Clift: Goodbye to Red-Meat Rhetoric

Republican pollster Neil Newhouse knew the day his party lost the Senate. It was Sept. 29, and he circled it on his calendar. That was the morning excerpts from Bob Woodard's book "State of Denial" broke, chronicling an administration in disarray that was not being truthful with the American people about how bad things were in Iraq.

That same day, a congressional committee issued a report documenting 400-plus contacts between indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the White House, and Republican congressman Mark Foley resigned after revelations that he had pursued underage congressional pages.

Newhouse said the date is "burned in my mind" just like another date in another era—Oct. 19, 1982—when unemployment hit 10.1 percent and signaled big losses in Congress for the GOP and President Reagan. These catalytic events have the impact of freezing the electorate, Newhouse told an audience gathered for post-election analysis at the nonpartisan Israel Project in Washington. "We just couldn't move the numbers," he said, despite a mountain of negative advertising, which another panelist, Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page, termed "PHD," a term of art for mud-slinging "piled high and deep."

The breadth of the Republican defeat is a long overdue slapdown of Karl Rove's politics of polarization. Democrats did well across the country, holding their own for the first time in the post-9/11 era with white men and, according to some exit poll estimates, getting close to a third of the evangelical vote . President Bush in his morning-after news conference struck a conciliatory tone, suggesting "common ground" with the Democrats on raising the minimum wage. This wasn't his first rodeo, he said, implying he knows how to take a fall and get back up.

Bush appears ready to trade in six years of hard-right governance for two years of conciliatory conservatism. It's always been an open question what Bush actually believes in, beyond winning. He became president by campaigning as a compassionate conservative but junked that persona on Rove's recommendation once he took office. According to the new book, "Building Red America," by former Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall, Rove acted on the advice of pollster Matthew Dowd, who found that the 2000 vote recount had so polarized the electorate there were too few swing voters left on which to base a centrist governing strategy.

Rallying the base with red-meat rhetoric and policies to match became the governing philosophy of the Bush presidency. The strategy imploded with this election, and Dowd is now doing interviews advocating bipartisanship in his role as Arnold Schwarzenegger's adviser. Schwarzenegger won re-election with a 17-point margin after moderating his image, hiring a Democrat as his chief of staff and promising not to call Democrats "girly men" any more. For Dowd, a highly regarded analyst, these shifting strands of advice are just another day at the office. For Bush and the country, the politics of polarization has had tragic consequences.

It's not too late for Bush to revert to the Texas model of working with Democrats that served him so well. Before Bush came to Washington and fell under the spell of the neocons, he wasn't tethered to right-wing ideology. He was molded by Rove and shaped by the intense competitiveness instilled in him by his family. He and Rove have an ongoing contest as to who can read more books this year. "I'm losing," Bush told reporters, taking a jab at Rove, "Obviously I worked harder on the campaign trail than he did." Now that Bush has more time, he should add to his reading list Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the "Team of Rivals" that Lincoln put together to win the Civil War.

Democrats are equal partners in power, an equation Bush can turn to his advantage. He has a vested interest in working with congressional leaders to share the burden of Iraq and to find agreement on some domestic issues. Bush can learn from the way President Clinton charted his comeback after the Democrats' loss of Congress in 1994. Clinton "triangulated," joining with the Republicans to pass welfare reform and a balanced budget and distancing himself from the old-line liberal Democrats. Clinton cared more about his legacy than any bond with congressional Democrats. One-party rule hadn't worked for him anyway; the Democratic-controlled Congress never even gave his wife's health-care plan a vote.

Clinton found a kindred spirit in Speaker Newt Gingrich. The two men became so enamored of each other's brilliance and grasp of the big picture that monitors were assigned on each side. Majority leader Dick Armey, who was there to rein in Newt's enthusiasms, recalls Vice President Al Gore, acting as a check on Clinton, physically restraining the president from giving away too much to his negotiating partner.

It's hard to imagine Bush, who delegates most policy discussions, having that kind of robust relationship with the genteel and disciplined Speaker-elect, Nancy Pelosi. These are more constrained personalities than the impetuous and undisciplined president and Speaker of 12 years ago. But the imperative is the same. The voters have spoken.