Bush and Republicans Scrambling for a Winning Election Strategy

On Nov. 7, a certain percentage of the voters will be thinking seriously about the issues and they will be Republican or Democrat or independent. But a certain percentage will believe they're thinking seriously about the issues but they will allow themselves to be swayed by a Republican campaign that has run out of issues to run on and has no effective accomplishments to brag about. Time is running out for the Republicans and they are in a desperate scramble to hang on to power in Congress. After an avalance of bad news, what options are left to Bush, Karl Rove, Dennis Hastert, Bill Frist and even sometimes, shock though it may be, John McCain? Apparently, not much. Other than making promises that somehow things will be different if Republicans remain in control of Congress, the options are the usual for a party increasingly bereft of moral leadership and ideas: smears, lies, spending lots more money than the Democrats, and fear. That's a pathetic excuse for a campaign and Americans ought to know better by now.

Howard Fineman of Newsweek has some thoughts on this year's campaign:

Backed into a corner, George W. Bush gets louder and more deeply West Texas: a high-school football coach, down by 20 points at halftime, banging on the metal lockers for inspiration. He thinks that even a trace of presidential doubt will embolden Democrats at home and evildoers in Iraq. So here he was, at a not-oversubscribed Washington fund-raiser, launching the last drive of his last campaign with grim determination and warnings of apocalypse if Democrats take Congress. "They are the party of cut and run," he said. "Victory in Iraq is vital for the security of a generation of Americans who are coming up. And so we will stay in Iraq! We will fight in Iraq! And we will win in Iraq!"

First of all, is Fineman sure that Bush knows what game is being played? But more to the point: Bush is president, not a cheerleader and being president means knowing what you're trying to accomplish. It's means firing people who aren't getting the job done. It's means being honest with yourself about the facts and being reasonably honest with the American people. It means talking to our enemies because that's what the job calls for. It means putting the US Constitution and the American people above your own political desires and the desires of your cronies. What we do not need from President Bush is more of the same.

Let's hear more from Fineman:

The Bush administration now administers two Green Zones, one in Baghdad and one in the White House. The question raised by both is the same: can the people inside deal with the people outside?

(snip)

Bush's newfound confidence in and focus on his role as commander in chief matched Karl Rove's my-way-or-the-highway theory of public life. He hasn't bothered to meet with Sen. John Warner, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who recently came back from a fact-finding trip to Iraq. Watch for Warner to reward the president by declaring that American soldiers are now dying there in vain.

Only the voters can decide what happens on November 7th. Whether voters allow themselves to be seduced once more by a barrage of negative ads from Republicans or whether a majority finally says enough is enough, the Republican Party is crumbling from its own contradictions, ineptness and corruption.

There is already rumbling that the Republican Party needs to rebuild itself. Although I don't want to read too much into his words, because sometimes he backpedals from his own assertions, the curious David Brooks of The New York Times seems to be sending a shot across the bow of right wingers who are determined to maintain their domination of the Republican Party and therefore the nation:

"Tell us, why, again, Republicans need 55 senators?" Rush Limbaugh asked not long ago. "Why do we need 55 senators when we have so many malcontents and traitors in the bunch? And they all happen to be from the Northeast, and they all happen to be moderates, they all happen to be liberals."

In that spirit, the National Federation of Republican Assemblies set out to rid the party of this threat. It set up a "RINO Hunters Club" to "root out and hunt down" the squishy centrists who are Republicans in Name Only. The Club for Growth ran candidates to defeat them. Last week on his radio show, Sean Hannity blasted the RINO's again, saying they were costing good conservatives their jobs.

(snip)

Why have 55 Repubican senators? Why not 25? Why not 15 brave and true? Throw in a few dozen pure-minded Republican House members and you could hold the next Republican convention in a living room.

When people like Rush Limbaugh start devouring members of his own party, isn't that a sign of a party that's grown dysfunctional beyond repair? Democrats need to learn a lesson here: the Republicans, if they go down on Nov. 7th, are going down because they no longer are representative of the American people. (I worried that the attack on Lieberman was an attack on the big tent that Democrats should have but Lieberman has completely given himself away and is no moderate but simply a politician convinced of his personal entitlement; nevertheless, Democrats need to maintain the big tent elsewhere.)

Here's more from David Brooks:

[Republican moderates] are looking for orderly places to raise their children. They are what you might call antiparty empiricists. They distrust partisans and can't imagine why anyone would be sick enough to base an identity on a political organization. They don't expect much from government but a few competently delivered services, and they don't like public officials who unnerve them.

(snip)

The big issue is Iraq, but the core problem with suburban voters is not the decision to go to war; it's the White House reaction to the mess afterward. As Robert Lang, the superlative specialist at Virginia Tech, notes, when people mess up a project in an office park, there are consequences. But Donald Rumsfeld never gets fired. Jerry Bremer and Tommy Franks get medals.

This is not how engineers and empirically minded managers behave. The people in these offices manage information for a living, and when they see Republicans denying obvious trends, or shutting out relevant data, they say to themselves, "Those people are not like me."

So there goes your majority. ...

Brooks is talking about the average rational Republican and makes a number of excellent points, but he also misses a few things. The main thing he misses is that as rational Republicans finally take time from their busy jobs to examine what Bush has done, they are not pleased. And an increasing number of them recognize the fiasco in Iraq not just for the numerous blunders, but for the strategic blunder it was from its initial conception. Keeping right wing Republicans in power Nov. 7th is probably the worse thing the voters can do. There are consequences to what Bush is doing and consequences from the lack of oversight and acccomplishment by the current Congress and it's not a pretty picture. There is no chance of restoring order in the next two years if right wing Republicans remain in power and remain unaccountable.