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Republicans lick their wounds
12/11/2006 10:02 - (SA)
Washington - As they ask what caused their election "thumping," US Republicans know their future will be built without George W Bush, who drove them repeatedly to power, but in the end helped drag them down.
The party, which once cowed Democrats and steamrollered to control of both the White House and Congress, must decide why many voters deserted it last week, and choose better ground to fight on next time, leaders say.
First, they must fill a leadership vacuum.
By the time the 2008 elections roll around, Bush, whose slumping approval ratings over Iraq contributed to Democrats seizing both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, will be packing his bags to return home to Texas.
Defeated House of Representatives speaker Dennis Hastert says he will not stand again as leader. The party's top man in the Senate, Bill Frist, is leaving after two terms. Feared House enforcer Tom Delay has already gone, the casualty of an ethics scandal, and party boss Ken Mehlman is expected to move on.
The 2008 presidential election campaign is likely to shape the party's new direction, with hopeful Senator John McCain for instance set to become an even more influential figure.
A clutch of other hopefuls is forming up, including possible candidates like former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. The more conservative George Allen appears to have ruled himself out with a clumsy campaign that ended with him losing his Senate seat in Virginia.
The current Republican number two in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is tipped for the leadership and is known as a political streetfighter who would be sure to give Democrats a tough time.
End of era
Tuesday's election defeat may be seen as the end of an era in which Karl Rove steered the party. Bush's master strategist until Tuesday manipulated the election machine superbly, piecing together majorities with conservative policies geared to a hard-core base of voters.
But for now, Rove's dream of a permanent place for conservative Republicans in government appears to have faded.
"The ambitions of President Bush to build a large and enduring Republican majority have not been realized and will not be realized in his time in office," said Brookings Institution analyst Thomas Mann.
Some Republicans argue the party needs to reboot, and swap the bloated government, heavy spending, deficit expanding ways for the core conservative principles that drove the "Republican revolution" in the 1990s.
"The country smacked the party, smacked the White House and, quite frankly, we deserved it, because we got away from the mandate that was given to us in 1994," Michael Steele, who lost a Senate bid in Maryland, told NBC.
Mehlman told journalists "we've got to recommit ourselves to being the party of conservative reform."
Poll
A poll by the conservative Club for Growth also suggested the party had deserted core supporters, not the other way round. Nearly 40% of voters asked said they believed that the Republican Party was now the party of "big government" compared to only 27% for Democrats.
Newt Gingrich, leader of the 1994 "revolution" which saw a class of radical, highly combative conservatives storm the House and tear it away from Democrats, is telling the party all is not lost, even as they mourn their defeat.
"We have to recognise that this was a defeat for Republicans, not for conservatives," former speaker Gingrich told Friday's Washington Times newspaper.
Gingrich pointed out that many of the new class of Democrats who ousted Republican members of Congress are of the "blue-dog" variety - more conservative than the traditional liberals of the past.
Conservatives also point out, that though they lost heavily in the House and the Senate in the election, many Democrat margins of victory were wafer-thin.
Also, the United States did not become a liberal country overnight, and is to the right of many nations in Europe for instance, and likely to remain receptive to conservative arguments.
Republicans can also look to history for comfort with the knowledge that however bad things look, America's two-year election cycle offers a quick chance for redemption.
After the 1994 bombshell election, which at the time many observers thought had effectively ended his presidency, Bill Clinton repositioned himself and won re-election two years later.
That 1996 election saw congressional Democrats fail however, after failing to learn the lessons of their own drubbing by voters.
- AFP
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