[Mb-civic] How the Republicans Let It Slip Away - David Ignatius - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

How the Republicans Let It Slip Away

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, October 12, 2005; Page A17

Watching the Republicans floundering over the past week, I can't help 
thinking of a school of beached whales. The leviathans of the GOP have 
boldly swum themselves onto this patch of dry sand, and it won't be easy 
for them to get back to open ocean.

The Republicans come to their present troubles from different 
directions: President Bush thought he was making a safe, pragmatic 
choice in nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, but this 
soulless maneuver enraged the party's right wing and set it on a 
fratricidal binge. Tom DeLay thought he was ramrodding a permanent 
Republican government, but he managed to get himself indicted and, well 
before that calamity, had angered House Republicans who concluded that 
"The Hammer's" leadership style was marching them off a cliff. Looming 
over all these little problems is the crucible of Iraq.

What's interesting is that most of these wounds are self-inflicted. They 
draw a picture of a party that, for all its seeming dominance, isn't 
prepared to be the nation's governing party. The hard right, which is 
the soul of the modern GOP, would rather be ideologically pure than 
successful. Governing requires making compromises and getting your hands 
dirty, but the conservative purists disdain those qualities. They swim 
for that beach with a fiercely misguided determination, and they demand 
that the other whales accompany them.

The bickering over the Miers nomination epitomizes the right's refusal 
to assume the role of a majoritarian governing party. The awkward fact 
for conservatives is that the American public doesn't agree with them on 
abortion rights. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll in late August found 54 
percent describing themselves as pro-choice and only 38 percent as 
pro-life, roughly the same percentages as a decade ago.

That's the political reality that Bush has been trying to finesse with 
his nominations of John Roberts and Miers. That's why he said in the 
2000 primary campaign that he wouldn't impose any litmus test (when 
other Republicans were demanding one) and would instead focus on a 
nominee's character and judicial philosophy. The realist in Bush 
understands that he can't easily force a nominee who is openly 
antiabortion on a country where a solid majority disagrees.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101321.html?nav=hcmodule
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