Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Party Unfaithful
The Republican implosion.
by Jeffrey Goldberg
June 4, 2007 ( Offline Print Date, New Yorker Magazine )

The West Wing of the White House tends to have a funereal stillness,
even in the best of times, which these are not. The President’s aides
walk the narrow corridors with pensive expressions and vigilantly
modulated voices. By contrast, Karl Rove’s office has an almost party
atmosphere. Rove, the President’s chief political adviser—the
“architect,” Bush has called him, of his 2004 victory over John
Kerry—has been a man of constant troubles: Valerie Plame troubles,
U.S. Attorney-firing troubles, and, most of all,collapse-of-the-Republican Party troubles.
Yet his voice is suffused with bonhomie, his jokes are bad and frequent,
his enthusiasm is communicable; he resembles an oversized leprechaun, although
one with unconcealed resentments and a receding hairline.

“Hey, what’s Snow doing here?” Rove said one recent afternoon. “Must
be important, if he’s visiting us.” Tony Snow, the White House press
secretary, stood in Rove’s outer office, bent over in conversation
with one of several assistants. “Uh-oh, here’s the big gun,” Rove said
as Peter Wehner, the White House director of strategic initiatives,
came into the office.

Wehner, an evangelical Christian, is known in
Washington for a relentless stream of e-mails that praise George W.
Bush’s allies (”The Remarkable Anthony Charles Lynton Blair,” “The
Remarkable Joseph Lieberman”); that glean from the Internet any
cheerful news from Iraq; and that provide links to articles by writers
like the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami and the untiring
neoconservative Norman Podhoretz.

As we talked, Rove would bounce up from his chair, twice making a show
of going to the dictionary to look up words. (One was “sanguinity,” as
in “I’m very sanguine” about the Republican Party’s future.) He is a
bookish man who plays the part of the anti-intellectual, which fits an
Administration whose culture discourages displays of esoteric
knowledge and, its critics say, of useful knowledge as well.

When Rove came to Washington, after the 2000 election, he envisioned
creating an enduring Republican majority—the permanent mobilization of
the Party’s broad, socially conservative base. Part of his strategy
was to cast as threats, in alarming terms, same-sex marriage, abortion
rights, and other bogeymen of the right. It is Rove’s cleverness,
combined with his joie de combat, that made him insufferable to
Democrats.

Now, though, the Democrats are gloating—and happy to point out that
little more than thirty per cent of the public approves of Bush’s job
performance. Andrew Sullivan, a disaffected conservative, has joked on
his blog that Rove seems to be getting his permanent majority—except
that it’s a Democratic one. The Republican reversal has certainly come
with great speed—as fortunes in Washington have tended to do since the
Vietnam era. In the midterm election, Republicans lost control of
Congress, and the House G.O.P. caucus is beleaguered by scandals and
by accusations that its members have benefitted from crude pork-barrel
politics. The tenets of neoconservatism that have animated Bush’s
foreign policy—that America has a responsibility to spread the ideals
of democracy, and that force can justifiably be used to aid this
secular missionary work—are held in low esteem. The call to change the
world which infused Bush’s second Inaugural speech has faded.

Disillusionment with the Administration has become widespread among
the conservatives who once were Bush’s strongest supporters. Mickey
Edwards, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, said recently,
“The Republican Administration has shown itself to be completely
incompetent to the point that, of Republicans in Iowa, fifty-two per
cent thought we should be out of Iraq in six months.” Edwards, who
left Congress in 1993 and now teaches at Princeton, is helping to lead
an effort among some conservatives to curtail the President’s power in
such areas as warrantless wiretapping. “This Administration is beyond
the pale in terms of arrogance and incompetence,” he said. “This guy
thinks he’s a monarch, and that’s scary as hell.” The grievances
against the Administration seem limitless. Many congressional
Republicans, for instance, were upset that Bush waited to fire Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld until after the midterm elections.

Even if events in Iraq do eventually turn in the direction that the
Administration hopes, history is weighted against the Republicans.
Only once since the death of Franklin Roosevelt has a party kept the
Presidency for three consecutive terms—when George H. W. Bush defeated
Michael Dukakis, in 1988. Bush the Elder, though, had the advantage of
being Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President, and Reagan, despite being
damaged by the Iran-Contra scandal, was greatly esteemed by his party.
Few of the men running now for the Republican nomination are likely to
embrace George W. Bush’s record. “If the Democrats can’t win the
Presidency in 2008, they’ll never win the Presidency,” David Keene,
the chairman of the American Conservative Union, said not long ago.

And now Karl Rove, the man Bush has called his “boy genius,” is among
those being blamed by conservatives for the Party’s problems—blame
that he shares with others who have attempted to transform the party.
One is Newt Gingrich, the strategist behind the 1994 Republican
takeover of Congress, who could not hold together his coalition, and
resigned. (Gingrich also faced ethics problems—he was accused of using
tax-deductible donations for political purposes.) Another is Tom
DeLay, who served as House whip under Gingrich and became Majority
Leader under Gingrich’s successor, Dennis Hastert, and who left facing
charges relating to campaign fi-nance. Perhaps most of all,
conservatives blame Rove’s boss, George W. Bush.

When I asked Rove if the persistence of bad news, along with criticism
from conservatives, has made the White House a moody place, he let
loose an apparently authentic laugh. “This is a great place to work,”
he said. “It’s inspiring to work here. It’s neat, particularly when
you’ve got a boss whose attitude is ‘What can we do today to advance
our goals? What are the big things we could be doing?’ ” Such
statements fail to acknowledge that the President has been spending
much of his time fighting congressional attempts to limit his mobility
in Iraq and to force the resignation of Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales. For Rove, the future is still Republican. “I don’t think by
any means it’s a sure thing, but I do think there are these big
societal changes driving us, and I think that the conservative
movement and the Party through which it operates are going to
benefit,” he said. “That’s not to say that it’s going to be an
ever-upward line. And it also doesn’t mean that smart Democrats can’t
do something about it.”

Rove thinks that more voters now are being influenced by technology
and religion. “There are two or three societal trends that are driving
us in an increasingly deep center-right posture,” he said. “One of
them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people’s
principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand.” He went
on, “So the power of the computer has made it possible for people to
gain greater control over their lives. It’s given people a greater
chance to run their own business, become a sole proprietor or an
entrepreneur. As a result, it has made us more market-oriented, and
that equals making you more center-right in your politics.” As for
spirituality, Rove said, “As baby boomers age and as they’re succeeded
by the post-baby-boom generation, within both of those generations
there’s something going on spiritually—people saying it’s not all
about materialism, it’s not all about the pursuit of material things.
If you look at the traditional mainstream denominations, they’re flat,
but what’s growing inside those denominations, and what’s growing
outside those denominations, is churches that are filling this
spiritual need, that are replacing sterility with something vibrant,
something that speaks to the heart of the individual, that gives a
sense of purpose.” Rove believes what he has always believed: that the
Christian right and, to a lesser extent, tax- and regulation-averse
businessmen will continue to assure Republican victories.

Early G.O.P. Presidential polls, though, don’t seem to confirm this
analysis. Rudolph Giuliani stands more firmly than any of his rivals
for abortion rights and civil unions for gays, and at this point
appears to be in the lead. Bush, polls suggest, has also lost the
support of some self-described conservatives. (Thirty-three per cent
of voters in 2004 identified themselves that way.) But Rove cautioned
against reading too much into polls, or the results of the 2006
midterm elections. “It’s important to keep in perspective how close
the election actually was,” he said. “Three thousand five hundred and
sixty-two votes and we would have had a Republican Senate. That’s the
gap in the Montana Senate race. And eighty-five thousand votes are the
difference in the fifteen closest House races. There’s no doubt we’ve
taken a short-term hit in the face of a very contentious war, but to
have the Republicans suffer an average defeat for the midterm says
something about the underlying strength of conservative attitudes in
the country.” Rove’s arithmetic was correct, but he sounded like John
Kerry, who, shortly after his defeat in the 2004 election, told me, “I
received the second-highest number of votes in American history.”

Rove places the blame for the election results on the recent scandals
in Congress—congressmen who placed themselves in the orbit of Jack
Abramoff, the lobbyist at the center of the Republican ethics
meltdown; and the former congressman Mark Foley’s relationships with
congressional pages—rather than the Administration’s management of the
Iraq war. “If you look at the exit polling, the No. 1 issue,
particularly among swing voters, was corruption and behavior,” he
said. “After Foley, people said, ‘It’s just too much.’ After that,
spending was the No. 2 issue.”

Rove suggested, as Bush repeatedly has, that history will ratify the
decision to invade Iraq. “You know, the Bush doctrine—’Feed a
terrorist, arm a terrorist, train a terrorist, fund a terrorist,
you’re just as bad as a terrorist,’ ” he said. “It’s going to remain
our national doctrine, and it’s going to be very difficult, I think,
if not impossible, to dismiss this, just as it will be to dismiss the
doctrine of preëmption. In the future, the country is not going to let
the dangers fully materialize, and we’re not going to allow ourselves
to be attacked before we do anything about it. The question was, did
we have the right intelligence about Saddam Hussein? No. Was it the
right thing to do? Yes.”

Leaving the White House, I passed through the West Wing reception
area, where a single visitor—an Army officer, perched on a couch—was
waiting for an appointment. It was Lieutenant General Douglas E. Lute,
who that evening was to be named “war czar,” a job that few others
seemed eager to take.

The appointment of a war czar four years after the invasion of Iraq
has struck some as a late and insufficient response to the crisis, and
has been a reminder that the Administration, ever since its halting
response to Hurricane Katrina, has been judged harshly on questions of
competence. Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans
have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the
Bush Administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy
Carter Presidency, when nothing seemed to go right. “It’s just gotten
steadily worse,” he said. “There was some point during the Iranian
hostage crisis, the gasoline rationing, the malaise speech, the
sweater, the rabbit”—Gingrich was referring to Carter’s suggestion
that Americans wear sweaters rather than turn up their thermostats,
and to the “attack” on Carter by what cartoonists quickly portrayed as
a “killer rabbit” during a fishing trip—”that there was a morning
where the average American went, ‘You know, this really worries me.’ ”
He added, “You hire Presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well
enough that you don’t have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to
draw the country together to meet great challenges you can’t avoid
thinking about.” Gingrich continued, “When you have the collapse of
the Republican Party, you have an immediate turn toward the Democrats,
not because the Democrats are offering anything better, but on a ‘not
them’ basis. And if you end up in a 2008 campaign between ‘them’ and
‘not them,’ ‘not them’ is going to win.”

If Gingrich were an ordinary politician and not someone brimming with
futurist and other ideas—some logical, some loopy, many interesting—he
would have passed his sell-by date a long time ago. But Gingrich is
not ordinary; he did not, in the manner of many ex-congressmen, become
a lobbyist (like Dick Armey, the Majority Leader when Gingrich was
Speaker). Instead, he has spent his exile lecturing, appearing on Fox
News, writing and co-writing books at a ruthless pace (eight so far,
including a recent novel about Pearl Harbor), and advertising his
thoughts on how to transform government and how to save his party.
Gingrich’s strength was always insurgency, and after he won his
majority, his Achilles’ heel, which was actual governance, became
visible to the world. In 1994, his Contract with America promised,
among other things, to reform the way Congress did business; in 1995
and 1996, in a standoff with the Clinton White House, parts of the
federal government were shut down for a total of twenty-seven days,
and Gingrich received much of the blame. Three years later,
Republicans, who by then held only a narrow majority in the House,
lost five seats; the Gingrich revolution was over and so was
Gingrich’s congressional career.

But Gingrich seemed to me to believe that, having led one Republican
revolution, he is well positioned to lead another—one that would place
him in the position of Presidential candidate. Though he says that he
won’t decide whether he is running until the fall—and although the
clamor for his candidacy has so far not been shrill—he is behaving in
many ways like a candidate, taking on speaking engagements and
constructing elaborate defenses of his record. He has admitted having
committed adultery, and he sought penance on the radio show of James
Dobson, a prominent leader of the Christian right. He is also mindful
of his weight. When we met recently at the McLean Family Restaurant,
in suburban Virginia, near the headquarters of the C.I.A.—one of many
government agencies that he says require “radical transformation”—he
ordered oatmeal with no milk or sugar. Republicans will be studying
Gingrich’s waistline this summer for signs of a pre-campaign regimen
of self-denial just as closely as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
will be studying Al Gore’s.

Gingrich does not seem to have aged much in the eight years since he
left Congress. His manner has not changed much, either. He has a
fondness for ideas that he deems large and not much talent for small
talk. Charm is a chore, though he was not at all crabby—as he
sometimes is—when we met. The condition of his party had put him in a
noticeably buoyant mood. On being asked whether Republicans would be
able to capture the White House in 2008 or 2012, he said, smiling, “Or
2016, or 2020.”

Not since Watergate, Gingrich said, has the Republican Party been in
such desperate shape. “Let me be clear: twenty-eight-per-cent approval
of the President, losing every closely contested Senate seat except
one, every one that involved an incumbent—that’s a collapse. I mean,
look at the Northeast. You can’t be a governing national party and
write off entire regions.” For this disarray he blames not only Iraq
and Hurricane Katrina but also Karl Rove’s “maniacally dumb” strategy
in 2004, which left Bush with no political capital. “All he proved was
that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,” Gingrich
said. He continued, “The Bush people deliberately could not bring
themselves to wage a campaign of choice”—of ideology, of suggesting
that Kerry was “to the left of Ted Kennedy”—and chose instead to
attack Kerry’s war record.

The only way to keep the White House in G.O.P. hands, Gingrich said,
would be to nominate someone who, in essence, runs against Bush, in
the style of Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right cabinet minister who
just won the French Presidency by making his own President, Jacques
Chirac, his virtual opponent. Sarkozy is a transforming figure in
French politics, Gingrich said, and he suggested that the only
Republican who shared Sarkozy’s “transformative” approach to governing
was, at that moment, eating a bowl of oatmeal at the McLean Family
Restaurant.

“What’s fascinating about Sarkozy is that you have an incumbent
cabinet member of a very unpopular twelve-year Presidency, who over
the last three years became the clear advocate of fundamental change,
running against an attractive woman”—the Socialist leader Ségolène
Royal—”who is the head of the opposition,” Gingrich went on. “In a
country that wanted to say, ‘Not them,’ he managed to switch the
identity of the ‘them.’ He said, ‘I’m different from Chirac, and she’s
not. If you want more of the same, you should vote for her.’ It was a
Lincoln-quality strategic decision.”

Gingrich’s ego is robust—Barack Obama is not the only national
politician to fashion himself as an inheritor of Lincoln’s mantle. He
seems convinced that the Republican Party’s salvation lies in his
fecund mind, and believes that truly transformative conservative
ideas, when well articulated, will be enough to attract large
majorities. He cited global warming as an example. Very few
Republicans these days talk about global warming as a reality, the way
Gingrich does. Before a recent debate on Capitol Hill with John Kerry
(reporters were promised a “smack-down”), Kerry seemed flustered when
Gingrich shifted the debate from the basic science to a discussion of
market-based solutions to the problem. Gingrich explained it this way:
“There’s a short-term way out of this and a long-term way out of this.
The long-term way is to create a new intellectual battleground, which
you can’t do if you start out by saying ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ But if
you say, ‘O.K., let’s talk about, for example, how you best have
conservation in America, do you think trial lawyers, regulators,
bureaucrats, and higher taxes are the answer, then you ought to be
with Al Gore. If you think that markets, incentives, prizes, and
entrepreneurs are the answer, you ought to be with us.’ ”

I asked Gingrich if it was a mistake to appeal to the
religious-conservative base of the Party on such issues as the fate of
Terri Schiavo, a woman who was living in a persistent vegetative
state. In 2005, Republicans—supported by, among others, DeLay, and the
former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist—engineered quick passage of a
special law requiring that Schiavo be kept on a feeding tube, against
her husband’s wishes but in accord with her parents’ demands and the
demands of many evangelicals and conservative Catholics. (Frist, a
physician, diagnosed Schiavo, noting that she was “clearly
responsive,” after watching her on videotape.) The courts intervened,
and the feeding tube that kept Schiavo alive was removed; she died
thirteen days afterward. That episode, though, frightened members of
what the anti-tax agitator Grover Norquist calls the “leave-me-alone
coalition.” It certainly frightened centrists, without whom neither
party could flourish.

Gingrich has been criticized lately by some conservatives—most notably
DeLay—for spending too much time reaching out to center-right voters;
he advocates modernizing the government rather than making it smaller.
(Gingrich and DeLay barely speak; their relationship came apart in the
late nineteen-nineties, when Gingrich suspected DeLay of engineering
an attempted coup.) It is true, Gingrich said, that he wants to bring
the center into a coalition with the right, “because I want to give
the right power. The right can have power only by being allied with
the center.”

That, Gingrich said, was Rove’s mistake. “I think he didn’t understand
the second-order effect of base mobilization. The second-order effect
is that you drive away the center because you become more and more
strident at the base.” What you end up with, he said, is cases like
Schiavo’s, and the feeling that Republicans risk alienating “America’s
natural majority.”

“The Schiavo case was one of my proudest moments in Congress,” Tom
DeLay told me not long ago in the basement grill room of the Capitol
Hill Club, a Republican retreat, where congressmen and senators can
mix with lobbyists, a number of whom are former congressmen. DeLay was
tan and smiling and tranquil, which was striking, considering that he
is currently under indictment in Texas on money-laundering charges,
and that many Republicans blame him for allowing a culture of
corruption to thrive when he led the Republican caucus. DeLay helped
create the so-called K Street Project, designed by Grover Norquist to
move Republican congressional staffers into key positions at lobbying
firms and trade associations; he was closely linked to Jack Abramoff,
and two senior former staff members have already pleaded guilty to
corruption charges in the Abramoff case.

“I don’t let those kinds of things bother me,” DeLay said of the
controversies that churn around him. “I’m at peace with myself,” he
added, laughing. “I know that bothers some people. I’m very relaxed.”
He pointed to his cup of decaffeinated coffee. “This is pretty much
the strongest stuff I drink these days. I’ll occasionally take a glass
of wine with dinner.”

Earlier this year, he published a memoir called “No Retreat, No
Surrender” (his spokeswoman says that he was not stealing from Bruce
Springsteen, and that the phrase has been used many times throughout
history, including by the Spartans and as the title of a Jean-Claude
Van Damme movie), in which he claimed that as a young congressman he
would on occasion drink ten to twelve Martinis at a time. In this
period, he earned the nickname Hot Tub Tom. Then he found Jesus and,
he said, stopped sinning. In the book, he freely confesses to
committing adultery. “I had put my needs first,” he told me. “I was on
the throne, not God. I had pushed God from His throne.”

In the book, DeLay criticizes Gingrich for, among other things,
conducting an affair with a Capitol Hill employee during the 1998
impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (The woman later became Gingrich’s
third wife.) “Yes, I don’t think that Newt could set a high moral
standard, a high moral tone, during that moment,” DeLay said. “You
can’t do that if you’re keeping secrets about your own adulterous
affairs.” He added that the impeachment trial was another of his
“proudest moments.” The difference between his own adultery and
Gingrich’s, he said, “is that I was no longer committing adultery by
that time, the impeachment trial. There’s a big difference.” He added,
“Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time.”

In fact, DeLay speaks of Gingrich with undisguised contempt. “He’s got
this new shtick now—’solutions,’ he calls it, like government is the
new solution. Government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.” DeLay
smiled. “Did you see that he had a love match with John Kerry on
global warming?” he said. “That’s not going to help him with the
Presidential race.”

A tall, thin man of about fifty approached DeLay, who jumped up to hug
him. “This is the man who really saved me,” DeLay said. He introduced
the man as the Reverend Ken Wilde, an Idaho evangelical leader, who
founded the National Prayer Center on Capitol Hill. The center houses
volunteers who pray for America’s leaders. “When I was going through
my troubles, it was Ken who really stepped up,” DeLay said.

Wilde had a brief message for DeLay. “The church is strong,” he said.
When he left, I asked DeLay if he thought the church—evangelicals, who
make up the core of his support—was strong enough to save the
Republican Party. In this case, he agreed with Gingrich. “We’re having
a time of it right now,” he said. “We don’t have a good shot at
winning 2008. I’m not saying we don’t have a shot, but it’s not good.
It’s going to take six years to rebuild.”

DeLay says that when, in the coming years, he is not fighting the
indictment in Texas (he insists that he is not guilty) he will be
building a conservative grass-roots equivalent of MoveOn.org. “God has
spoken to me,” he said. “I listen to God, and what I’ve heard is that
I’m supposed to devote myself to rebuilding the conservative base of
the Republican Party, and I think we shouldn’t be underestimated.” He
said that Republicans should spend their impending exile reminding
themselves what they stand for. “I see this as a cleansing process,
where you can return to your principles, which are order, justice, and
freedom—the basic principles of the conservative movement. We have to
redefine government based on conservative principles, we have to win
the war against our culture, and we have to win the war on terror.”

DeLay’s critics find his reinvention as a guardian of conservative
ideals implausible. “I don’t think he ever understood what it was
about,” Dick Armey, who preceded DeLay as Majority Leader, told me.
“The revolution was about changing public policy for America, but he
thought the revolution was about winning a Republican majority in
which he would have an important position in the leadership. For him,
keeping the majority was about keeping power for himself.”

In Armey’s view, DeLay saw earmarking—the practice by which members of
Congress can attach spending projects to larger bills—as a means of
keeping the Republicans in permanent power. One such project, in
Alaska, involved building a bridge that would connect a small city to
an airport on an island, at a cost of more than two hundred million
dollars; the so-called “bridge to nowhere” became a national joke and
a scandal. “Politics is morally and intellectually inferior to any
other criteria when you’re making choices about spending,” Armey said,
“and they fell into making political choices. There was an explosion
of earmarks in the last several years. You use earmarks to help the
guy who needs it to win elections, but then what happens is people
say, ‘I don’t need an earmark, but it sure would be nice’ “—that is,
to bring pork to the congressman’s home district.

Conservative leaders have always entertained suspicions about George
W. Bush’s conservative credentials—in part because his father raised
taxes while President, and in part because “compassionate
conservatism,” which was a mantra of Bush’s 2000 campaign, sounded to
some dangerously like “big-government conservatism.” DeLay’s
willingness to spend tax money in order to keep his party in power
came as a surprise to those who believed that he was a doctrinaire,
limited-government conservative. “Bush was never a conservative, but
Tom DeLay was one of us and he betrayed us,” Richard Viguerie, a
founder of the modern conservative movement, says. “He’s like a lot of
these guys. They campaign against the cesspool. ‘I’ll clean up the
cesspool of government,’ but after a while they all say, ‘I made a
mistake—it wasn’t a cesspool, it was a hot tub.’ That’s what they
called him, you know, Hot Tub Tom.”

Viguerie, whose new book is called “Conservatives Betrayed: How George
W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative
Cause,” told me how the conservative movement has been undermined:
“It’s not any one thing, but, when you add everything up, what you
have is a massive overreach of executive powers, and massive
overspending by people who claim they’re conservatives. Every
President, with hardly any exceptions, will take as much power as he
gets. That’s what Presidents do. Bush has tried more than most. And it
was supposed to be the Republicans in Congress who would do oversight
of the President, so that he wouldn’t get away with too much abuse of
power. But they abdicated that role. It was all about the maintenance
of power, and now look where they are.” He continued, “This President
has strengths and weaknesses, but he has a major character flaw, and
that’s that he will brook no criticism and his people won’t, either.
And the whole Party gave in to him on that.”

Jeff Flake, a four-term congressman from Arizona, is one of the
Republicans who have turned on the Administration. He is a Mormon,
with five children, and his cheerful personality seems to have
somewhat protected him from retribution from a Party leadership that
doesn’t like what he’s saying. “The Republican Party has always had
three tenets—economic freedom, limited government, and individual
responsibility,” he told me not long ago. “If you look at any of those
three issues lately, you’d be hard-pressed to say that the Republican
Party really stands for any of them. Look at the growth of government.
And I’m not just talking about war spending and homeland security. You
can put that aside, and we’ve still grown substantially. Look at that
tracking-poll question that’s always asked: ‘Whom do you trust more to
manage the public’s finances, Republicans or Democrats?’ Republicans
have always had a big edge there. And that has narrowed over the
years, and now it’s reversed.”

Flake said that he and Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana
conservative, often joke that they feel like Revolutionary War-era
minutemen who arrived five minutes after the battle was finished. “You
know, it took three runs for Mike to get to Congress. We both got here
in 2000, we show up and report for duty, and we’re told, ‘All right,
No Child Left Behind is the first mission.’ That’s the first thing we
do. We arrived for the revolution, and we’re six years late. And then
we thought, Maybe this is an aberration, wait until the next term, and
then what is it? Prescription drugs. We were just too late.”
Limited-government conservatives believe that No Child Left Behind is
a federal intrusion into a matter best left to states, and that the
prescription-drug bill represents the further expansion of
entitlements.

When I mentioned Flake’s objections to Rove, he said, “I don’t accept
the label ‘big-government conservatism.’ I think the object here is
how do you fundamentally reform the big institutions of government in
a way in which you drive them toward market choice, to the individual,
to decentralization.” He went on, “Flake is one of the few people who
are consistent. Because he will say, ‘Not only should we not have the
prescription-drug benefit but also we shouldn’t have Medicare, either.
But most members of Congress, virtually every conservative member of
Congress, has said, ‘Look, we’ve settled that issue; we’re going to
have Medicare.’ ”

Flake, like many Republicans on the Hill, no longer seems interested
in Rove’s theories. “If we would stick to our principles, we could be
a natural governing majority,” he said. “But our leaders have not
stuck to the principles they say they follow.” Like most Republicans,
he sees little chance in the near term for his party’s revival. “It’s
a tough environment, and, frankly, I’m not sure we’ve bottomed out
yet. There are still a lot of investigations going on, and the war is
going on. We’re going to have to turn it around, but I’m not sure how
we’re going to do it. All we can hope for, I guess, is for the
Democrats to overreach on something.”

The Democrats are not strangers to overreaching, and America’s
political parties tend to make quick recoveries. In 1964,
Republicans—and especially conservatives—despaired after Barry
Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson; four years later,
Richard Nixon won the White House. In 1976, Jimmy Carter defeated
Gerald Ford in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that drove Nixon
from office, but Carter lost four years later to Ronald Reagan—and
Republicans gained control of the Senate. Not long ago, I asked the
G.O.P. leader in the House, John Boehner, if he thought it possible
for his party to keep the White House and take back Congress in 2008.
His answer was revealing. “The Democrats have gone too far,” he said.
“They’ve grossly miscalculated what the American people want on
national security.” When I asked him to describe a set of post-Iraq,
post-corruption, post-earmark-scandal ideas that would propel the
Republicans back into contention, he said, “Members have to do the
hard work, using their own brains to develop our proposals for the
future.” Then he said, “The Democrats are going to stumble. It’s just
the nature of things.” ♦