On his high horse
In the wake of his party's remarkable electoral performance, can George Bush now unlock America's political stasis?
THE 2002 mid-term elections were an extraordinary success for George Bush. The Republicans have expanded their control of the House of Representatives and even regained the Senate. By the light of history, this was remarkable. During its first term, the party that controls the White House has never won back the Senate, and has lost seats in all but two of the past 34 mid-term elections. Had normal patterns prevailed, the Democrats should have done well, with the economy weak and the stockmarket down over 40% from its high point in March 2000.
That they did not has much to do with Mr Bush himself. With his high personal approval ratings—60% of the population still regard him favourably—he seems to have broken the usual rule for mid-terms: that presidents can harm their party but seldom do much good.
In the month before election day, Mr Bush campaigned like a man with his shirt-tail on fire. Breaking with his reputation as a man “above politics”, he threw his prestige into the battle. His frenzy of campaign appearances in the final stretch, when he visited 15 states in six days, may well explain the last-minute shift towards the Republicans and could have tipped the balance in several close Senate races.
Mr Bush is not just the Republican Party's biggest electoral draw. He is also its champion fundraiser and dominant decision-maker. He has centralised in the White House the power to take many party-political decisions. He intervened in at least three Senate races, overruling local favourites and picking moderate candidates more to his liking. Two of them—Saxby Chambliss in Georgia and Norm Coleman in Minnesota—won their races against the odds.
The great divide
Having successfully bucked one historical trend, the question now is how far Mr Bush can break free of another: the electoral tie that has dominated American politics since the early 1990s. Here, the evidence is mixed, but there are hints that he may be starting to change the landscape a little. If so, this would prove the most important story of the mid-term elections.
As Rhodes Cook, a political analyst, points out, if you add up all the congressional votes between the last round of redistricting in 1991-92 and 2000, you get 204m Republican votes and 203m Democratic ones. The parties came within a whisker of one another in the elections of 1996, 1998 and 2000. Bill Clinton was re-elected president with 49% of the vote. Mr Bush got 48% in 2000. This was the same number, over and over again: the 50-50 nation (or, as one misprint put it, “America: the so-so nation”).
Such political divisions cannot easily be shifted by any president, let alone in two years, because they reflect deep demographic divisions. In 2000, Democrats took an overwhelming share of urban voters, Republicans a large share of rural voters, and the suburbs split evenly between the two. The 50-50 nation appears to be made up of two big, separate voting blocks, with only a small number of swing voters in the middle.
So it would be asking a lot for Mr Bush to change America's political landscape. Yet there is some evidence he may—just may—be starting to. Republicans won 53% of all votes in the Senate races. This is the same share Mr Bush's father won in 1988, before parity set in. Admittedly, this is not a nationwide figure (there were only 34 Senate races). It is not a decisive break with the 50-50 pattern. But it does stretch that pattern to the limit. And in several states that were close in 2000, including Florida and Minnesota, the margin of Republican victory was larger than expected.
Not too much should be read into the result of one election. Newt Gingrich mistook the 1994 mid-term Republican landslide as proof of permanent change, and over-reached to his cost. Yet it is worth remembering that a 50-50 division is extremely rare in America. For most of its history, one party has dominated—Republicans between the 1890s and the early 1930s, Democrats from then until the 1980s. The last period in which neither side was able to establish a clear advantage was the 1880s. And because political stasis is so rare, it should also, on the face of it, be amenable to change.
Mr Bush has a better chance than most to break the deadlock. To begin with, he was, when elected, the first Republican in 50 years to control all three branches of government. He has now regained unified control, which should give him back greater power to initiate legislation.
Next, some long-term trends in America ought to help Republicans more than Democrats. On the campaign trail, Mr Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, argued that the president had an opportunity to pave the way for a period of Republican dominance by extending his party's appeal to new immigrants and “new economy” workers—rather as President McKinley did in the 1890s, breaking an earlier period of deadlock, by attracting votes from European immigrants who were powering America's industrial cities.
Mr Rove's thesis is more plausible than some suppose. Over the past decade, there has been a sharp increase in the number of people who own shares, and a huge growth of new immigrants. Corporate scandals and a falling stockmarket have slashed the value of portfolios, but it seems clear that people do not blame Mr Bush or his party for this. As for the new citizens, they are often socially conservative. Mr Bush won 40% of the Latino vote when he was governor of Texas. This time, Republicans won two of the biggest states with large Hispanic minorities (Florida and Texas) and narrowed the Democratic majority in California.
In this election, the Democrats failed to offer any constructive alternative economic policies and were split on Iraq
The other helpful trend for Republicans has been the recent weakness of the other side. In this election, the Democrats failed to offer any constructive alternative economic policies and were split on Iraq. It is true that they have been tenacious in hanging on to, and turning out, their traditional constituencies—trade union voters, blacks, teachers and others. But the Democratic alliance is even more fractious than the Republican one. Union members are declining as a share of the population, though not of the electorate. This time, blacks seem to have stayed home in droves. If, as is possible, Democrats react to their disappointments by drifting to the left, Mr Bush should have a good chance to pick up votes in the centre.
Lastly, political deadlock is often ended by ground-shaking events at home and abroad. In the past two years, the boom of the 1990s has bust. The collapse of Enron has sparked the biggest crisis in corporate governance for decades. The attacks on the World Trade Centre have transformed America's sense of its own vulnerability (the Senate is debating the largest reorganisation of government since the 1940s in the new Department of Homeland Security), and have transformed its relations with the rest of the world. The country is preparing for possible war with Iraq.
Against that background, a partisan breakthrough should at least be possible. That the mid-term elections show only hints of it reflects partly the intrinsic difficulties of changing a political landscape, and partly Mr Bush's own record. In essence, he chose to ignore the closeness of his 2000 election victory and sought to govern as if he had a mandate for his platform. This worked, in the sense that his first year saw two big legislative victories. Yet it complicated his attempt to appeal past the divide of American partisanship.
The record so far
On the campaign trail of 2000, Mr Bush offered three main domestic programmes—tax cuts, education reform and “compassionate conservatism” (whatever that meant). Despite his party's loss of congressional seats, Mr Bush signed a $1.35 trillion tax cut—the largest since 1981—into law in June 2001 on a strict party-line vote in the House of Representatives. This was speedier than Ronald Reagan's tax cut, which was signed nine months after an overwhelming election victory.
Mr Bush's other main domestic achievement was a 1,000-page education-reform bill which had, as its centrepiece, a plan to test every public-school pupil between the ages of eight and 13 and to sanction schools and school systems for failures. This, too, fulfilled a campaign promise to “leave no child behind” by giving more money to schools but increasing their accountability for the way they spent it. Unlike the tax cut, this measure won a lot of Democratic support. Indeed, Senator Edward Kennedy wrote much of it.
Between them, these measures gave Mr Bush a political identity as a small but not anti-government conservative. The tax cut was the conservative bit, restraining the public sector in a time-approved manner: by choking off cash. It also split the Democratic Party, because 12 Democratic senators, most in close contests, voted for it.
The education bill was the small-government bit, showing that Democrats have no monopoly of social concern, and that Republicans have a distinctive approach to matters like education: they are no longer just the party that says No. Mr Bush thereby managed to combine two of the main, and sometimes conflicting, strands of recent Republicanism: “leave-us-alone” tax-cutting ideologues and the sort of pragmatic, social-policy types to be found among Republican governors.
Whether these policies have been successful, however, is a different matter. Mr Bush was lucky with the timing of his tax cut, which provided a measure of stimulus as the economy slipped into recession last year. The stimulus increased thanks to the expansion of government spending after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. All that helped the economy.
On the other hand, most of the tax cut was “back-loaded”—that is, its main impact will be felt after about 2008. When that happens, all things being equal, it should help economic growth. But it will also reduce future administrations' room for fiscal manoeuvre, even though no one knows what the economy will be like in 2008. So while the measure's short-term impact has been modest and beneficial, its longer-term impact is larger and uncertain.
The education bill has also had mixed effects. School-testing has improved education in many states, and the federal government has a good case for encouraging more of it. But, argues Chester Finn, the president of the Fordham Foundation, some of the law's provisions are not being implemented because they cannot be. Any district with failing schools is required to offer pupils an alternative. Many do not have one. Other provisions are being undermined by states that dislike them. Each state is required to propose its own reading and arithmetic tests within 12 years. That timetable has had the perverse effect of causing states that were working slowly to bring in tough tests to give up and propose easy ones. Other states are trying to fudge definitions of what counts as a “highly qualified teacher” in order to circumvent top-down requirements for more.
It is unfair to judge Mr Bush on these two policies alone (voters certainly did not). But when you add to that uneven achievement the fate of “compassionate conservatism” and his administration's response to corporate scandals, it is easier to see why Mr Bush's record as a landscape-changing president is only mixed.
The essence of compassionate conservatism is that it tackles traditional Democratic issues—poverty, drug addiction, illiteracy, recidivism—in a conservative way, by giving more choice to recipients of government money and also setting tougher targets. Proponents of compassionate conservatism also argue that it can create new electoral alliances to help break the 50-50 deadlock—alliances, say, of high-minded suburbanites who support social-policy reform, people in inner cities freed from the ravages of crime and drug abuse, and conservative blue-collar workers. This is not a pipedream. Republicans like Rudolph Giuliani in New York city and Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin showed that it can work at state and local level.
Had Mr Bush responded quickly to the Enron scandal, he might have altered the Republicans' image as a party in hock to big business. Instead, he dragged his feet
But it has not so far translated to the national sphere, and that is partly Mr Bush's doing. He dropped school vouchers from the education bill. He did not protest when his proposal to involve religious institutions more in social policy (the “faith-based initiative”) was eviscerated in Congress. Most important, he has not yet gone to the public to say he is serious about “compassionate conservatism” or even to explain what it means. It is hardly surprising that the landscape-reshaping consequences have been modest.
Especially when you compare the administration's response to corporate scandals. It is possible that had Mr Bush responded quickly to the Enron scandal, and initiated some of the reforms he ended up embracing, he might have altered the Republicans' image as a party in hock to big business. Instead, he dragged his feet over accountancy reform and has been embarrassed by the continuing chaos at the Securities and Exchange Commission. This left the president looking hidebound by traditional corporate interest groups, and made it much harder for him to launch an appeal to new voting coalitions.
Facing a new world
Still, for most people, compassionate conservatism, tax cuts and corporate malfeasance matter much less than national security. This, since September 11th, has defined Mr Bush's administration. Electorally, it helped Republicans. Not because war with Iraq is popular (doubts are growing). Nor because the attacks of September 2001 have left a lasting impression on the domestic political landscape (they have not). Rather, it is because Mr Bush's response to those attacks kept his personal approval ratings high, and because national security—broadly conceived—prevented the economy or any single domestic matter from dominating the election.
Foreign policy is also one area where control of Congress will not be so important. Over time, national security has become more and more a presidential prerogative. After September 11th, partisan differences over Russia, China and North Korea have faded. Democrats support Mr Bush's defence build-up, and Republicans support increased foreign aid.
Only on Iraq is there the making of partisan division, and this will certainly affect the president's future standing. A clear-cut victory over Saddam Hussein would be his own triumph and would benefit him accordingly. If anything were to go wrong, however—either in the military phase or, more probably, afterwards—the Democrats, as the more reluctant warriors, would hold him responsible.
That is for the future. What is most striking now is the way in which Mr Bush's foreign policy has changed. Before September 2001, he had seemed to be following a policy of classic Realpolitik: it was all about power and America's freedom of manoeuvre. He withdrew from international treaties he disliked, such as the Kyoto protocol, and made almost no use of diplomacy to express what he wanted.
The climax of this approach appeared to come in September this year, with the announcement of the policy of pre-emption. From now on, America, in Mr Bush's words, would act against “emerging threats”—most notably Saddam Hussein's attempts to procure nuclear weapons—“before they are fully formed”. The world outside America has noted, and worries about, this policy more than any other. Yet it masks subtler changes in Mr Bush's foreign-policy thinking that America's allies may find more congenial.
For one thing, Mr Bush has chosen (for the moment) to work through the UN on Iraq, giving substance to his stated preference for pre-empting multilaterally. This is also an intriguing reassertion of an old-fashioned east-coast Republican internationalism that had seemed to be dying.
Mr Bush also increasingly associates American power with the espousal of universal democratic principles—something that may persuade other countries to accept American hegemony more readily. He talks far more about removing the long-term causes of terrorism—not poverty, but the resentment that grows from lack of proper representation in countries that sponsor terrorism. In short, Mr Bush is morphing into a “national-greatness conservative”—one of those who argue that America should use its power to help reform countries in the light of its democratic ideals.
In search of greatness
This is a reversal. During the Republican primary campaign of 2000, national-greatness types had supported John McCain, who argued that America itself needed reform to prevent special interests stifling its democracy. Mr Bush rejected that view both on the campaign trail and in office (witness his response to the corporate scandals). Yet he has ended up picking the foreign bit of the national-greatness agenda, if not the domestic part.
That is a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because it means Mr Bush appeals to national-greatness Republicans as well as to small-government conservatives. But it is a weakness because it creates tension between the foreign and domestic sides of his presidency. The most obvious example is the contrast between the strength of his foreign-policy team and the lack of experience and clout of the economists. A more subtle example is Mr Bush's unwillingness to rally Americans to any wider national goals after September 11th. Perhaps most important, the simple cost of the defence build-up and of possible action in Iraq would leave less money for some of the social policies that national-greatness types would like to see.
Clearly, these tensions have not weakened Mr Bush's presidency. This week's elections show that he is in fine shape, and has a chance to get in better shape in two years' time. But the danger remains that the tensions could grow—the inevitable result, perhaps, of trying to manage a world that is changing fast and a country that is changing only slowly.