That year Teddy Roosevelt decided he wanted another term in the White House, which was inconveniently occupied by his chosen successor and–this was about to change–friend William Howard Taft. Roosevelt failed to wrest the nomination from Taft and the party conservatives, but he ran anyway, thereby helping elect Woodrow Wilson. The incumbent president finished third.
The civil war between conservative and liberal Republicans (subsequently labeled “moderates” by sympathetic media trying to be helpful) flared up again when President Taft’s son the conservative Sen. Robert Taft three times (1940, 1948, 1952) failed to win the party’s presidential nomination. Then from the podium of the 1960 convention, Barry Goldwater, successor to Taft as the conservatives’ pinup, challenged conservatives to “take this party back.” They did so in 1964, at a fratricidal convention that thunderously booed Nelson Rockefeller’s podium appearance. In 1976 Ronald Reagan almost wrested the nomination from President Gerald Ford, who had made Rockefeller his vice president.
The feuding that has roiled Republican conventions off and on since 1912 went off the boil when Reagan was nominated in 1980. The only way to rekindle the animosity this year would have been for Bush to choose a running mate who supports abortion. Which of course is why, with comic solemnity, The New York Times, and others who wish woe for Republicans, urged him to do that.
Relative to the temper of the various times, and to the content of conservatism in those times, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may be the party’s most conservative ticket since 1964 (Goldwater and Bill Miller) or even since 1924 (Calvin Coolidge and Charles G. Dawes). But theirs is not the insurgency conservatism of 1980. One reason Republicans are so relaxed is that they no longer live with the constant strain of pretending to believe the things they decreasingly believed between the rise of Reagan and the fall of Newt Gingrich.
Gone is the vow to abolish whole departments, especially Education. Gone is the adversarial stance toward the welfare state. Gone–washed away by the tidal wave of budget surpluses–is the sense of scarcity that reinforced conservative interest in limiting government. In the 1990s conservatism had two genuinely radical proposals for domestic reform, proposals that would have fundamentally altered the political culture. Term limits for members of Congress would have ended careerism, today’s strongest motive for entering, and for particular behavior in, politics. A flat tax would have taken the tax code out of play as an instrument for dispensing political favors, and would have put out of business a parasite class of tax lawyers and lobbyists in Washington. Today neither proposal has a pulse.
Still, the political tide is running toward conservatism. Federal spending is under 19 percent of GDP, down after eight Clinton years from the peacetime peak of 23.5 percent, reached under Reagan. Gore has doubled the size of his promised tax cut. No matter who wins the election, there probably is going to be at least a substantial reduction of, and perhaps elimination of, the estate tax, and some privatization of Social Security. After courts are done ruling on the constitutionality of Cleveland’s program, school-choice programs may multiply rapidly.
If Bush wins the election, the Justice Department’s jihad against Microsoft may be terminated. And if Bush nominates some Supreme Court justices, abortion may again be subjected to regulation by states, in a political climate in which the public opposes partial-birth abortion and public funding of abortion, and favors waiting periods, and parental notification when minors seek abortions. (A Los Angeles Times poll finds public approval of the Roe v. Wade decision has fallen from 56 percent in 1991 to 43 percent today.)
Republicans will leave Philadelphia united partly by the exhaustion of old controversies caused by conservatism’s defining itself in reaction against the New Deal and Great Society. However, only once (1880) has a Republican won the presidency without carrying California, and no Republican has ever won while losing the two largest states. Today Bush trails in both California and New York, though by slightly less in California. On the other hand, there are only 18 Democratic governors to help Al Gore, and only one in the nine largest states (Gray Davis, California).
Part peacock and part pit bull, Gore has become the alpha populist, exclaiming about “corporate polluters,” “price gouging” pharmaceutical companies, the sinister ways of “Big Oil” and insurance companies, fraud in the stock market and so on. Gore may be misreading the moment: the prestige of business probably has not been higher since the 1920s. But Gore, a creature of the 1960s, seems to consider hostility toward business a necessary ingredient in courtship of “those people,” who are not “the ones who think comfortably about their savings over scotch in the club.” That even today a Democratic nominee speaks that way confirms G. K. Chesterton’s belief that some political institutions are “parvenue by pedigree; they hand on vulgarity like a coat-of-arms.”
But candidates, like eulogists, are not under oath. Gore, struggling to convey the hellish nature of existence in Bush’s Texas, says, “I think it should be… as easy to raise a child as it is to set up an oil rig.” Whatever that means. And while whole forests are being felled to provide paper on which to print Harry Potter books, Bush, trying to dramatize how everything has gone to wrack and ruin under the Clinton-Gore administration, says “our children can’t read.” Candidates are apt to say especially odd things when the contented electorate, logy from prosperity as from a feast, has not said what the election should be about.
