"Fire on the Right" by David Brock
 Appeared in the February 2001 edition of "Talk" Magazine


 George W. Bush's "new" Republican Party presented itself to the national
 convention last summer with much talk of unity, consensus,
 bipartisanship--even compassion.  Bush aides carefully prescreened all
 speeches, deftly removing the word *impeachment* from each; you had to
 strain to hear the word *conservative*.  Bush lieutenants blocked the
 Reverend Pat Robertson from speaking, replacing him in the party pantheon
 with General Colin Powell, who is reviled by members of the extreme
 right.  All in all it was an impressive show designed to win support from
 independent voters, like me, who had turned from the party during the
 fanatical Gingrich era.  Still, I wanted to ask Bush, who did not
 acknowledge the role his own party's leaders had played in creating so much
 rancor, exactly what he thought was wrong with the old party.  And also:
 Where did he think all those rancorous old Republicans would go?  Having
 been in and around the conservative movement for 15 years, I knew how
 unlikely it was that the party could transform itself overnight.

 It didn't take long for Republican loyalists to junk the pretty bipartisan
 rhetoric.  In the hours and weeks following Election Day, a predictable
 cast of extreme right-wing players, many of them ex-associates and
 ex-friends of mine, emerged from the woodwork where they'd been hidden--or
 had hidden themselves--during the presidential campaign.  House Majority
 Whip Tom DeLay, for example, organized what conservative Wall Street
 Journal columnist Paul Gigot approvingly called "a bourgeois riot" in
 Miami.  Rush Limbaugh exhorted millions of Dittoheads, "We're fighting for
 our lives!" Pundit Ann Coultier referred to the justices of the Florida
 Supreme Court as "aspiring Pol Pots." Former Newt Gingrich strategist Tony
 Blankley wrote of Gore supporters, "They are Americans by birth, but they
 might as well be Martian reptiles for all the moral kinship they have with
 us." Appellate superlawyer Ted Olson made sweetly reasoned arguments before
 the U.S. Supreme Court.  (When I worked at The American Spectator he was
 involved with the magazine's Arkansas Project, a multimillion-dollar
 dirt-digging operation against the Clintons, the very hub of "the vast
 right-wing conspiracy.") All over the down-channel cable news shows,
 gray-suited Republican lawyers who had helped me attack Anita Hill a decade
 ago droned on about law and victory.  Even Newt Gingrich, whose
 win-at-any-cost spirit seemed to animate the Republicans' invective,
 surfaced from seclusion and made righteous appearances on television in the
 days immediately following the election.

 The Republicans' dramatic postelection display shows how deeply ingrained
 apocalyptic fervor, vitriolic rhetoric, and primal rage are in both GOP
 history and the psyche of its chief ideologists.  In the aftermath of the
 election it is clear that fury--if not blind fury--will be shaping
 discourse in Washington for some time to come whether George W. Bush shares
 in the Republican hyperthyroidism or not.

 The vein-popping conservative backlash Americans witnessed after the 2000
 election is rooted in the war over judicial nominees that began in the late
 1980s, when presidents Reagan and Bush, in an effort to roll back decades
 of socially progressive jurisprudence, endeavored to confirm conservative
 nominees to the nation's top courts.  "There really is a line from Broward
 County that goes all the way back to what *they* did to [failed Supreme
 Court nominee Robert] Bork: the attacks, and lies, and misrepresentations,"
 says former Delaware governor Pete DuPont. "Then they almost did the same
 thing to [Supreme Court justice] Clarence Thomas.  I think this time
 conservatives finally decided to stand tall." Gingrich was in on the
 tone-setting war from the start.  Writing shortly after Bork's defeat, he
 promised to fight the Democrats "with the scale and duration and savagery
 that is true only of civil wars."

 It didn't take long to see that Gingrich and the people around him weren't
 conservatives in the original sense of the word; they were power-hungry
 radicals who consciously adopted the street-fighting political style of the
 '60s for their own ends.  In the early '90s Gingrich's posse hung out at
 the Capitol Hill row house of Grover Norquist, an antitax lobbyist whom The
 New Republic once called the "Che [Guevara] of the Republican Revolution."
 At Norquist's parties, where conservatives convened to drink kegs and
 grouse about the latest liberal outrages, I ran into former Reagan and Bush
 speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol,
 conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, Wall Street Journal editorial writer
 John Fund, and many of the figures you saw kicking and screaming on TV
 about the "stolen" election.  The integrity of ballots was the last thing I
 ever thought this crowd could get worked up over.  Norquist kept a pet boa
 constrictor named Lysander Spooner, after a turn-of-the-century anarchist;
 a majestic portrait of Lenin graced Norquist's living room
 wall.  Incongruously for such a hard-right crowd, Peter, Paul & Mary tunes
 played on the stereo.  I asked Norquist about this deviation once, and he
 told me it was okay since the '60s left "is being destroyed."

 After the Cold War, Republicans made the destruction of the left a central
 mission.  Gingrich and company cannily recognized that the Cold War's
 demonizing "us versus them" paradigm had not outlived its usefulness, and
 they appropriated it for new use.  The GOP promptly stigmatized its
 domestic political opposition as unprincipled, immoral, and
 un-American.  The dramatic rhetorical shift from one enemy to another
 culminated at the divisive Republican National Convention in 1992 in
 Houston, where RNC chairman Rich Bond stood on the convention floor and
 said of the Clintons and their supporters, "We are America.  Those other
 people are not." As Marshall Wittmann, the Christian Coalition's former
 chief congressional lobbyist, told me, "Conservatism only thrives when it
 has an enemy.  Things really heated up in the movement in 1993 and 1994,
 because the Clintons came to power."

 Republicans have never forgotten that in 1992 the ballots cast for Ross
 Perot combined with those cast for George Bush constituted a majority of
 the electorate; in their minds the will of the people clearly favored
 conservative leadership.  On election night in 1992, then-Senate minority
 leader Bob Dole went on national television and denounced the Clinton-Gore
 ticket, which had won with 43 percent of the vote, as illegitimate.  That
 made it possible to say and do anything to stop them.  And boy, did we
 try.  (As part of its $2.4 million investment in the Arkansas Project, for
 example, The American Spectator sent me to Arkansas to chase down
 outlandish stories linking Clinton to drug-running and murder.)

 Riding a wave of anti-Clinton sentiment, the Gingrich Revolution swept into
 power in 1994.  In came a generation of right-wing rabble-rousers whose
 politics seem based more on raw emotion and invective than conservative
 ideals. "A horny hick" and "creepier and slimier than Kennedy" were two of
 many phrases conservative pundit Ann Coulter used to describe
 Clinton.  Beginning with a famous election night party that Laura Ingraham
 and I threw after George Bush senior was elected in 1988, my house in
 Georgetown became the center of social life for the revolution.  The
 highlight of my dinner parties was always a dramatic reading from Gennifer
 Flowers's steamy book Passion & Betrayal.

 When Gingrich's extreme antigovernment agenda fell flat--notably when
 Clinton outfoxed the GOP in the government shutdown fiasco of 1995 and then
 revived his fortunes by tracking to the center--furious Republicans fought
 back.  They deployed the scandalmongering technique pioneered by Gingrich,
 who called politics "war without blood." GOP congressional investigation
 staffers, together with friends of mine who worked for Kenneth Starr,
 quickly generated charges, countercharges, conspiracy theories, and rumors
 designed to depict the Clintons as criminals.  After I introduced Paula
 Jones to the world in the pages of The American Spectator, I was one of the
 right wing' golden boys, and I was in the thick of it all.

 Among Clinton's foes tempers boiled over, as the promised indictments
 failed to materialize and Clinton won reelection handily.  Tired of running
 down dead ends, I bailed out soon afterward, but the right--intellectually
 bankrupt and on the ropes politically--never stopped believing that the
 Clinton-Gore administration was a depraved criminal syndicate.  In the fall
 of 1997, months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, I attended a
 dinner given by The American Spectator.  The subject of discussion that
 evening was how to build support for an impeachment resolution introduced
 by Representative Bob Barr of Georgia.  Impeachment, said The Wall Street
 Journal's Fund, was "not a matter of law, but of political will."

 The Republicans saw their subsequent failure to remove Clinton as a
 historic defeat.  But they didn't blame themselves.  As they had after the
 failure to get Bork's nomination through Congress, Republican stalwarts saw
 themselves as the beleaguered victims of a malevolent political force.  In
 their minds they had simply been outmaneuvered by the oily Clinton-Gore
 spin machine, tricky lawyers, and the liberal-leaning media, and they would
 do everything they could to ensure that nothing like this ever happened
again.

 This is the untold political backdrop for Florida's recent drama.  And it
 explains why Republicans so quickly concluded that Florida Democrats were
 colluding with Gore to steal the election and why they were so adamant
 about drawing their line in the sand.  Speaking of the Republican fighting
 force that took to Florida's streets after the election, Florida Republican
 Congressman Mark Foley offers a thorough assessment, "This all goes back to
 1995," says Foley.  "No matter what we did, we got punished in the court of
 public opinion.  The Democrats kept beating us with their half-truths and
 inconsistencies.  If they say it often enough and loud enough it's true,
 and the media lets them get away with it.  That's how we got beat at
 impeachment. 'It's all about sex.' Give me a break.  How about the rule of
 law?  A lot of this is pent-up frustration over that... You don't know how
 crazy it makes us when time after time we just can't make people understand
 why we're doing what we're doing.  I used to sit home quietly during these
 things.  Then I hear *them*, of all people, talk about the rule of law in
 the Florida election, and I lost it.  I said to myself, 'I'm not going to
 let them get away with their lies this time.  I'm not going to take it
 anymore.  I'm going to fight back.  They're not gonna steal it from us.'"

 Public opinion polls showed that while 75 percent of Democrats would have
 accepted Bush as president, barely 60 percent of Republicans would accept
 Gore, suggesting that the Republican base shares Foley's views.  The
 numbers also suggest that for conservative Republicans something more was
 at stake than the election of Bush or Gore.  I think that much of the
 hysteria sprang from the Republicans' sense that the right has lost ground
 in the culture wars.  In an election in which the two most reliable
 indicators of a Republican vote were churchgoing and gun ownership, social
 conservatives responded to Bush's much-repeated promise to revive a
 tradition of moral leadership, "to renew our values and restore our country."

 Traditionalist supporters seemed to think a Bush victory would provide a
 powerful cultural emetic.  As The Weekly Standard's Kristol observed, for
 the right the election had always been about Bill Clinton, the man The Wall
 Street Journal announced on election day had "Caligulized modern American
 politics." Radio show host and columnist Dennis Prager put it
 differently.  In his view, the "chad revolt" was fueled by conservative
 anger over "attempts to destroy the Boy Scouts," and "the war on the
 'masculinist' culture of the military." In a Wall Street Journal piece
 under the headline GORE CARRIES PORN BELT, DuPont noted that "Gore carried
 the areas with the highest... percentage of sex movies in the home video
 market," suggesting a link between wayward Americans and the Democratic
Party.

 For a while, anyway, Bush seems likely to enjoy a honeymoon with the
 party's conservative base, which sees him as a conquering hero.  But
 Marshall Wittmann sees "great irony" in the "full-throated anger on the
 right" regarding the election.  "The right will not play a prominent role
 in the administration," says Wittmann.  "The Republican right is going to
 be left out in the cold.  [Bush] won't be able to nominate Marlo Thomas,
 much less Clarence Thomas.  What Bush may not understand is that the
 Democrats don't want bipartisanship, they want to stuff their legislation
 down the administration's throat.  I see Eisenhower, who accommodated all
 the demands of the New Deal, as the model." At a postelection briefing
 Michael Berman, a longtime Democratic activist, argued that Democrats may
 be pleasantly surprised by Bush.  "The Bushes don't talk to the Tom DeLays
 or the Dick Armeys.  They're good people."

 Former GOP senator Warren Rudman, who chaired Senator John McCain's
 presidential campaign, raises the possibility of a kind of Clintonian
 triangulation, in which Bush uses the right wing as a foil.  "Whatever his
 intentions were, he absolutely will have to govern as a centrist," says
 Rudman.  "He'll have cover, because anything that comes out of the [more
 conservative] House is dead on arrival in the Senate, where moderates are
 going to coalesce around John [McCain].  Bush could build his governing
 coalition that way, with conservative Democrats and the mainstream
 Republicans." Such a scenario isn't likely to play with right-wingers, some
 of whom are already beating the drums.  National Review has attacked the
 conservative bona fides of prospective White House chief of staff Andrew
 Card, and The Wall Street Journal has warned, "This would hardly seem the
 time to go all wobbly with gauzy visions of a bipartisan future." Wittmann
 thinks Bush can safely ignore such carping while holding the Republican
 right together, if only because their electoral fate is not
 intertwined.  Yet given that conservatives are notorious for eating their
 young, Wittmann wouldn't rule out a "primary challenge from the right in
 2004." So where will all that Republican road rage go in the
 meantime?  Pretty much where we came in: "To Hillary Clinton," he says.

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-~>
<FONT COLOR="#000099">eGroups is now Yahoo! Groups
Click here for more details
</FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/11231/0/_/475667/_/980861249/"><B>Click 
Here!</B></A>
---------------------------------------------------------------------_->

Please let us stay on topic and be civil.
To unsubscribe please go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia-drugs
-Home Page- www.cia-drugs.org
OM


/--------------------------------------------------------------------------\
PEOPLE BEFORE PROFITS! **** ONE PERSON ONE VOTE ** FREE MUMIA ** FREE PELTIER
  "From Each According To Their Ability, To Each According To Their Needs"
\---------------------------------------------------------------------------/

From: Joe McPherson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

"Fire on the Right" by David Brock
Appeared in the February 2001 edition of "Talk" Magazine


George W. Bush's "new" Republican Party presented itself to the national
convention last summer with much talk of unity, consensus,
bipartisanship--even compassion.  Bush aides carefully prescreened all
speeches, deftly removing the word *impeachment* from each; you had to
strain to hear the word *conservative*.  Bush lieutenants blocked the
Reverend Pat Robertson from speaking, replacing him in the party pantheon
with General Colin Powell, who is reviled by members of the extreme
right.  All in all it was an impressive show designed to win support from
independent voters, like me, who had turned from the party during the
fanatical Gingrich era.  Still, I wanted to ask Bush, who did not
acknowledge the role his own party's leaders had played in creating so much
rancor, exactly what he thought was wrong with the old party.  And also:
Where did he think all those rancorous old Republicans would go?  Having
been in and around the conservative movement for 15 years, I knew how
unlikely it was that the party could transform itself overnight.

It didn't take long for Republican loyalists to junk the pretty bipartisan
rhetoric.  In the hours and weeks following Election Day, a predictable
cast of extreme right-wing players, many of them ex-associates and
ex-friends of mine, emerged from the woodwork where they'd been hidden--or
had hidden themselves--during the presidential campaign.  House Majority
Whip Tom DeLay, for example, organized what conservative Wall Street
Journal columnist Paul Gigot approvingly called "a bourgeois riot" in
Miami.  Rush Limbaugh exhorted millions of Dittoheads, "We're fighting for
our lives!" Pundit Ann Coultier referred to the justices of the Florida
Supreme Court as "aspiring Pol Pots." Former Newt Gingrich strategist Tony
Blankley wrote of Gore supporters, "They are Americans by birth, but they
might as well be Martian reptiles for all the moral kinship they have with
us." Appellate superlawyer Ted Olson made sweetly reasoned arguments before
the U.S. Supreme Court.  (When I worked at The American Spectator he was
involved with the magazine's Arkansas Project, a multimillion-dollar
dirt-digging operation against the Clintons, the very hub of "the vast
right-wing conspiracy.") All over the down-channel cable news shows,
gray-suited Republican lawyers who had helped me attack Anita Hill a decade
ago droned on about law and victory.  Even Newt Gingrich, whose
win-at-any-cost spirit seemed to animate the Republicans' invective,
surfaced from seclusion and made righteous appearances on television in the
days immediately following the election.

The Republicans' dramatic postelection display shows how deeply ingrained
apocalyptic fervor, vitriolic rhetoric, and primal rage are in both GOP
history and the psyche of its chief ideologists.  In the aftermath of the
election it is clear that fury--if not blind fury--will be shaping
discourse in Washington for some time to come whether George W. Bush shares
in the Republican hyperthyroidism or not.

The vein-popping conservative backlash Americans witnessed after the 2000
election is rooted in the war over judicial nominees that began in the late
1980s, when presidents Reagan and Bush, in an effort to roll back decades
of socially progressive jurisprudence, endeavored to confirm conservative
nominees to the nation's top courts.  "There really is a line from Broward
County that goes all the way back to what *they* did to [failed Supreme
Court nominee Robert] Bork: the attacks, and lies, and misrepresentations,"
says former Delaware governor Pete DuPont. "Then they almost did the same
thing to [Supreme Court justice] Clarence Thomas.  I think this time
conservatives finally decided to stand tall." Gingrich was in on the
tone-setting war from the start.  Writing shortly after Bork's defeat, he
promised to fight the Democrats "with the scale and duration and savagery
that is true only of civil wars."

It didn't take long to see that Gingrich and the people around him weren't
conservatives in the original sense of the word; they were power-hungry
radicals who consciously adopted the street-fighting political style of the
'60s for their own ends.  In the early '90s Gingrich's posse hung out at
the Capitol Hill row house of Grover Norquist, an antitax lobbyist whom The
New Republic once called the "Che [Guevara] of the Republican Revolution."
At Norquist's parties, where conservatives convened to drink kegs and
grouse about the latest liberal outrages, I ran into former Reagan and Bush
speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol,
conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, Wall Street Journal editorial writer
John Fund, and many of the figures you saw kicking and screaming on TV
about the "stolen" election.  The integrity of ballots was the last thing I
ever thought this crowd could get worked up over.  Norquist kept a pet boa
constrictor named Lysander Spooner, after a turn-of-the-century anarchist;
a majestic portrait of Lenin graced Norquist's living room
wall.  Incongruously for such a hard-right crowd, Peter, Paul & Mary tunes
played on the stereo.  I asked Norquist about this deviation once, and he
told me it was okay since the '60s left "is being destroyed."

After the Cold War, Republicans made the destruction of the left a central
mission.  Gingrich and company cannily recognized that the Cold War's
demonizing "us versus them" paradigm had not outlived its usefulness, and
they appropriated it for new use.  The GOP promptly stigmatized its
domestic political opposition as unprincipled, immoral, and
un-American.  The dramatic rhetorical shift from one enemy to another
culminated at the divisive Republican National Convention in 1992 in
Houston, where RNC chairman Rich Bond stood on the convention floor and
said of the Clintons and their supporters, "We are America.  Those other
people are not." As Marshall Wittmann, the Christian Coalition's former
chief congressional lobbyist, told me, "Conservatism only thrives when it
has an enemy.  Things really heated up in the movement in 1993 and 1994,
because the Clintons came to power."

Republicans have never forgotten that in 1992 the ballots cast for Ross
Perot combined with those cast for George Bush constituted a majority of
the electorate; in their minds the will of the people clearly favored
conservative leadership.  On election night in 1992, then-Senate minority
leader Bob Dole went on national television and denounced the Clinton-Gore
ticket, which had won with 43 percent of the vote, as illegitimate.  That
made it possible to say and do anything to stop them.  And boy, did we
try.  (As part of its $2.4 million investment in the Arkansas Project, for
example, The American Spectator sent me to Arkansas to chase down
outlandish stories linking Clinton to drug-running and murder.)

Riding a wave of anti-Clinton sentiment, the Gingrich Revolution swept into
power in 1994.  In came a generation of right-wing rabble-rousers whose
politics seem based more on raw emotion and invective than conservative
ideals. "A horny hick" and "creepier and slimier than Kennedy" were two of
many phrases conservative pundit Ann Coulter used to describe
Clinton.  Beginning with a famous election night party that Laura Ingraham
and I threw after George Bush senior was elected in 1988, my house in
Georgetown became the center of social life for the revolution.  The
highlight of my dinner parties was always a dramatic reading from Gennifer
Flowers's steamy book Passion & Betrayal.

When Gingrich's extreme antigovernment agenda fell flat--notably when
Clinton outfoxed the GOP in the government shutdown fiasco of 1995 and then
revived his fortunes by tracking to the center--furious Republicans fought
back.  They deployed the scandalmongering technique pioneered by Gingrich,
who called politics "war without blood." GOP congressional investigation
staffers, together with friends of mine who worked for Kenneth Starr,
quickly generated charges, countercharges, conspiracy theories, and rumors
designed to depict the Clintons as criminals.  After I introduced Paula
Jones to the world in the pages of The American Spectator, I was one of the
right wing' golden boys, and I was in the thick of it all.

Among Clinton's foes tempers boiled over, as the promised indictments
failed to materialize and Clinton won reelection handily.  Tired of running
down dead ends, I bailed out soon afterward, but the right--intellectually
bankrupt and on the ropes politically--never stopped believing that the
Clinton-Gore administration was a depraved criminal syndicate.  In the fall
of 1997, months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, I attended a
dinner given by The American Spectator.  The subject of discussion that
evening was how to build support for an impeachment resolution introduced
by Representative Bob Barr of Georgia.  Impeachment, said The Wall Street
Journal's Fund, was "not a matter of law, but of political will."

The Republicans saw their subsequent failure to remove Clinton as a
historic defeat.  But they didn't blame themselves.  As they had after the
failure to get Bork's nomination through Congress, Republican stalwarts saw
themselves as the beleaguered victims of a malevolent political force.  In
their minds they had simply been outmaneuvered by the oily Clinton-Gore
spin machine, tricky lawyers, and the liberal-leaning media, and they would
do everything they could to ensure that nothing like this ever happened again.

This is the untold political backdrop for Florida's recent drama.  And it
explains why Republicans so quickly concluded that Florida Democrats were
colluding with Gore to steal the election and why they were so adamant
about drawing their line in the sand.  Speaking of the Republican fighting
force that took to Florida's streets after the election, Florida Republican
Congressman Mark Foley offers a thorough assessment, "This all goes back to
1995," says Foley.  "No matter what we did, we got punished in the court of
public opinion.  The Democrats kept beating us with their half-truths and
inconsistencies.  If they say it often enough and loud enough it's true,
and the media lets them get away with it.  That's how we got beat at
impeachment. 'It's all about sex.' Give me a break.  How about the rule of
law?  A lot of this is pent-up frustration over that... You don't know how
crazy it makes us when time after time we just can't make people understand
why we're doing what we're doing.  I used to sit home quietly during these
things.  Then I hear *them*, of all people, talk about the rule of law in
the Florida election, and I lost it.  I said to myself, 'I'm not going to
let them get away with their lies this time.  I'm not going to take it
anymore.  I'm going to fight back.  They're not gonna steal it from us.'"

Public opinion polls showed that while 75 percent of Democrats would have
accepted Bush as president, barely 60 percent of Republicans would accept
Gore, suggesting that the Republican base shares Foley's views.  The
numbers also suggest that for conservative Republicans something more was
at stake than the election of Bush or Gore.  I think that much of the
hysteria sprang from the Republicans' sense that the right has lost ground
in the culture wars.  In an election in which the two most reliable
indicators of a Republican vote were churchgoing and gun ownership, social
conservatives responded to Bush's much-repeated promise to revive a
tradition of moral leadership, "to renew our values and restore our country."

Traditionalist supporters seemed to think a Bush victory would provide a
powerful cultural emetic.  As The Weekly Standard's Kristol observed, for
the right the election had always been about Bill Clinton, the man The Wall
Street Journal announced on election day had "Caligulized modern American
politics." Radio show host and columnist Dennis Prager put it
differently.  In his view, the "chad revolt" was fueled by conservative
anger over "attempts to destroy the Boy Scouts," and "the war on the
'masculinist' culture of the military." In a Wall Street Journal piece
under the headline GORE CARRIES PORN BELT, DuPont noted that "Gore carried
the areas with the highest... percentage of sex movies in the home video
market," suggesting a link between wayward Americans and the Democratic Party.

For a while, anyway, Bush seems likely to enjoy a honeymoon with the
party's conservative base, which sees him as a conquering hero.  But
Marshall Wittmann sees "great irony" in the "full-throated anger on the
right" regarding the election.  "The right will not play a prominent role
in the administration," says Wittmann.  "The Republican right is going to
be left out in the cold.  [Bush] won't be able to nominate Marlo Thomas,
much less Clarence Thomas.  What Bush may not understand is that the
Democrats don't want bipartisanship, they want to stuff their legislation
down the administration's throat.  I see Eisenhower, who accommodated all
the demands of the New Deal, as the model." At a postelection briefing
Michael Berman, a longtime Democratic activist, argued that Democrats may
be pleasantly surprised by Bush.  "The Bushes don't talk to the Tom DeLays
or the Dick Armeys.  They're good people."

Former GOP senator Warren Rudman, who chaired Senator John McCain's
presidential campaign, raises the possibility of a kind of Clintonian
triangulation, in which Bush uses the right wing as a foil.  "Whatever his
intentions were, he absolutely will have to govern as a centrist," says
Rudman.  "He'll have cover, because anything that comes out of the [more
conservative] House is dead on arrival in the Senate, where moderates are
going to coalesce around John [McCain].  Bush could build his governing
coalition that way, with conservative Democrats and the mainstream
Republicans." Such a scenario isn't likely to play with right-wingers, some
of whom are already beating the drums.  National Review has attacked the
conservative bona fides of prospective White House chief of staff Andrew
Card, and The Wall Street Journal has warned, "This would hardly seem the
time to go all wobbly with gauzy visions of a bipartisan future." Wittmann
thinks Bush can safely ignore such carping while holding the Republican
right together, if only because their electoral fate is not
intertwined.  Yet given that conservatives are notorious for eating their
young, Wittmann wouldn't rule out a "primary challenge from the right in
2004." So where will all that Republican road rage go in the
meantime?  Pretty much where we came in: "To Hillary Clinton," he says.
==========================[FAIR USE DOCTRINE]========================
FAIR USE NOTICE: Contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are
making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding
of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy,
scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes
a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section
107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section
107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those
who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes. For more info:
[http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml] If you wish to use
copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go
beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
==========================[FAIR USE DOCTRINE]========================

/------------------  Click Here to Help Yourself   --------------------\
      No effort/no-brainer way to generate income from your website.
    http://www.websponsors.com/cgi-bin/referral.cgi?username=thegolem
       UNCENSORED NEWSGROUPS * ANONYMITY * PRACTICE SAFE INTERNET
         http://www.usenet-access.com/default.asp?ID=pnewsorg
         Free Stuff and Trial Offers ** 186 different offers
 http://www.websponsors.com/cgi-bin/ad_click.cgi?userid=4748&OFFERID;=117
  \--------------------------------------------------------------------/
     332 message board forums at: http://pnews.org/mall/mb.html
  TEN (PNEWS)"progressive news & views" LISTSERVER Forums [Since 82]
 Forum Descriptions - signup/signoff at: ->http://pnews.org/signup.shtml
                      TheGolem ** http://pnews.org/
\------------------------------------------------------------------------/




Reply via email to