Republicans sitting on a time bomb
Beneath this week's show of unity there are divisions that threaten to tear the Republicans apart, reports Gerard Baker
September 02, 2004
POWER may or may not corrupt those who possess it, as Lord Acton observed, but it almost always divides them.
The strains of governing are usually too much for even the most loyal and co-operative of political parties.
Inevitable disappointments at hopes unrealised, the disaffection of loyal followers excluded from office and the steady but enervating toll of years in government produce centrifugal tendencies that usually end violently.
Opposition, by contrast, is centripetal. The will to win trumps all other ambitions and ideologies. That is why the US Democrats are united this year as never before by their desire for victory.
The Republicans, however, have been in power for some time. George W. Bush is completing his first term, and his party has controlled Congress for most of the past decade.
It would be surprising if the broad grouping that is the modern Republican Party were not splitting at the seams. But on the surface the Republicans gathered in New York this week look as united as the Democrats in Boston a month ago.
In 1992, after the troubled term of George Bush Sr, and eight years of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party turned on itself. Former Nixon speechwriter Pat Buchanan ran against Bush in the primaries and set the stage for his defeat in November.
The party's convention that year seethed with talk of culture wars that pitted Republicans against Republicans. Millions of former party supporters defected to Ross Perot in the election.
The current President Bush faces no internal threat. He moved early in his presidency to secure the party's truculent right-wing base with conservative policies on taxes and social issues such as abortion and stem-cell research.
This week's convention is a celebration of the Bush presidency, and there will be no public dissent from a Republican anywhere near Madison Square Garden all week.
But there are tensions within the party. The choice of headline speakers this week demonstrates that for all its monolithic public unity, the party is a coalition of groups that have only the most tangential of connections.
Rudy Giuliani may be the hero of September 11, but to some Republicans he is still the pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, flamboyant New Yorker who once appeared dressed in women's clothes.
Arnold Schwarzenegger represents a brand of Republicanism that is as far removed from the lifestyle and ideology of conservative southerners and midwesterners as Bill Clinton or Jennifer Lopez.
John McCain is still despised by some Republicans for his irredeemably independent streak. From another direction entirely come Vice-President Dick Cheney, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Michael Reagan, son of the late president and a right-wing talk show host.
This diversity of speakers reflects deep tensions about the identity of the Republican Party and Bush's presidency. The fact is there are many Republicans who look on the Bush White House with a combination of bewilderment and contempt.
He may cut the perfect image of the rugged God-fearing Texan conservative, but there are those in the party who believe it is not really conservative to put the budget in the red, impose tariffs on steel imports, pass a $US535billion ($754 billion) expansion of Medicare or strengthen the role of the federal government in education.
Above all, traditional US conservatives are dismayed by Bush's radical foreign policy, in which US forces are projected around the world to promote Washington's democracy and remake failed states.
It is usually when parties leave office that the bloodletting begins. Old-fashioned Republican isolationists will savage the neo-conservative nation builders. Deficit hawks will assault the tax-cutting supply-siders. The party's social moderates will fight the Christian conservatives. The pro-business lobby will take on the populist, anti-immigration, anti-free trade Republicans.
It is likely to be a bonfire that will last for years -- which is why so much is at stake for Republicans in this election.
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