuts in popular social programs, both of which are ultimately unavoidable if the rich are going to pay a permanently lower tax rate. Casting the debate as "simplification" (the flat tax) or "ownership" (privatized Social Security accounts), the thinking goes, will make them forget that they're paying a larger portion of the bill for government and getting less in return.
But even a few weeks after Bush's reelection those hopes are all but dead. First, Bush administration officials leaked that they would hold off on tax reform until 2006. Given that by then Congress will be facing elections and Bush's political strength will be on the wane, tax reform advocates agree that enacting tough changes will be impossible.
As for privatizing Social Security, the Republicans have floated the prospect of paying for that not with cuts in benefits or tax hikes but with enormous new borrowing. We would enjoy the benefit — spiffy new accounts — today. The bill comes later.
The upshot of both these developments is that a second Bush term means more of the same. Even with full control of the federal government and a president freed of the constraints of reelection, Republicans lack the political will to raise middle-class taxes or cut large spending programs.
Which means that eventually one or all of the following will happen: The budget deficit will drag the economy down; Republicans will have to inflict significant fiscal pain on major elements of their coalition; voters will elect Democrats to tame the deficit. It may take years before the "realignment" falls apart. But it won't take decades.
There is an inexorable logic to Republican fiscal irresponsibility, and it's hard to disagree with Chait's assessment that it will affect their coalition. The Bush administration has yet to show the willingness to make the hard domestic taxing and spending choices. Cutting taxes is easy to do politically. Facing the consequences of the cuts — well, that's always the hard part, isn't it?
I've already blogged a bit about Bush's ownership society in a post that was influenced in part by Jonathan Chait.
