bwwarrraahhhhhh
Posted on 01/23/2005 7:38:52 PM PST by Pikamax
Some See Risks as Republicans Revel in Power By ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICHARD W. STEVENSON
ASHINGTON, Jan. 23 - President Bush begins his second term with the Republican Party in its strongest position in over 50 years, but his clout is already being tested by Republican doubts about his domestic agenda, rising national unease about Iraq and the threat of second-term overreaching, officials in both parties say.
With this election producing a second-term Republican president and solid majorities in both the Senate and the House, Mr. Bush's party is more dominant than at any time since Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928. As Mr. Bush embarks on an explicit effort to put an imprint on politics and policy that will long outlast his presidency, his advisers are heady over what several described as an opportunity to make a long-lasting realignment in the nation's political balance of power.
But even those advisers said Mr. Bush had at most two years before he faced the ebb that historically saps the authority of a second-term incumbent, a relatively short time to sell his far-reaching agenda. And Republicans say his situation could be complicated by the absence of an obvious heir, opening the way for competing wings of the party to battle over details and tactics on the very issues Mr. Bush is embracing.
Richard Norton Smith, a presidential scholar who is director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, said the Republican Party had "come closer now than they've been at any time in my lifetime" to being the nation's majority party. But Mr. Smith said historical cycles over the past century suggested that its dominance might be coming to a close.
"The calendar alone tells you this conservative cycle is long in the tooth," he said. "Add to that the divisions, or latent divisions, that exist with your own coalition. Once Bush is removed from the scene, and once he becomes in effect a lame duck, all those tensions are there."
The White House has described the election results as a mandate, and in his Inaugural Address on Thursday, Mr. Bush laid out his vision in sweeping terms.
But some Republicans said they were worried about overconfidence, including Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who invoked his experience serving alongside Speaker Newt Gingrich when Republicans captured the House in 1994. "Hubris is deadly," Mr. Sanford said.
And Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said that while he applauded Mr. Bush's ambition in pursuing two major domestic goals - overhauling Social Security and the tax code - those issues, if handled incorrectly, could undercut Mr. Bush's long-term goal for the party.
"They could provide the president's opponents with fodder for some of the old canards, that Republicans don't want a social safety net, that they're the party of the rich, all those things," Mr. Bauer said. "It's going to take a very astute effort and massive amounts of presidential involvement to keep that from happening."
Mr. Bush got a reminder on the Sunday talk shows of the difficulties he faces, as Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who is talking about running for president, said on "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on ABC that he did not believe the White House had a strategy to extricate the United States from Iraq. On "Meet the Press" on NBC, Representative Bill Thomas of California, the head of the Ways and Means Committee, laid out his own ideas for how to change the retirement system, which were to a large degree different from what the White House has suggested.
Democrats, even while struggling with their own party divisions and confusion, are showing signs of coalescing into an aggressive opposition party, especially on issues like judicial appointments and Social Security.
Mr. Bush has repeatedly overcome doubts about his ability to win approval of controversial proposals. And his political advisers are confident going into this second term. They say that the party is poised to at least begin the broad political realignment and the diminishment of the Democratic Party that has been a goal of Mr. Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
"It is now fair to say that today the Republican Party is the dominant party in America," said Ken Mehlman, the new Republican National Committee chairman. "It's not a deep majority, it is not a broad majority, but it is a very strong majority."
"Now what does that mean?" Mr. Mehlman continued in an interview at his new office on Capitol Hill. "We're certainly not in the position that F.D.R. Democrats were in the 1930's and 40's. We're not the overwhelming favorite. There are going to be challenges. We're going to lose elections sometime. But it does mean we're in a very strong position."
Before 2001, the last time Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress was 1953. Gary Jacobson, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, argued that given the longevity and margins of Republican control in the House and Senate over the past decade, this was the most powerful period the party had enjoyed since 1928, the year Hoover was elected and Republicans held 56 Senate seats and 267 House seats. The numbers now are 55 and 232.
With this presidential election, the Democrats lost a nearly 30-year advantage in party identification in presidential elections; in a survey of voters leaving the polls, 37 percent said they were Republican and 37 percent said they were Democrats. Mr. Bush won by nearly three million votes, after losing the popular vote last time. He drew more than 11 million more votes than in 2000; by contrast, Mr. Kerry drew about 8 million more votes than Al Gore, the Democratic candidate in 2000.
It is a sign of Republican ascendance that the party is already forcing its opponents to re-examine some of their most strongly held positions. Democrats, for example, have been openly discussing whether to decrease their emphasis on one of their touchstone issues, abortion rights, after an election in which Mr. Bush ran aggressively as an opponent of abortion.
Still, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, disputed the long-term meaning of the gains, arguing Democrats would have won the White House had 60,000 votes shifted in Ohio, and said Mr. Bush had enjoyed a "huge advantage" because of the attacks of Sept. 11.
"George Bush is in serious difficulties on Social Security, tax reform, all the cornerstones of the Bush agenda that the Republicans can't agree on," Mr. McAuliffe said.
And even Republicans acknowledge there are questions about the durability and significance of the changes taking place. Most fundamentally, it is difficult today to measure whether the Republican successes of 2002 and 2004 were merely a ratification of Mr. Bush himself - a president running for re-election in wartime - or the start of a long-lasting shift to the Republican Party.
"It's still a story waiting to be told," Matthew Dowd, a senior Bush campaign adviser, said. "You can't say after a national election that you won by 2.7 percent nationally, and a lot of states were close, that the Republican Party is going to be dominant."
The critical question for Mr. Bush, his advisers and Democrats say, is the success or failure of his agenda, both in terms of getting it through Congress and winning support for it from the public. Recent polls show apprehension about important aspects of his Social Security plan, and an overwhelming sentiment that Mr. Bush does not know how to end the war in Iraq, which is increasingly unpopular.
And Governor Sanford of South Carolina pointed to the public perception of an economy in trouble, saying, "If we were to see some sort of storm in our economy, well, there are advantages to holding all the cards, and there are disadvantages."
Republican leaders say the challenge now is to deliver on the ambitious agenda Mr. Bush set out in the 2004 campaign. He is trying to persuade Congress and the American people to embrace his plan to reshape Social Security by adding private investment accounts and to create a new tax system that rewards more saving and investment. He wants to reduce the costs that lawsuits and regulations impose on businesses and put more conservative judges in the nation's courtrooms.
Against the backdrop of continued violence in Iraq, he is seeking to rally the nation behind a national security policy that is at once pre-emptive, interventionist and wrapped in a moral imperative to spread freedom.
If he can succeed at all or even most of those undertakings, and those changes leave voters feeling more prosperous and secure, it could usher in an enduring change in the balance of political power in the nation, Mr. Bush's aides say. If he fails, Republicans may well remember this moment as little more than a fleeting alignment of the political stars: the short-lived victory of an incumbent president running for re-election in wartime against an unsteady opponent and a weakened opposition party.
David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale, suggested that Mr. Bush's task was not easy and that the historical import of his victory had been overstated.
"I do not think this is a lasting, mountainous achievement in terms of building coalitions," Professor Mayhew said. "Knowing what we know now, the presidential election of 2008 is probably a tossup."
He won the election. Iraq was THE issue...STFU NYT!!
I don't want the Republicans to "revel in power" - - I want them to cut taxes, declaw the EPA and the IRS and other government agencies, and get tons of conservative justices on the bench. That is what I want them to do. Period.
The nay-sayers are underestimating Bush again. They don't think he can do it. These are the same people who were so sure he would be swept out of office last year. If any one is long in the tooth, its the Left, whose dominance in American life is fading.
Having been wrong on every issue before the election, the Times goes on to show that it has not lost its touch afterward, either.
bwwarrraahhhhhh
ROTFLOL!!
"Some See Risks as Republicans Revel in Power" - YEAH!! They see their power has gone to someone else and they're just crying in their beer about it.
"Knowing what we know now, the presidential election of 2008 is probably a tossup"
lmao - at these clowns. Rhetorical nonesense - they sit around and talk to themselves and think they know the pulse of this country.
Oh okay - I can go with that - 2008 is probably a tossup. /s
We don't even know the contenders yet fool.
Yes, I remember the NYT being equally concerned when Clinton won in '92 with both houses.... NOT.
I guess its time for articles about the homeless to return as well.
I was more concerned when the Democrats were revelling.
GASP! Hide the women and children...
Oh my..did you see the headline above the white house chicks jumping up and down on the bed.."Farrah beaten bloody by lover"..was clinton anywhere nearby????? I hope she put some ice on her...
Bet even money its Hillary in '08. We'll put up either Allen or Sanford against her. And once again, a GOP sweep of the South, Midwest and Rocky Mountain States.
You think a moderate democrat will survive the guantlet of Iowa? Think again. It will be Hilliary or the rat from North Carolina. Don't bet against Dean at the DNC having a hand in whisking the party even father to the left.
The left's vetting process in the primaries is letting the loons take over the party. John Kerry was ranked the number 1 liberal senator and his accomplice was number 3 or something.
Won't happen.
Agreed: the national Democratic party really seems to be in the hands of the barking moonbat left.
The New York Times is the Loser in Chief among the DLM (Defeated Liberal Media). They do not know that there were crushed, and that is why they are going to be defeated again, and again, and again.
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