“What can I but enumerate old themes?” asked Yeats in “The Circus Animals' Desertion,” reviewing the symbols he'd employed throughout his career in one of his last great poems.
But what can you do when you can't even enumerate old themes? That's the dilemma facing Republicans, and the conservative movement generally, in the wake of George Bush's State of the Union address last night. It's not just that the president has run out of new ideas. It's that the old arguments for his old ideas don't work, either.
On the domestic side of the ledger, what Bush offered was a series of disconnected small programs -- disconnected from one another, disconnected from the conservative ideology that powered the Bush agenda right up through last year. We'll invest in schools. We'll invest in research. We'll look into alternative energy, and it's up to Cheney to figure a way to do this that will still enrich the oil companies. We'll increase competitiveness through free trade, though it's free trade that has eviscerated manufacturing. We'll create good jobs, though last year, in the middle of a recovery, wages -- even the combined value of wages and benefits -- declined. We'll do something about the affordability of health care, but don't expect the president to really make a case for health security accounts -- last night, he devoted all of one sentence to them.
And what do we do about social security? Appoint a commission, that's what.
Judging by last night's speech, the Ownership Society has dwindled down to a few random acts of renting. No theme linked the domestic side of Bush's agenda, and no wonder: he plumped very hard for the theme at the center of modern conservatism last year, the substitution of the market for the state as the primary means of obtaining security, and the American people flat-out rejected it. Privatizing social security, the feverish brainchild of right-wing theorists for the past quarter century, is now not only off the agenda itself, it has queered the prospects for Health Savings Account and other libertarian panaceas that won't pencil out.
In some ways, the domestic half of Bush's speech resembled Bill Clinton's State of the Union addresses once the Republicans controlled Congress: full of small programs of a centrist ideology. Like Clinton, Bush has been reduced to arguing for the stuff he can get, not the stuff he really wants. Unlike Clinton, he can't summon much enthusiasm for the task. Besides, however small Clinton's agenda, he imparted some urgency to it because, whatever its limitations, it was his vehicle for staving off the draconian tax cuts that the Republican Congress wished to enact. There was no detectable urgency in Bush's agenda last night; it was all quite perfunctory.
On the foreign side, the president's intensity was still there, but to radically diminished effect. Arguments that were first adduced one and two and three years ago appeared yet again, this time looking threadbare, emaciated, and quite the worse for wear. We are still in Iraq to keep al-Qaeda from taking over, just as we went to eradicate the influence of al-Qaeda in Saddam's Iraq. Never mind that the real conflict is between Sunni and Shiite, and that we're working to split the Sunnis from the Zarqawi nutcases. Amazingly, the president also continued to extol the spread of democracy in the Arab world, as if every recent election there hadn't set back the cause of peace or, for that matter, the Enlightenment. No dates, no criteria for withdrawal were forthcoming, save his assertion that the troops would come home when the generals said they could.
For all his non-truculence of tone, though, the president really only came alive in defending the National Security Agency's wiretapping. “If there are people inside our country who are talkin' with al-Qaeda,” said the president, “we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.” The dropped “g” was the giveaway here -- this was the real Bush, the tough guy, and this was his one and only avenue of attack against the Democrats. Karl Rove had made clear that Bush would go after the Democrats on this, as he had in 2002 and 2004.
What he hadn't made explicit was that this was the last avenue of attack open to Bush. But what else are the Republicans going to run on? The war? Health care? The economy? Ethics? Only on terrorism does Bush's polling even reach 50 percent, and it is, at this juncture, the only issue on which he thinks he can still clobber the Democrats. Only by keeping the nation in the psychic state it inhabited in September 2001 will the Republicans stay in the game later this year. No other theme currently on the horizon cuts in their favor.
Well, there is one other, but it's not one Bush can embrace: immigrant bashing. It won't please such Republican financial mainstays at the restaurant lobby and agribusiness, and it may estrange potential Latino supporters, but as a growing number of Republican incumbents feel increasingly desperate, look for them to play the immigrant card in the same way the Sensenbrenner bill does: Militarize the border and criminalize the undocumenteds. The emerging Republican position is a problem masquerading as a solution, but that seldom deters nervous incumbents, particularly when they've just heard their president address the nation for a full hour without coming up with a single theme on which they can run.
Thanks, pal. The conservative cupboard is bare. The only question for Republican strategists in '06 is how many sliming campaigns the Swift Boat guys can do at once.
Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.
