The Arena: Republicans’ recent electoral failures stem overwhelmingly from one single cause: George W. Bush. His policies of starting wars based on the flimsiest of evidence, prosecuting those wars incompetently, total disregard for fiscal responsibility, and a governing style of appointing people to high level positions based solely on blind loyalty to him and treating political opponents as traitors to the country are deeply unpopular and with good reason. No wonder Barack Obama’s promise of change resonated so strongly. John McCain’s only hope was to distance himself as far from Bush as humanly possible. Instead he gave voters no reason to believe a McCain administration would be substantively different from Bush’s. His loss was preordained.
The sad thing is that things could have been different. I saw the Bush-led political train wreck coming four years ago and wrote a book about it, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, published in early 2006. At that point Bush was a lame duck and there was no reason why Republicans needed to hold back on criticizing him for his many mistakes. I also thought they would be smart enough to see that whatever their personal views of Bush and his policies, they were going to be a political albatross around every Republicans’ neck in 2006 and 2008. For self-preservation alone I figured that Republicans would try to get as far away from Bush as they could.
Foolishly, Republicans chose not to follow this advice even after the huge losses in 2006. If anything, they seemed to tie themselves even more closely to Bush. Once Republicans made the decision to embrace Bushism without reservation, the electoral results were inevitable. I still believe that Republicans must repudiate Bush if they have any hope of making more than a token comeback. I am starting to see a few conservatives point their fingers at Bush’s failures for the greatly diminished Republican political fortunes, but it is too little, too late. Nevertheless, realizing how deeply Bush has harmed the Republican Party, not to mention the nation, is the first step toward recovery.
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