Start with the obvious: the gifts from the Clinton administration that just keep on giving. Every day seems to bring a new disclosure of some tawdry, diminishing fund raising or other political practice the White House has to explain and justify and bring up to date in relation to whatever contradictory thing it said on the subject only days before. Yes, the Republicans have not exactly been Camp Fire Girls themselves on campaign financing. But this latest administration stuff has qualities that set it apart as especially damaging.
First, it engages shrines of democracy and symbols of power, from the White House itself to the Lincoln bedroom to Air Force One. Many Americans view these shrines and symbols as (1) belonging to them and not to any temporary, custodial White House occupants and (2) having been debased by the uses to which they have been put by the Clinton political apparatus. This is the kind of thing that, flit catches on, can be politically devastating. It does not require mastering a whole lot of head-breaking details about an obscure, decades old real-estate venture. In addition, from the GOP’s point of view it has the advantage of being the kind of trouble that does direct harm to a president’s image–his stature, as distinct from his standing with the public on this particular issue or that. To the extent that people decide the practices engaged in are crummy, the practitioners will look at least a little crummy to them, too.
So there is an opportunity for an opponent of indisputable stature to move in on the picture as Candidate Clean, Senator Unsullied, something like that.
Next, there is what could be seen as either good fortune or bad fortune, depending on your politics, but which is surely part of the big opportunity. It is the (at least temporary) beaching of the whale Gingrich and the subsequent disorientation and quarrelsomeness of the lesser House Republican fish. Those who might take over from Gingrich some time are simultaneously circling one another and publicly behaving with that ostentatious “who, me?” reticence that vice presidents tend to display when presidents have to go off to the hospital for a day. This circumstance could change, but in terms of some new person’s breaking out of the pack, it is very promising. Dole is gone, Trent Lott is having to establish himself as a competent Senate leader before he establishes himself as leader of much more than that. The governors have vanished back into the national-politics rabbit hole they seem mostly to inhabit for three years out of every four.
So there is, relatively anyway, a Republican Party leadership vacuum that the fight person doing the right, smart things could fill.
Finally, there is the extremely difficult, if not near intractable, problem of the ideological and political conflicts within that large aggregation of strong-willed, occasionally fratricidal folks who consider themselves the national Republican Party. I say “fratricidal” knowing this word for years seemed more applicable to the Democrats. But, so far as their appetite for internecine warfare is concerned, the Democrats seem to have been stun-gunned lately, and to be slogging along more or less as one beast. It is Republicans who have the kind of sharp, deeply felt divisions for which the Democrats once were famous. Their conflict over abortion strikes me as the most politically consequential of these, similar in many ways to the Democrats’ earlier conflict over civil rights: profoundly held personal convictions in stark opposition, as close to irreconcilable as the sides on a political issue can get. And even if you could get some accommodation on this one, there would be the troublesome rest: taxes, campaign-finance legislation, entitlements, term limits, a host of cultural questions. The leader who can find them some shared common purpose on these questions, rather than merely trying to make himself agreeable to all, could be a winner.
So there is an opportunity for an issues Houdini who can bring a measure of effective ideological peace or at least civil order to the Republican Party.
You hear talk of senators like John McCain and Fred Thompson. There are no doubt others. What the challenge will take is someone who can do more than briefly paper over differences or someone who is willing to continuously remake himself to appease this faction or the other, as so many of the Republican presidential wannabes were doing last time. That is the opposite of stature. What is required is stature plus the political skill and guts to bring a workable degree of order to the currently fragmented troops. I suspect that whoever succeeds will have to take some pretty big hits first, will have to get into some pretty big fights, will have to demonstrate both self-confidence and a capacity to stand there and take it. It won’t be one of those poll-created, papier-mache guys.
Maybe, of course, it will be no one. The moment and the opportunity could pass all the likely candidates by, just as has happened in both parties time and again over the years. For all I know we could just end up watching an interminable bicker over whose fault it is that both sides finally killed some reform legislation neither wanted, and see a reversion to the sterilities of Campaign ‘96-in which (think about this) we may be stuck forever. But such an outcome is not foreordained. The bipartisan lassitude and disorder of the moment may not be what the politicians in both parties had in mind with all that high-flown talk of bipartisanship a few months back. But it is full of promise for some smart political comer.
