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The Post-Bush Era
 Pride
goeth before a fall, and three notable people
discovered this week that arrogance has a price tag. The reporter Judith
Miller, the femme fatale of journalism, finally left the New York
Times, where after 28 years she had become an embarrassment to
her bosses and colleagues. Terrell Owens, the Philadelphia Ego, learned, in
spite of his belated apologies, that he’d exhausted the patience of his
team’s owners, his coaches, and his
teammates.  And
President Bush read the election results.
The drubbings the Republicans
took from coast to coast weren’t a total surprise. The weekend
before the election, the Washington Post reported voter
discontent with the GOP, even in the heartland. David Broder, the veteran
political analyst, quoted an old Republican leader saying of Bush,
“He’s lucky he’s not on the ballot this year.” And
that was in Ohio.
Voters in Ohio, Broder noted,
couldn’t care less about whether Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Karl
Rove — minor studies in arrogance — have committed perjury;
the “dominant factor” in the Republican slump is the endless
Iraq war. Bush’s patriotic happy-talk leaves them unmoved as
American soldiers, many of them Ohioans, keep dying in ambushes.
On election day I got a startling bit
of feedback. A fervent and principled conservative, a Vietnam veteran and
former CIA man, the sort the Democrats would call an
“extremist,” mentioned that he and many of his friends now
look back on the eight Clinton years as the good old days.
In Republican Virginia, Democrat
Tim Kaine was easily elected governor after Bush came down to campaign for
his opponent, Jerry Kilgore. At one point Kilgore, sniffing the wind, had
avoided appearing with Bush during a presidential visit to the state, but by
the end of the race he was desperate enough to welcome his support, hoping
it might make the difference. It didn’t.
Neither did feverishly branding
Kaine a “liberal.” The old Republican tricks aren’t working
anymore. Bush, guided by Rove (“Bush’s brain”), has
worn them out.
Only last year, when Bush and his
brain whipped the feckless John Kerry, the Republicans looked invincible.
They’d consolidated not only their hold on the presidency but the
conquest of Congress that had begun in 1994, when Newt Gingrich was riding
as high as Bush has since.
![[Breaker quote for The Post-Bush Era: Has it already begun?]](2005breakers/051110.gif) The
“war on terror” rallied the country behind Bush,
and dozens of neoconservative keyboards gushed forth analogies with
Roosevelt and Churchill fighting Hitler, the Saddam Hussein of yesteryear.
“Pre-emptive” war quickly effected “regime
change” in Afghanistan and Iraq, where “democracy” put
down its roots, women enjoyed rights for the first time, and “weapons
of mass destruction” would soon be found. The invincible Bush basked
in triumph.
Meanwhile, at home, the invincible
president became the biggest spender ever to occupy the White House. As
nearly 80 million Baby Boomers approached retirement age, he added new
Medicare benefits that would consolidate Republican popularity for the
foreseeable future.
And without raising taxes! With a
booming economy, it would all pay for itself. Optimism was the legacy of
Ronald Reagan, Gingrich, and supply-side economics. You couldn’t
argue with success, and even most of the Democrats were too intimidated to
protest much.
But, amidst all the GOP
celebrations, the Iraq war sprang a slow leak. A fierce resistance to the
invasion, or “liberation,” erupted and persisted. Saddam Hussein
was overthrown, captured, and humiliated, but his dreaded weapons were
never found; it seemed they didn’t exist. The
“slam-dunk” pre-war intelligence had goofed. The administration
had also taken some liberties with the facts. Eventually a special prosecutor
got into the act.
The wheel of Fortune turned out
to be more than a game show. Within a remarkably short time, early in his
second term, Bush had totally lost his aura of mastery and heroic virtue. The
headlines brought a welter of new or formerly marginal names, none of which
reflected well on the president: Katrina, DeLay, Frist, Libby, and Harriet
Miers. And more than 2,000 American soldiers had died in Iraq.
If conservatism means Bush, we
may see a new political alignment in the years ahead. Given only two choices,
sensible voters should prefer a chastened liberal to a deluded conservative.
This is excellent news for the
junior senator from New York. Think of it. In early 2009 she could become
not only the first woman president, but the first president to bring White
House furniture in with her.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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