Make the Bush Record the Issue

Times are tough for the Republican Party and its candidates. Earlier this month, according to Gallup, more people strongly disapproved of George W. Bush than any previous president since the advent of polling—and, really, how could things be any different? Bush can boast of an unwinnable quagmire in Iraq, a decimated housing market, economic instability and a collapsing dollar, a dysfunctional health-care system, a still-devastated Gulf Coast, a wealth gap of a scope unseen since the Great Depression and a pervasive and disturbing image of America as a hapless, blundering giant, rather than a beacon of freedom and morality in the world.

Yet despite this dismal rap sheet, Republicans refuse to distance themselves too far from Bush and his record lest they take a hit from the fringe voters who still support his presidency. That is, after all, the Republican Party base, and no presidential or congressional candidate can get far without its help. It's why Republicans refuse to break from the president on Iraq, despite the lack of political progress in Baghdad. It's why Republicans voted to support Bush's veto of the wildly popular State Children's Health Insurance Program, denying health care to millions of needy kids. Time and again, GOP leaders have forgone sensible and popular policies in favor of catering to a shrinking and increasingly isolated base.

Consequently, to stand any chance of winning next year, Republicans must pray for a national amnesia to erase the previous eight years from the minds of voters. But amnesia only happens in soap operas—and that's why Democrats will win in 2008. As long as Democratic candidates remind voters that the Republican platform and Bush's record are one and the same, victory will be assured.

In his first Inaugural Address, Ronald Reagan remarked that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." While the quip has provided Republicans with a cheap slogan for two decades, the philosophy behind it is beginning to box them in. If they govern effectively, they invalidate their own antigovernment ideology. And when you elect people who believe that government won't work, you shouldn't be surprised when government stops working.

Bush, who in his failed congressional run in 1978 campaigned against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, gutted the effectiveness of the Mine Safety and Health Administration as president. When sharp decreases in inspections and fines led, not unexpectedly, to a rash of deaths in underground mines from the Appalachians to Utah, the administration might have thought to reverse its leniency. Even mining companies braced for a new round of regulations. Instead, the only major move from the Bush administration has been to relax regulations, in effect rewarding mining companies for having contributed to the deaths of their employees.

When Bush chose a head for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, did he select a competent administrator experienced in disaster management? No, he appointed Mike Brown, an attorney previously fired as the "judges and stewards commissioner" of the International Arabian Horse Association for gross mismanagement. He was an incompetent horse lawyer, yet Bush deemed him capable of running the nation's top disaster relief agency. Reagan, who once said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'," might have approved the choice, but the abandoned residents of the Gulf Coast would undoubtedly beg to differ.