Some doctrinaire conservatives are growing a bit cranky over the ideological impurities of George W. Bush. California Republicans rebelled when he promoted the candidacy of Richard Riordan -- Horrors! An electable moderate! -- for governor. Free-market ideologues blanched when he supported protections for the steel industry. "Steel tariffs are not just anti-market," grumped Sebastian Mallaby in The Washington Post. "They make no sense on their own terms."
Actually, they make sense and then some. Karl Rove -- the man behind thecurtain in all matters political at the Bush White House -- understands all toowell that busting up the Democratic coalition and building an enduringconservative majority in the United States requires the administration to buildany number of alliances with its ideological opposites. While the Democratsremain devoid of any strategic direction, Rove is busy developing a whole newseries of wedge issues to pick them apart.
Much was made during the 2000 campaign of Rove's appreciation of Mark Hanna,the late-nineteenth-century industrialist who, as the political genius of theMcKinley operation, remade the Republican Party. Hanna not only persuaded theCEOs of his day to invest mightily in the party, he also dashed the designs ofthe William Jennings Bryan Democrats to restructure American politics along linesof class. Running against McKinley in 1896, Bryan began with a base of supportamong farmers and sought to bring industrial workers to his column as well.Hanna's strategy was to align voters not by class but by sector. Industrialistsand urban workers both benefited from the tariffs that McKinley championed,though Bryan's farmers most certainly did not. Even though those industrialistspaid their workers a miserably low wage, Hanna found common ground between thesetwo conflicting classes -- and there built a Republican coalition that lasted formore than 30 years.
Follow the Bush White House over the past few months and it's apparent thatRove grows more Hanna-like by the week. At bottom, the administration remains thepluperfect expression of class politics: crafting a tax cut for the wealthy,bailing out airlines but not their workers, pushing fast track. But Rove knowsthat an administration devoted solely to the care and feeding of the rich is notpolitically sustainable. So he's developed a series of discrete policies thatappeal to distinct groups in the electorate by sector.
The steel tariff is one of these. It runs counter to the administration'soverall free-trade policies, but it also stands to erode Democrats' support amongunionized industrial workers in such swing states as Ohio, West Virginia, andPennsylvania.
Immigration policy is another of Rove's sectoral opportunities. It's also anecessity: Rove has long been convinced -- rightly -- that absent a successfuloutreach strategy to the fast-growing Latino electorate, Republicans are doomed.Since the opening days of the administration, Rove has concentrated particularlyon liberalizing immigration policy with Mexico -- and not even the clamor forgreater border security since September 11 has deterred him from his mission. Aswith the steel tariff, he's been dealing with a business-labor coalition:businesses in search of more immigrant workers, unions bent on organizing them.
As a result not just of September 11 but also the recession, the domesticpressure to increase immigration has waned, but the Republicans are stillnegotiating with unions and other immigrant advocates for more modestliberalizations. Consequently, Congress is now poised to extend an amnestycovering many thousands of undocumented immigrants, and to make legal immigrantstudents eligible for Pell Grants.
What Rove is doing is coming up with a new generation of wedge issues. BillClinton took all the old GOP favorites -- crime and welfare in particular -- off thetable. Rove is responding by finding new ways to pick apart the Democraticbase -- and with party strength so evenly divided, it doesn't take much to tip thebalance one way or the other.
Rove's strategic initiatives stand in sharp contrast to the Democrats' torpor.While Rove has shown himself willing and able to deviate from core GOP policy tocut into the Democratic base, the Democrats have been unable even to formulate acore policy, let alone deviate from it. Uncertain whether to stand for fiscaldiscipline or a real prescription-drug benefit, divided over how and whether toquestion the president on our expanding and amorphous war, paralyzed by the taxcut that all too many of them voted for, they call to mind Lincoln's descriptionof a Union general in the aftermath of a battlefield defeat. The general, Lincolnsaid, was wandering around "confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head."
That's our Democrats. Alas, that's not Karl Rove.
