Hagel was riding around New Hampshire last week aboard John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express,” and not just because they are both Vietnam vets. Hagel thinks that even if McCain loses, he’s on the cutting edge of change in the party: “In essence what he’s talking about is reform.”
Reform. It’s such an old concept for the Grand Old Party that it’s almost new. The way one reads that party history is central this season, as the Republicans struggle to redefine themselves. Karl Rove, the canny architect of George W. Bush’s campaign, is especially interested in the last turn of the century, when the afterglow of the Civil War was wearing off and the party of Lincoln was at loose ends. A brilliant political strategist named Mark Hanna packaged William McKinley as a perfect vessel to “conserve” the business gains of the Industrial Revolution. Rove sees Bush as doing the same for our own technology revolution. His tightly scripted plan is reminiscent of Hanna’s in 1896, when he had McKinley campaign from his front porch in Canton, Ohio.
But the conservative Business First theme didn’t hold. When McKinley ran for re-election in 1900, he chose a hot-blooded veteran of the Spanish-American War as his running mate. One congressional leader fretted that only a heartbeat “stood between that madman and the White House.” Indeed, McKinley was assassinated and Theodore Roosevelt, John McCain’s political hero, became president. TR brought us, among other things, the first campaign-finance reform and the first inheritance tax–the same tax Republicans now propose to abolish. Roosevelt spawned a generation of heartland Republican progressives like Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and George Norris of Nebraska (a Hagel model) who positioned the party against Eastern special interests. That movement petered out. Starting in the 1930s the GOP became, consecutively, isolationist, anti-communist and anti-statist, more interested in limiting government than reforming it on behalf of the people.
The deeper question posed by the McCain campaign is whether reform can make a comeback in his party. The odds are against it, mostly because of the way the party is structured. Campaign-finance reform of any kind is deeply threatening to the moneyed interests that dominate fund-raising. It doesn’t help that GOP intellectuals, always central to changing the direction of the party, aren’t enthusiastic about reform either. Despite his Reaganite pedigree, McCain is seen by many Republicans as nothing short of a heretic. In endorsing Steve Forbes last week the conservative Manchester Union Leader wrote that McCain would be a good candidate for second place–in the Democratic primary.
That’s a common view in GOP circles–and a sign of how much trouble the party is in. Whatever McCain’s flaws, here’s a candidate whose appeal to Democrats and independents would help Republicans greatly in November were he somehow nominated, and that appeal is being used against him. Opposition to “special interests” is, in this peculiar view, threateningly liberal. In fact, it’s classically conservative–aimed at curbing the federal pork barrel.
If Bush is the McKinley candidate to McCain’s Teddy Roosevelt (similar ticket, 100 years later?), Bush has another model: Bill Clinton. The whole point of “compassionate conservatism” is to take the edge off the GOP’s reputation for harshness just as Clinton took the edge off the Democrats’ reputation for softness. That’s why Bush’s team was so intent last week on spinning his tax plan as focused on the lower and middle classes. So why not just leave the cuts there? Because current GOP dogma says the wealthy must be served. The bulk of the Bush cut–which would bust the budget under today’s Congressional Budget Office surplus projections–is directed toward the richest slice, who have gotten a lot richer in recent years. Bush last week defended his 22 percent cut for the top bracket as “insurance against recession.”
Bogus insurance, as Bush must know. Almost any nonpolitical economist will tell you that a stimulative tax cut now might overheat the economy. It would also make it harder to find the money for a high-end tax cut when we need it–to fight a real recession down the road. McCain, interestingly, doesn’t cut the top rate at all. His tax-cut plan is directed mostly at hard-pressed lower- and middle-income workers, and he explains how he’d pay for it. The plan is “progressive,” to use a Teddy Roosevelt word that most Republicans now consider dirty.
Even so, the whole subject of taxes is played out. Some bigger, nobler political idea is struggling to be born. Just as they did 100 years ago, voters want the fires of chaotic growth tempered in ways that help them; they’re just not sure how. A colorful alderman named Paddy Bauler once defined his city’s politics when he yelled: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform!” The United States probably ain’t ready, either, but the 2000 campaign may yet nudge it in that direction.
