Why the Bush campaign is barely hanging on

Karl Rove is either the genius who has kept Bush from slipping beneath the waves or he is the the reason the boat is full of holes. I incline to the latter view, but what do I know?

I first encountered Karl when he was one of the up and comers in the Young Republicans. I considered him to be on the wrong side of the ideological divide then and still do. Reading the conventional wisdom as set forth in this Washington Post story - Rove Trims Sails but Steers for Victory (washingtonpost.com) - just shows how out of touch both the Post and Karl are with the base of the GOP.

There is so much talk in politics about "soccer moms" and "NASCAR fans" and such old reliables as "religious right" that one seldom hears why majorities of one group or another favor a particular candidate or party. It all sounds like selling soap, a way of choosing where to run the ads, the buzzwords to motivate shoppers, the pretty colors and the catchy jingles.

But politics is, or at least should be, about deadly serious matters - war and peace, crime and justice, poverty and prosperity. The important questions should be about why voters in some demographic vote as they do. Like it or not, it comes down to a few factors like self-interest for some or world-view for others. Even self-interest is a world-view of sorts.

The GOP base is built on a fairy traditional world-view - original sin, personal freedom and responsibility, entrepreneurship, etc. The Democrats have no single base, being built up since the era of FDR as a congeries of sometimes competing and conflicting interest groups. For example, the Democrats manage to accommodate both the ex-Klansman Robert Byrd and the entire Congressional Black Caucus today just as they managed to hold both the "solid south" and urban Blacks in the 1940s. To the extent that there is a Democrat world-view today, it is almost the polar opposite of the GOP - human perfectibility, communal rights and responsibilites, central planning, and so on - a humanist/progressive world-view.

So, what has this got to do with Karl Rove and his machinations in behalf of George W. Bush?

All we, the GOP base, get out of this deal is lip-service to our principles and a promise of marginally less unacceptable judges. Now the judge business is a big deal, but only because we have come so far down the road to tyranny. The founders thought the federal judiciary to be the least consequential branch of government whereas today it has become the final arbiter of virtually all matters of public consequence.

School Vouchers

Here's a prime example of what's wrong with the way things are done. Bush told the base he was for school vouchers, and maybe he is. But the demographics found that vouchers are not highly popular with suburban swing voters who are generally (and naively, in my view) content with their own schools. But vouchers are highly popular among urban Black voters the kind of people who are either trapped in failing public schools (schools so bad that most public school teachers with kids won't send their own kids to them, and they can afford not to) or make heroic sacrifices to send their Baptist kids to Catholic schools. So, we got no push for a voucher program.

In a tactic that the Federal Trade Commission would label as "bait and switch" if it were a commercial transaction, we get "No Child Left Behind." Yes, there is a voucher component in NCLB, but it is years away and only after a school district proves incapable of teaching enough of its charges to pass the new federal tests for all the kiddies. Now, those tests are part of the problem, not the solution; they are a key mechanism by which the federal government controls the curricula in schools throughout the country. The Democrats, under the leadership of Ted Kennedy, went along with the voucher component to get GOP votes for the bill hoping they would get back in control of at least one house and kill that part of the law before it was ever implemented.

In the meantime, the Democrats get more federal money to spend on their most important constituency - unionized school teachers - and more central control of education. This is a lose-lose proposition for the GOP base. And did it get George Bush something to brag about? Hardly. The Democrats have spent so much time trashing the Bush administration for NCLB, even those who voted for it, that the debate comes down to another argument over "the stingy Republicans don't love your children like we do." Reality check: far from the Democrat's claim that not enough money was put into NCLB, school districts are actually complaining that they can't spend all the new money on NCLB activities and want the feds to allow tranferring NCLB money to other accounts.

Bottom line. The GOP base gets shafted, again. We lose an opportunity to do something that would help kids in poor schools which might get their parents to consider voting for us. And, we build up the Democrats' power base. Whoopee! That was fun. Can we do it again, Uncle Karl?

Immigration

For some reason (several reasons, actually, but I don't want to get into that in detail now), both parties seem inflexibly committed to a ruinous policy of expanding both legal and illegal immigration. But let's stick to how this plays out for the GOP. The base is highly skeptical of the current high levels of legal immigration and absolutely livid about the lack of control of our borders. So what does the administration do?

They tell us we have to expand things like H1-B visas to bring foreign workers here or the jobs will go overseas anyway. And the president talks about another amnesty. I know he doesn't call it that, but it is. When some Republicans said they wanted a president like Reagan, they didn't mean one who would emulate Reagan's worst idea.

Polls show upwards of 70% support for shutting down illegal immigration and sending the illegals home. You would think there would be some political gain in doing something this popular. Moreover, the stubborn refusal of the unemployment rate to drop below 5.4% despite some other signs of economic recovery cannot be entirely unrelated to the constantly growing number of illegals coming here to compete for the available jobs. The Black male unemployment rate might come down from its seemingly permanent double-digit perch if labor was more scarce. And, if you think this is a nuisance issue now, wait till the bottom really falls out of the economy.