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Posted on 09/05/2001 12:02:40 PM PDT by Nonstatist

The President has a plan to redraw the map for 2004.

On the last Sunday in August, I went to Pennsylvania to watch President Bush wind up his "Home to the Heartland" tour, which wasn't so much a tour as a series of short forays that punctuated the month he spent at his ranch, in Crawford, Texas. This time, on his way to being inducted into the Little League Hall of Excellence, in Williamsport, Bush stopped at a steel mill in the Monongahela Valley to attend a picnic for steelworkers and their families. There are probably more sylvan spots for a summer picnic; this one was held in an asphalt interior courtyard surrounded by long battleship-gray corrugated-steel industrial structures out of a Charles Sheeler painting. But the picnickers' real purpose was not recreation, it was lobbying—for strict limits on imported steel, a cause on which labor and management are in agreement. U.S. Steel sponsored the event, and a procession of company and United Steel Workers' officials and politicians warmed up the crowd for Bush by issuing calls from the podium for a "level playing field" for the steel industry.

As usual, Bush arrived precisely on time, at the head of an entourage that included his wife, Laura, two Cabinet secretaries, and the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge. The President was the most informally dressed and the most suntanned member of the group. He spent an hour and a half at the picnic—an eternity in the realm of Presidential scheduling—and most of that time he devoted to one of the primal activities of politics, moving along the edge of a surging crowd shaking hands, hugging, holding babies, signing autographs, and posing for pictures. Bush's quotient of charisma is below that of a rock star—it was possible for people to sit eating heaping plates of fried chicken and sausages while he was shaking hands fifty feet away—but he appeared to be enjoying himself, and people seemed to come away thinking, You know, he's a good guy. Ross McClellan, Sr., the union-local president at the factory, who sat next to Bush at lunch, left the President's company positively aglow. "He told me he puts on his pants the same way I do," he reported to his friends.

The speakers reminded the crowd that in June Bush had ordered up an investigation of unfair trade practices by foreign steel manufacturers. This seems like a modest favor, since no one knows its outcome, but because Bill Clinton had declined to do the same thing Bush could plausibly appear in hero's guise at a steelworkers' picnic. At the podium, he presented himself as a humble, decent, uxorious, God-fearing, unpretentious man, perhaps a little rascally, who stands in opposition to the federal government over which he presides. "Congress is on vacation," he said. "The country's never run better." And, a little later, "Washington passes laws, but it doesn't pass values legislation. Values exist in the hearts and souls of our citizens."

Where Presidents travel domestically is determined according to the political art called targeting; a location is never accidental. Bush and the people close to him have got to be exquisitely aware that he lost the popular vote in 2000 and, through the defection of Jim Jeffords, lost the Senate in 2001 and that his advantage in the House will be lost in 2002 if the Democrats get the traditional off-year gain for the party that doesn't control the White House. Political wisdom is that after taking office you nail down your base and repay your contributors, and then you switch your attention to winning converts. That is what Bush has to do now.

If union steelworkers in the Monongahela Valley (many of them Catholic gun owners) are an example of the hoped-for new Bush voter, that's interesting. Al Gore is eternally consigned to be the answer to the trivia question "Which Presidential candidate lost his home state?" It's worth noting that Bush lost to Gore by a wide margin in the state where he was born, Connecticut. Although Bush moved to Texas as a toddler, his connection to his birthplace is not faint. His grandfather was a United States senator from Connecticut. Gerald Ford carried Connecticut in 1976, Ronald Reagan carried it in 1980 and 1984, and George H. W. Bush carried it in 1988. Not only did George W. Bush lose Connecticut in the general election; he lost the Connecticut Republican primary, to John McCain. McCain even carried the Bush family seat, Greenwich.

In earlier generations, states like Connecticut and Vermont, Jim Jeffords's home, made up the heart of the Republican Party in Presidential politics, while places like Tennessee and West Virginia, the site of another surprising Bush victory last fall, belonged to the Democrats. The historic shifts in regional political loyalties, which between the late nineteen-sixties and the late nineteen-eighties seemed to be running in a strongly Republican direction, now seem to be bidirectional. The South, the agricultural Midwest, and the mountain West are the Republican base. Clinton, during his time as the head of the Democrats, nailed down the Northeast, the Great Lakes states, and the West Coast for his Party. Hence the striking electoral map of the 2000 Presidential election, which, as it became familiar from constantly being projected on television screens, represented a shorthand way of thinking about the country: there's Red America, the Bush-voting center; and Blue America, the Gore-voting perimeter. Bush seems to feel his Red America-ness deeply. The more relaxed he is, the more he talks about it. When he arrived in Crawford in early August, a reporter asked him a question indicating dissatisfaction with the hundred-degree heat, and Bush shot back, "This is Texas. I know a lot of you wish you were in the East Coast, lounging on the beaches, sucking in the salt air, but when you're from Texas, and love Texas, this is where you come home; this is my home. We built a house in the Crawford area; it'll be the house where I live in for the rest of my life." (A couple of weeks later, when a reporter teased Bush by saying he'd been away "sucking up salt air on the West Coast," Bush's instant comeback was "Brie and cheese?"—which was not only funny but message-reinforcing, since it communicated that Bush is too country to know that Brie is cheese.) In public statements during the month, Bush favorably compared Crawford with Washington, which he usually called "Washington, D.C.," the city where people would rather take positions than get things done, like in Texas. Whenever Bush left town, it was always to go to regular-folks venues, such as a Harley-Davidson plant in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, a Target store in Kansas City, and the steel mill where I caught his act—in states with no ocean frontage, where the last election had been very close.

For the past couple of years, Karl Rove, who has functioned as chief adviser to Bush throughout his political career, has been fond of comparing the 2000 and 1896 Presidential elections. In 1896, William McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan by putting together a coalition of the rising industrial regions of the country, which wound up becoming the geographic basis of a Republican majority that dominated national politics until the Great Depression. What's interesting about Rove's comparison now—as John Milton Cooper, Jr., a University of Wisconsin historian, observes in a forthcoming book of essays on the 2000 election—is that Bush's territory resembles Bryan's, not McKinley's. McKinley took all the Northeastern and Great Lakes states, plus California and Oregon—Blue America—and Bryan got the South and the West.

I don't think this is entirely a coincidence. Like Bryan, Bush is a populist—an unlikely populist, given his background, but evidently a sincere one. As a politician, he appeals, as Bryan did, far more to the middle of the country than to the coasts, and more to the small towns and farms than to the metropolitan areas. Like Bryan, he seems to stand more with religion than with science, more with what the Populists called "producers" than with financiers, and more for the United States operating solo in the world than for its being entwined in a system of international entanglements. Bryan was florid and Bush is straightforward, but the rhetoric of both contains a large dose of resentment of the fancy people in the sophisticated areas. It would be hard to find a purer example of the proposition that the same thought can be expressed in quite different ways than by placing Bush's Crawford pronouncements next to this one of Bryan's, from the "Cross of Gold" speech: Ah, my friends, we say not one word against those who live upon the Atlantic coast, but the hardy pioneers who have braved all the dangers of the wilderness, who have made the desert to blossom as the rose—the pioneers away out there, who rear their children near to Nature's heart, where they can mingle their voices with the voices of the birds—out there where they have erected schoolhouses for the education of their young, churches where they praise their Creator, and cemeteries where rest the ashes of their dead—these people, we say, are as deserving of the consideration of our party as any people in this country. It is for these that we speak. Bush, in his public self-presentation, glorifies simplicity and "heart"; without using specifically religious language, he traffics in the evangelical Christian ideal of leadership by a simple, good man. As he reminded the press several times during August, he is going to deal with Vladimir Putin by bringing him to Crawford and talking man to man—pointing to this rather than to their official summit meeting in Shanghai, where they would be surrounded by diplomatic experts. The dramatic climax of Bush's month in Crawford, his speech on stem-cell research, may have represented his making a compromise, but it also underscored his Bryanism. Of the hundreds of things a President works on, he decides which issues to elevate to primary national importance.

Bill Clinton chose not to draw attention to stem-cell research. Bush made it the subject of his only televised prime-time address as President so far. The next morning, his aides gave a lavish supplementary briefing to explain in detail how he had reached his position, as they have done on no other issue since he became President. The impression Bush created was that he shares the basic premises of the right-to-life movement about the rights of the unborn, and that he and the people around him consider the moral compass, as opposed to some more advanced and technical instrument, to be his most important piece of equipment. There is a connection between Bush's Bryanism and the search for new Republican voters. One might think that Bush, the tax cutter and regulation lifter, would look for them in affluent, traditionally Republican suburbs. Instead, if I am reading the signals correctly, he appears to believe that the most promising course is to push the boundaries of Red America just a little farther outward, by persuading middle-class, small-town heartlanders who have traditionally been Democrats to switch. That is what he was doing in the Monongahela Valley.

Trying to raid Democratic territory demonstrates a certain strategic bravado on Bush's part, but it also raises a question: Why is the old Republican Northeast and Midwest such a tough sell for him? I got only one real chance to suck in salt air with those who live upon the Atlantic Coast this summer, and that was when I interviewed Representative Christopher Shays on the deck of his house in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which overlooks a pretty little sailboat-filled cove of Long Island Sound. I had made a small project of checking in with moderate Republican congressmen, who are a strikingly regionalized group. Their home territory is the Northeast, with outposts in the Midwestern suburbs and in coastal California. Not much had been heard from them as a group for decades, as their party's base moved relentlessly south and west following Barry Goldwater's Presidential campaign in 1964, but after Jeffords left his party, this spring, they seemed to be reëmerging.

Moderates voted against the Bush Administration and their leadership in the House on a series of issues: drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, faith-based social programs, air-quality standards, the patients' bill of rights, and, the most dramatic example—with Shays leading a revolt that barely failed—campaign-finance reform. (Shays has gathered the signatures of more than two hundred House members on a petition for the reintroduction of his bill in the fall.) The scene at Shays's residence—a neat, white Colonial house with chintz sofas and a copy of "Millie's Book," by Barbara Bush, on the coffee table; the slender, polite, prematurely white-haired Shays; an American flag flying next to the front door; sailboats in the Sound—bespoke Republicanism, and Shays insisted that he is a real Republican. He told me that his introduction to politics was riding his bike, as a small boy, down to the Republican headquarters in Darien to get an "I Like Ike" button.

"What's happened in my district is this," he said. "The Democratic Party isn't stronger. The Republican Party is weaker. Independents predominate." Shays's district is the one that the Bush family came from, by the way. "The more the Republican Party becomes the party of the South, the Southwest, and the West, the less relevant the Republican Party will be in New England. The more Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, Dick Armey, and Tom DeLay are viewed as representing the Party, the harder it is for me to win elections. George W. Bush is a Texan. He is proud of it. He doesn't think like somebody from Greenwich, Connecticut. Here's a great example: George W. went to Europe once before he became President. That's mind-boggling to somebody from this district, especially considering his family background." Most of the moderates have a similar story about their districts to tell. Mike Castle, of Delaware, who heads the Republican Main Street Partnership, a three-year-old organization of House and Senate moderates whose most prized recent recruit is John McCain, told me that the first time he ran for the state legislature, in 1966, rural downstate Delaware was Democratic and the suburbs of Wilmington were Republican. Now downstate is the Republican base and the suburbs swing (though not the way they did in "The Ice Storm," which was set in Christopher Shays's district). "Even the corporate chieftains aren't Republican anymore," Castle said. Beginning in 1952, Delaware voted for the winner in every Presidential election until 2000, when it voted for Gore.

The moderates' distance from their party is cultural as much as political. Evangelicals are not a strong presence in their districts today, and even when they were, in the nineteenth century, they were a liberal pressure group, not a conservative one. The moderates, and their constituents, are uncomfortable with politics and religion blending together. The moderates have a different style from that of the House leadership. They don't use ideological rhetoric. They don't rail against liberals. The government shutdown engineered by Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker, and the impeachment of Clinton played poorly in their districts. The moderates even look different from the conservatives, being more likely to resemble reedy country parsons than prosperous automobile dealers. They are heirs to the Progressive tradition, with its view of government as an honorable profession to be practiced by experts, and of business interests as a corrupting force. One aide to a moderate Republican congressman told me, horrified, about a meeting he and his boss had held with a lobbyist for Peabody Coal about legislation to renew the federal Clean Coal Technology Program, a perfect example of an initiative born in a reform spirit which has evolved into a subsidy for an industry. "I wrote that bill!" the lobbyist proclaimed, showing a wounded author's pride at the idea that a member of the legislative branch of government would presume to alter it.

Politicians have to think first about being reëlected, and therefore the moderates are less worried about incurring the displeasure of their party leadership than about the possibility of facing Democratic opponents who would be pro-choice and pro-environment but conservative on budget and spending issues, and who would try to identify them with the national Republican leadership. I asked another of the moderates, Rob Simmons, who represents a district in eastern Connecticut, how one would run against him. "You link me to Bush and Cheney," he said. "I'm a toady of President Bush. I'm in league with the oil industry. None of that is true, but truth matters less in politics than it used to." Simmons, a freshman, barely won in a district that had been represented by Democrats for the preceding twenty-six years. What if Bush offered to come to the district next fall and campaign for him? Simmons did not leap at the possibility. "Hopefully he would come to discuss something relevant to the district, like the military, or infrastructure," he said. "Prescription drugs would have a lot of currency. If he came to talk about his position on stem-cell research, or about, perhaps, even faith-based programs, I don't think there'd be much enthusiasm."

What the moderates see as self-preservation has, however, incurred the wrath of the right wing of their party. The year after Mike Castle and his colleagues created the Republican Main Street Partnership, a young supply-sider named Stephen Moore set up a lobbying group in Washington called the Club for Growth, which finances conservative primary opponents of moderate Republicans. "The enemy isn't so much Dick Gephardt"—the House minority leader—"as it is Mike Castle," Moore told me with a grin. In the 2000 elections, its first cycle, the Club for Growth targeted the ten-term incumbent Marge Roukema, of New Jersey, but she beat back her primary challenger and is still in the House. In 2002, Moore told me, he plans to target two more Republican moderates. (He once wrote an article in The American Spectator called "Who Needs the Northeast?") This spring, Moore sent a letter to all the Republican moderates in the House vowing to find primary opponents for them if they voted against Bush's tax cut. After telling me this, he held up his thumb and index finger to form a circle. "Zero. Nobody voted against us. We sent the letter to thirty people. None of them wanted to suffer the same near-death experience as Marge Roukema. We did the same thing in the Senate, but it didn't work as well, because we hadn't been involved in races and they weren't afraid of us. We ran ads attacking the senators who voted against the tax cut in their states. Not too long after that, Jeffords defected. That was a bad thing. If I'd known that might happen, I wouldn't have run the ad in Vermont."

In theory, the leadership and the Administration should be afraid of the moderates, who number at least twenty in a House that has a Republican majority of ten. Instead, the moderates, for all their rebellions of the spring and summer, have not yet won a single battle. Part of their problem, if it is a problem, is precisely that they are moderate—they tend to be loyal and well mannered. John Podesta, who was Clinton's chief of staff and now teaches at Georgetown Law School, recently told me, "I used to say, when I was in the White House, anybody who came into my office with a strategy built around the House moderates, I'd throw them out. Because they always collapsed." That is one reason Bush has been able to govern as if he had a mandate, when he doesn't. But what he probably is not going to be able to do is pick up political support in the moderates' territory. The moderates themselves may be holding for Bush, but their districts are long gone. Earlier this year, Congress passed President Bush's budget for fiscal 2002, based on revenue estimates that now appear to have been far too optimistic. The main action in Washington this fall will have to do with numbers—in particular with Social Security, which is the rare federal program that has its own tax. These days, Social Security takes in far more in taxes than it pays out in benefits. When the baby-boom generation retires, that will no longer be the case. In his State of the Union Message in 1998, Bill Clinton, by unveiling the slogan "save Social Security first," introduced the idea that whatever was left over of the Social Security tax monies after benefits had been paid should be put into a trust fund for the baby boomers' retirement. By the time Al Gore ran for President, the trust fund had metaphorically morphed into the "ironclad lockbox" that Darrell Hammond made fun of on "Saturday Night Live." There is no actual Social Security trust fund—it's only a construct, which didn't exist until the sixty-sixth year of the program and has no legislative authority behind it. But Clinton saw it as a way to make Republican tax cuts seem like tampering with the sacrosanct Social Security program, and Bush, during the campaign, appeared to accept the trust-fund idea.

A few days before Bush got back to Washington from Crawford, the Congressional Budget Office issued numbers indicating that, with the tax cut and the bad economy, the federal government won't be taking in enough money to avoid dipping slightly into the Social Security trust fund. This signalled the start of a giant game of chicken. Gephardt and Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leaders in their respective houses, who are both thinking about running for President in 2004, will try to force Bush into a choice between cutting the budgets of the two government departments he wants to spend more on, Education and Defense, and picking the ironclad lockbox. If it's the latter, the Democrats will accuse him of having raided Social Security in order to cut taxes for the rich. Bush will counter by accusing the Democrats of being irresponsible big spenders. (Both sides have fired opening salvos already, in the form of brief negative advertising campaigns; the Democrats' ad aired in Crawford, the Republicans' in Daschle's and Gephardt's home towns.) The whole routine is deeply fake—Social Security isn't in imminent danger, and the budget-balancing Democrats are anything but big spenders—but it represents a real question, which is whether the federal government should be nourished, so that it can stand ready to solve national problems, or starved, so it cannot grow. As the game plays out, it will present Bush with choices that will reveal more about his political intentions.

He has very efficiently got rid of all the extra money available to the federal government, by cutting taxes so much. If he accepts the current Democratic formulation, in which fiscal prudence generally and the Social Security surplus in particular are sacred, it will suggest that he wants to fight for the unlikely new Democratic political territory in the sophisticated suburbs. That's what a legatee of William McKinley would do. But, if he's really William Jennings Bush, the President of Red America, he'll just let the numbers go out of whack, keep his new programs for the school kids and our brave men in uniform, and say that anybody who disagrees with him is just stuck in that old way of thinking that they have up in Washington, D.C.

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