The Republicans will be rejected overwhelmingly - not for their style, but because of their ideology.
By LARRY DERFNERlarry derfner 88(photo credit: )
If not for the crisis on Wall Street, John McCain would likely be on his way to the White House now, with Sarah Palin as his heir apparent. They had overtaken Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the polls early last month on the strength of Palin's phenomenal debut, and were starting to open up a lead. Then, on September 15, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the stock market fell 500 points, and the race began to turn back around. Since then, as the economy's graph has gone down, Obama's has gone up.
With less than three weeks before the election, it would probably take either a terrorist attack on the US or some ghastly revelation about Obama to save the White House for the Republicans. The way things are going, they will lose the presidential election by a wide margin, and the Congressional races by a landslide.
Barring a catastrophe, that is going to be the story of the 2008 election - the Republican Party lost it. Not that McCain lost it, or that Palin lost it - and not that Obama won it, or that the Democratic Party won it, or that the liberals won it. No, the Republicans lost it. They were rejected overwhelmingly by the American people - and not because of their style, but because of their politics. Because of their ideology.
They were rejected because Republican ideology failed completely. At home and abroad. And they can't say their ideology was never given a chance. They had a true believer as president, a real cowboy - a free-market zealot, a war hawk, a social conservative, the whole package. Republican to the bone. More Reagan than Reagan. The ultimate neocon.
He's had eight years to do his thing - their thing - and look at the results. George W. Bush used to be a divisive president, but no more; he's turned basically the whole country against him. The Republicans used to worship him, now they're trying to pretend he never existed.
The Republicans, running against a black, intellectual, inexperienced, rootless cosmopolitan Democrat with probably the worst name in American political history - even without the Hussein - could have overcome the collapse of their foreign policy ideology and elected McCain/Palin. But with their economic ideology in ruins too, they've got nothing left to say for themselves. They're tapped out.
Now even a strange bird like Obama is beating the daylights out of them.
SO, BARRING catastrophe, 2008 is going to be a watershed year for America. The radical right-wing ideology that's dominated the country since 1980 - a belief in the infallibility of capitalism and American military power - will be taking off for the dustbin of history.
This doesn't mean, though, that the pendulum is going to swing way over to the Left. I'd be very surprised if it did. Obama might like to do another New Deal - I'd sure like him to - but with the economy in such a hole, he's unlikely to have much money to help the poor and lower middle class. The only way he'd be able to get the money for another New Deal is by raising taxes substantially, but this has become politically impossible in the US.
And between Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Taliban and al-Qaida, he's not going to be able to rely strictly on negotiations for foreign policy; he's also going to have to use military power, which he's said he'll do, and he should be believed because at times there's going to be no avoiding it.
I don't know where Obama and the Democratic Congress are going to take America, but I know where they're not going to take it - they're not going to take it where Bush did. They're not going to fight a class war at home for the rich, and they're not going to go off on a crusade in the Middle East.
Moreover, I figure Obama's going to trust his brain more than his gut, he'll be guided more by history than ideology, and he'll want to hear different opinions instead of just echoes of his own.
I don't know how good a president he's going to be, but I cannot see, realistically, how he can turn out worse than Dubya.
The good news for the Republicans is that a lot of them realize that the conservative movement has to change. Writers such as David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, David Frum and Ross Douthat are daring to suggest that maybe the GOP isn't getting trounced because McCain's too old, or because of bad campaign strategy, or the liberal media elite, or the drugged-out perverts in Hollywood - but rather because the Republicans got things at least partially wrong. Their ideas didn't entirely work, obviously. So they have to come up with new, less rigid ideas.
A watershed year this is turning out to be. After nearly 30 years of moving about as far right as it could go, the pendulum is swinging back toward the center. Barring a catastrophe, happy days - or happier days, anyway - will be here again.
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