SNIFF the air in Washington, DC, this spring and you notice the smell of decay. The Republicans have been America's dominant party, winning seven of the past ten presidential elections and controlling both houses of Congress since 1994 (except for a brief interlude in 2001-02 when one of their senators defected). And their institutional power has been as nothing compared with their ideological clout. Wherever you look -- from welfare reform to foreign policy -- the conservative half of America has made all the running.
Yet this machine is stalling. The White House is doing its best to engage in some emergency repairs. The past few weeks have seen the appointment of a powerful new chief of staff, Josh Bolten, and a new director of the Office of Management and Budget, Rob Portman. Karl Rove, George Bush's chief political adviser, is also giving up his policymaking role to concentrate on preparing for this November's elections. But the party's problems go too deep for personnel changes to solve.
Mr Bush is the most unpopular Republican president since Richard Nixon: a recent Washington Post-ABC poll showed that 47% of voters "strongly" disapprove of his performance. Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader who did more than anybody else to build the conservative machine in Congress, is retiring in disgrace, the better to focus on his numerous legal problems. More Republicans may well be implicated in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal in the coming months.
The ideological shine has gone, too. The party of streamlined government has been gorging on legislative pork. A party that once prided itself on businesslike pragmatism has become synonymous with ideologically skewed ineptitude of the sort epitomised by Donald Rumsfeld (see article). "What is the difference between the Titanic and the Republican Party?" goes one joke in conservative circles. "At least the Titanic wasn't trying to hit the iceberg."
This presents an opportunity for America's other big party. The Democrats hope to win this year's congressional elections in November and, on the back of those, to capture the White House in 2008. They need a net gain of 15 seats to take over the House and six seats to take over the Senate.
With two-thirds of Americans convinced that their country is heading in the wrong direction, this might appear to be easy. It isn't. First, various technical factors -- from the power of incumbency to gerrymandering -- will help the Republicans in November. More important, if the Republicans reek of decay, the Democrats ooze dysfunctionality: divided, beholden to interest-groups and without a coherent policy on anything that matters to America and the world (see article).
It is never easy for America's out-of-government party. There is no leader of the opposition, and the cleverer presidential candidates may want to keep their powder dry till 2008. But it is not impossible to produce coherent ideas. In 1990 "New Democrats" began to gather round Al Gore and Bill Clinton; in 1994 Newt Gingrich rallied Republicans around his "Contract with America". Nowadays "the alternative to Bush" is a muddle of vacuous populism and meaningless slogans (who is not for "real security", whatever that is?). Worst of all, the Democrats are marching backwards.
Take the party's economic policies. Mr Clinton stood for free trade and (after some retraining) a balanced budget. In 1993, 102 House Democrats, less than half the total, voted for the North American Free-Trade Agreement. Last year, only 15 Democrats defied the unions to vote for a smaller trade bill, the Central American Free-Trade Agreement. In the usually wiser Senate, only 11 out of 44 Democrats supported the bill, and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton were not among them. As for the budget, the Democrats' main criticism of Mr Bush's splurge is that he has not spent enough.
This, sadly, is symptomatic. Some Democrats are trying to unpick Mr Clinton's welfare reforms. Despite the party's rhetoric about protecting the poor, it has blocked most serious attempts to improve the schools poor children are condemned to attend. As for national security, the party seems to be veering ever further to the Michael Mooreish left. Two years ago, Mr Kerry savaged Mr Bush over Iraq, but talked relatively responsibly about a gradual withdrawal. Now the call from many of the party's leaders is to bring the troops home now -- and hang the consequences for the region.
Familiar vested interests are sometimes at work. The Democrats' relationship with the teachers' unions is just as crony-ridden as (and even more damaging to America's long-term interests than) the White House's ties to Big Oil. But there is also something new eating away at the Democratic brain: fury at Mr Bush. And though Bush-bashing may be understandable, it also looks increasingly counterproductive. The risk for the Democrats is that, although Mr Bush will retire to Crawford in 2009, he will have defined them as an anti-Bush party -- isolationist because he was interventionist, anti-business because he was pro-business. Mr Rove would love that.
Incompetence v incoherence: the battle intensifies
Mention this to party activists and you will get the same complaint that Mr Clinton mercifully ignored in the early 1990s: you are just trying to turn their party into "Republican lite". In fact, there are plenty of areas where liberal America needs to stand up bravely for its beliefs: against the death penalty, in defence of civil liberties, sounding a warning on global warming. American voters respect principles and convictions; what they do not like is pandering to special interests and waffle.
The real danger facing the Democrats is that they become a permanent minority party -- a coalition that enjoys support from the super-rich, a few minorities and the working poor, but is out of touch with the suburban middle class, not to mention America's broader interests. Such a party might sneak a victory this year, thanks to Mr Rumsfeld et al, but then get hammered by, say, John McCain in 2008.
Two years ago, this newspaper narrowly favoured Mr Kerry's incoherence over Mr Bush's incompetence. Since then, Republican incompetence has exceeded even our worst fears. How depressing to report that Democratic incoherence has soared too. America deserves better.
-- The Economist, 20 April 2006
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6826160
