UK Sunday Times: Dead hand of Bush is shaping this election

[seafan]

Dead hand of Bush is shaping this election

By Andrew Sullivan
February 10, 2008

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This election has been crafted by the man who isn’t in it. This is an election about George W Bush.

Most presidential elections, to be sure, are about the last one. Young, electrifying JFK was the antidote to arguably the best and certainly the most tedious president of the last century, Dwight Eisenhower. Jimmy Carter was a purist rebuke to the sordidness of Watergate. Ronald Reagan in turn provided the stylistic pomp and ideological clarity that Carter clearly lacked. George Bush Sr was a “kinder, gentler” Yankier version of Reagan conservatism. Bill Clinton was the clued-in, lower-class hipster to replace the out-of-it patrician pensioner of the first Bush. W, in turn, was the plain-spoken, hedgehog-rather-than-fox antidote to the wily, slippery, verbose Bubba Bill Clinton.
And now we have the three potential Bush replacements: John McCain, the man who ran against him in 2000, voted against his tax cuts, excoriated his torture policy and assailed his Iraq occupation; Hillary, the wife of the man Bush succeeded and who beat his daddy; and Barack Obama, a young, charismatic JFK-liberal whose eloquence and erudition are almost textbook negatives of Bush’s folksy, faux-ignorant charm.

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The business elites liked Mormon Mitt Romney enough – but the evangelicals didn’t. The Southern Christianist right loved Mike Huckabee. And the hawks championed McCain, but everyone else mistrusted him. McCain, to be sure, won the nomination last week. But it would be more accurate to say that everyone else lost it. McCain failed to secure a clear majority in the primaries and caucuses. In fact, he’s the only successful candidate I can recall who had to spend the day of his final victory apol-ogising to party activists for winning. ..... Bush is the reason, in other words, that this unlikely maverick has become the Republican nominee. And Bush is also the reason, I would argue, that Hillary Clinton’s meticulously planned coronation as the next Democratic nominee came unstuck.

It came unstuck because the depth of the Democrats’ disgust with Bush required more than just partisan revenge. And in the glare of the campaign, the Clintons began to represent for many Democrats the kind of politics that Bush himself had mastered. They remembered that before Karl Rove there had been Dick Morris: political consultants skilled at dividing and polarising electorates to get their candidate a 51% victory. Would reelecting the Clintons be in some way an endorsement of continuing Bush-style politics?

If Bush had not so enraged and dispirited liberals, Clinton would have been fine as the next career politician running their machine. But Bush had become for this generation of Democrats what Nixon had become for a previous generation. And they wanted a revolution against him and all he represented. They wanted someone who had clearly opposed the Iraq war in the first place and would not foment a new one against Iran. They wanted someone who wouldn’t require translation by Washington professionals – but could instead inspire and rally the broader public.
The demoralisation of the Bush era made possible the emotional and social forces that have combined to create the Obama movement. Hurricane Katrina and the terrible treatment of poor blacks in New Orleans made a black man almost necessary. Abu Ghraib made a man of integrity important. And the stain that many liberal and independent Americans felt the Bush era had left required a much stronger astringent than careful, focus-grouped, split-the-difference Clintonism.

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And that’s why the Republicans realised that up against the transformative power of Obama, they had to risk a move to the centre or face obliteration. Without Obama, I doubt that McCain would have emerged. But up against a clear, fresh, inspiring character, the Republicans couldn’t run a mere regional candidate like Huckabee or a phoney Bush composite like Romney. They needed a Republican who could appeal to the independents who were rushing to the Obama primaries and caucuses. And so Bush made Obama possible and Obama made McCain necessary.
If, as is still narrowly probable, the Clintons still strong-arm and bully their way to the Democratic nomination, something even more unexpected may happen. The conservative repudiation of Bush may finally beat the liberal version. History has its ironies. With McCain, this campaign may just have produced its biggest one.

[Yael]

1. GWB -- your legacy has spoken

:toast: