I think it's a bit too clever to suggest that the real path to Republican doom runs through a McCain presidency: Yes, McCain will sign programs into law and raise taxes and be ideologically impure, but George W. Bush signed Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind and McCain-Feingold and conservatives loved him despite it. Activists are pure. Movements are tribal. Presidents know this. And McCain will become leader of the tribe. Additionally, if there is another terrorist attack, McCain might well do what Bush did not: Unite the country around a conservative agenda and enduringly transform the face of our politics. Which is just to say, presidencies are unpredictable, in large part because events are unpredictable. But I actually want to focus on a separate piece of Beinart's essay, that posits another path to GOP renewal: Kneecapping President Obama. "[Republicans] could savage a Democratic President who tries to pass controversial liberal legislation, as Newt Gingrich did to Bill Clinton in 1993 and '94," says Beinart. "If Obama wins, scenario No. 2 becomes a live option...With big majorities in the House and Senate, he'd probably take another run at universal health care, which is what helped prompt the Gingrich revolution in 1994." In a limited way, it's not clear that the 1994 health effort was an overreach so much as Clinton handled it extremely poorly. If you need a new car, and make $50,000 a year, buying a top of the line Lexus would be a catastrophe, but investing in a Corolla might make sense. Clinton went for the Lexus. But more broadly, I think Beinart is giving too much explanatory power to politics. What prompted the Gingrich Revolution 1994 was that this was a right wing country that happened to elect a left-leaning president. Crime, welfare, and race were the resonant issues. Midnight basketball somehow mattered. The Democratic congressional majority was entrenched and corrupt, and a number of its members went to jail immediately preceding the election. And the conversion of the Dixiecrat south to the Republican south was long overdue. In 1994, there were 53 Democratic house seats in districts that had voted for President Bush in 1992 -- a year when Bush got merely 37 percent of the vote. As Mark Schmitt has written, "Many of these districts had been voting reliably for Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and even Barry Goldwater while never quite shedding their allegiance to a local Democratic representative. What Gingrich did in nationalizing the election was to encourage voters to look at their Democratic representative in the light of their already established presidential preferences." In other words, Gingrich pushed the country into an alignment that better reflected its realities. His campaign against Clinton was part of that process, but the underlying reality had to exist before his revolution could matter. It's very hard to look at the Republican coalition now, and the array of issues facing voters, and conclude that there exists similar conditions for a realigning election. Indeed, it's not the partisan composition of Washington that seems out of step with the electorate, but the Republican Party itself. Hence their decision to nominate the national politician least associated with Republicanism, and his decision to nominate a vice-presidential candidate whose only accomplishment was calling out Republican corruption. This is not the material of which conservative realignments are made.
