Evidence of conservative despair isn’t hard to find nowadays in
Washington.
“We’re doomed!” one veteran communications operative of the
Right exclaimed last week when I asked her to assess the current
campaign.
Similar views are expressed privately by many other Republicans,
including some professionally employed as part of the GOP election
apparatus. Talking to them is like walking into the Redskins locker
room before a Dallas game and being told by Washington players that
the Cowboys are unbeatable.
There are clear reasons for this defeatist mood. Congressional
Republicans seem to have learned nothing from their 2006 drubbing.
Polls indicate that the anti-Republican sentiment of two years ago
has only deepened since then, and not even the sunniest optimist on
the Right sees any prospect of the GOP recapturing either house of
Congress in November.
Yet for all the dark clouds looming over Republicans on the
congressional front, the gloom seems deepest when conservatives
consider the presidential campaign.
Perhaps overwhelmed by the media enthusiasm for Sen. Barack
Obama (who has been thrilling Chris Matthews’ legs for five months
now) many conservatives seem to have accepted the Democrat’s
victory as inevitable, or even desirable.
Matt Welch, editor of the libertarian journal Reason,
recently summed up the attitude of many Beltway
Republicans: “‘Look, we’re out of ideas, we’re exhausted, it’s not
working, we don’t know what our principles are anymore, let’s take
one for the team and have a black guy be the president for a
while.’”
Even beyond the ranks of “Obamacons”
— conservatives openly in favor of the presumptive Democratic
nominee — many on the Right have begun discussing prospects of an
Obama presidency in tones of weary acceptance they never used when
speaking of Al Gore or John Kerry.
Philip Klein’s “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” expressed
a very widespread belief among younger conservative intellectuals
that an Obama administration might not be so bad.
Some conservatives (not all of them young intellectuals)
actually dread a John McCain victory as an unmerited ratification
of the GOP’s abandonment of principle. They believe Republicans
“deserve to get their [rear ends] kicked,” as the veteran
communications operative told me last week.
Deserved or not, many Republicans are clearly preparing for such
a repudiation in November. It was a telling admission that when a
trio of conservative online strategists created a web forum this
spring to discuss their ideas, they called their venture The Next Right —
a tacit acknowledgment of fading confidence in the current
Right.
ARE PROSPECTS REALLY so bleak? Despite the dispirited state of the
GOP, the ideological muddling of the McCain campaign, and the media
accolades for Obama, it is far from a foregone conclusion that Hope
and Change will triumph Nov. 4.
The lingering menace of unrequited Hillary Clinton supporters —
the PUMAs —
has made party unity so problematic for Democrats as to nearly
neutralize the lack of Republican enthusiasm for McCain.
Opinion polls undercut the notion of an insuperable Obama
advantage. While the Gallup daily tracking poll has consistently
shown the Democrat with only a small lead or in a dead heat with
McCain, Obamamaniacs were thrilled by last month’s
Newsweek poll showing their candidate ahead by 15
points.
Alas for the apostles of Hope, either that poll was a
statistical mirage or else the mass movement toward Obama quickly
receded, and Newsweek reported
last week that his lead is now an insignificant 3 percentage
points.
Disregarding this slender margin in the polls, and seemingly
undaunted by Obama’s inability to finish off Clinton until the
final stage of the Democratic primaries, Team Obama now appears
convinced that the general election campaign will be a triumphant
march to victory.
Obama’s handlers will send him jaunting
off to Europe next week, heedless of whether this could feed
the perception of their candidate as an arrogant elitist. And the brain trust at Team
Obama has airily dismissed criticism of their plan for an open-air rally
for 70,000-plus at Denver’s Mile-High Stadium during the Democratic
National Convention next month.
The sense of Obama’s inevitability that has contributed so much
to Republican despair might actually be inducing the kind of hubris
among Democrats that so often has been their undoing. Skeptics who
recall that Mike Dukakis held a 17-point lead in July 1988 evidently have no
influence at Hope HQ.
RECALLING THE HAPLESS Bush 41 presidency that was the disastrous
denouement of Dukakis’s defeat, disaffected conservatives no doubt
will ask, “What’s the point of electing an ideologically unsound
Republican president who is almost certain to further damage the
GOP ‘brand’?”
A fair question, and it’s hard to summon a positive argument in
response. But the purely negative argument — the potential benefit
of dealing the Democrats their third consecutive presidential loss
— is not entirely without merit.
Among other things, beating a supposedly unbeatable Obama
despite the lackluster qualities of the Republican nominee would be
a testimony to the latent power of the conservative movement. And
it’s hard not to smile when contemplating the Democrats’ probable
reaction to another defeat.
After their bitter disappointment over the 2000 Gore-Bush
showdown in Florida, and their rage over the “Swiftboating” of
Kerry in 2004, Democrats would descend into a state of political
apoplexy if the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy snookered them a third
time.
You think “Bush Derangement Syndrome” is bad? John McCain might
become the first president to face impeachment on Inauguration Day.
(Dennis Kucinich could easily whip up a 47-point
indictment between Nov. 4 and Jan. 20.)
Granted, there’s no civic virtue in electing a Republican
president purely for the pleasure of crushing the hopes of
liberals. But wouldn’t it be fun?
