- Bush's approval rating at 32 percent.
- His "strong leader" rating down 11 points to 42 percent.
- Congress' approval rating at 23 percent.
- 50 percent say Democrats "share their value," compared to 37% for Republicans.
- Twice as many people say Democrats have "new ideas" than say the same for Republicans.
- 60% say things are going badly in Iraq, and only 39% say going to war was the right decision.
- 70% say the country is on the wrong track.
The problem is not that Republicans never had any ideas for where to take the country. The problem is that their ideas have all either resulted in fiascos (Iraq, tax cuts, domestic spying) or been ineffectual (Medicare expansion, Social Security reform, gas price relief), while their management of the government has stunk to high heaven (Katrina, Iraq). Massive Republican scandals haven't helped either.
Now, faced with the prospect of losing the "permanent majority" that they thought they had won just a couple years back, Republicans are freaking out. As Harold Meyerson writes in the Washington Post, it's basically too late to come up with new ideas before the 2006 elections:
Karl Rove and his minions have plumb run out of issues to campaign on. They can't run on the war. They can't run on the economy, where the positive numbers
in growth are offset by the largely stagnant numbers on median incomes and the public's growing dread of outsourcing. Immigration may play in various congressional districts, but it's too dicey an issue to nationalize. Even social conservatives may be growing weary of outlawing gay marriage every other November. Nobody's buying the ownership society. Competence? Ethics? You kidding?
So far, the Republican strategy has been to ominously warn the country that a Democratic Congress would mean impeachment of Bush. It doesn't take a genius to see that that strategy isn't going to fly - it just makes voters think that the only thing keeping Bush from impeachment is a rubber-stamp suck-up Republican Congress. Claiming that half the country wants Bush impeached, true or not, legitimizes the idea of impeachment itself.
What the Republicans will do when they ditch this strategy is clear: play to the base by inciting hatred and fear of liberals, and scare the rest of the country by playing the "national security" card again and again. The former effort is especially important, since base turnout is key in low-turnout off-year elections like this one, and because Republicans are in the danger zone with only 51% of conservatives giving Bush a thumbs-up.
Playing to the base shouldn't be hard. Conservatism has become a political religion for many in this country, and religious affiliation trumps reasoned argument every time. Thus, after months of listening to conservative leaders hem and haw and backpedal and tack to the center, we are starting to see maximalist, swing-for-the-fences, give-no-ground arguments being thrown around again. As an example, take this ridiculous article in the National Review. The article basically throws the grudging Republican admission of global warming completely out the window, and transports us to that 1980s alternate reality where "the greenhouse effect" was all just a big hoax:
One-worlders and other socialist sorts have seen the potential for finally giving the U.N. control over all the “commanding heights” of the world by giving them control of a key driver of development. Hollywood, of course, has always known that disaster sells movie tickets. And rent-seeking companies and governments that compete with the U.S. seek to use greenhouse-gas controls to give them an edge over their competition. In the past, if one failed to believe extreme computer-modeling exercises, or shied away from putting the world on an energy diet, the [environmentalist] coalition was unanimous in damning you as some kind of tobacco scientist, flat-earther, or most recently, a holocaust denier...[But] in a trend that should be worrisome to those who believe the value of science lies in its authority, alarmist climate scientists are increasingly the object of derision by people with enough power to reach even the general public.
Apparently that overwhelming and still-growing consensus that Earth's climate is in serious trouble is just more Hollywood alarmism.
Or take this article in the Weekly Standard, which declares that missile defense, instead of being a boondoggle that our government has quietly been abandoning, is about to become a reality.
These aren't just lies, they're old lies. Like, 20-years-ago old. So have conservatives suddenly just flipped their lids and decided that all the reality they've been forced to swallow over the past decade just never existed? Doubtful. Articles like these are a calculated maximalist approach. What do you do when you're all out of ideas? Recycle some old broken ones and hope somebody's still buying them. By asserting the absolutely most out-there absurdist claims they can dredge up, conservatives hope they can draw on Red America's supposedly bottomless wellspring of blind faith in the conservative movement, and "shift the center to the right" through sheer force of will. They're like a salesman who, finding his price offer rebuffed, raises it just to piss off the buyer.
As a result, conservatives are starting to venture into Lyndon LaRouche-land - a political cult that throws out the most outlandish wacky ideas it can, because those ideas will rally the faithful and no one else is paying attention anyway.
The big problem will be when faith fails. Americans are pretty religious people, but even the most starry-eyed of Christians pray to Jesus at Church, not Bill Kristol. Most of us Americans have a deep (some might say healthy) distrust of politicians and the government. The conservative movement has done a pretty decent job of getting people to have faith in the Republican Talking Points Bible, but even that base will crumble in the face of a constant steady barrage of reality.
And reality, it is well known, has a liberal bias.
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