Base to Bush: It's Over

By Byron York
Sunday, July 8, 2007; Page B01

Let's say you're a Republican president, a bit more than midway through
your
second term. You're scrambling to salvage what you can of a deeply
unpopular
war, you're facing a line of subpoenas from Democrats in Congress and
your
poll ratings are in the basement. What do you do?

You estrange the very Republicans whose backing you need the most.

That's precisely what President Bush has managed to accomplish during
the
two big political developments of recent weeks: the commutation of I.
Lewis
"Scooter" Libby's prison sentence and the defeat of comprehensive
immigration reform. But the president's problems with the GOP base go
beyond
those awkward headlines. Republicans aren't mad at Bush for the same
reasons
that Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the devotees of MoveOn.org
are;
there's no new anti-Bush consensus among left and right. No,
conservatives
are unhappy because the president allied himself with Sen. Edward M.
Kennedy
(D-Mass.) over an immigration deal that leaned too far toward amnesty
for
illegal immigrants. They're unhappy because Bush has shown little
interest
in fiscal responsibility and limited government. And they're unhappy,
above
all, because he hasn't won the war in Iraq.

All of this has left Republicans saying, at least among themselves,
something blunt and devastating: It's over.

"Bush fatigue has set in," declares one plugged-in GOP activist.

"We're ready for a new president," says a former state Republican Party
official in the South.

"There was affection," opines a conservative strategist based well
beyond
the Beltway, "but now they're in divorce court."

The problem is there for anyone to see: Bush's approval ratings could
not
have collapsed to 30 percent unless a lot of his base deserted him. In a
number of recent polls, his job-approval rating among Republicans has
been
in the low- to mid-60 percent range. "Being under 70 percent of your own
party, when you're president, is a pretty weak performance," notes
Republican pollster David Winston. "He should be closer to, if not over,
90
percent."

Despite all this, the president has behaved in recent weeks like a man
with
political capital to burn. On immigration reform, he defied the GOP base
as
if his well of support were so deep that he could draw out as much of it
as
he liked. He also gave himself the worst of all worlds in the case of
Libby,
Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff. By commuting Libby's
prison
sentence -- as opposed to pardoning him outright -- for perjuring
himself to
CIA leak investigators, Bush outraged his Democratic opposition while
leaving his base vaguely disappointed.

The president knew that Libby's most ardent partisans -- including the
most
powerful vice president in U.S. history -- opposed his spending even one
night in jail. But for the base writ large, the case wasn't about Libby.
It
was about the politics of the Iraq war. A lot of conservatives had hoped
for
a full pardon because they wanted a strong White House statement that
the
CIA leak investigation had spun out of control, that it had grown from a
set
of crazy political circumstances and that the whole mad imbroglio should
never have gotten as far as it did.

In short, they wanted something like the impassioned statement President
George H.W. Bush issued in December 1992, when he pardoned former
defense
secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, former national security adviser Robert
C.
McFarlane, former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams and three
other participants in the Iran-contra affair. (Abrams, by the way, is
now a
deputy national security adviser.) Back then, Bush said that patriotism
was
the "common denominator of their motivation." The president used the
pardons
as an opportunity to denounce what he called "a profoundly troubling
development in the political and legal climate of our country: the
criminalization of policy differences."

In the Libby case, there were no ringing declarations. Instead, this
President Bush came up with a cramped, limited statement, commuting
Libby's
jail term while keeping (at least for now) his conviction, a $250,000
fine
that he has already paid and two years of probation. One didn't have to
read
too far between the lines to guess that the president believes Libby to
be
guilty of perjury; just for good measure, Bush threw in some good words
for
Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The problem, the president said,
wasn't that Fitzgerald had gone on a three-year fishing expedition that
netted only Libby, or that the Iraq war's foes were using the CIA leak
case
to rehash their grievances against the original decision to invade;
rather,
the problem was simply that U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton's
sentence
was "excessive."

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The fundemental question, therefore, becomes this one --
do we just wait until their next earth-shattering fiasco or have we
finally
had enough of the wit, wisdom and stylish satire of Bush, Cheney, Rove,
Gonzales, etc?

Could someone from the Republican party politely and privately or
someone
for the Democratic party clearly and publicly or both houses of congress
please ask them to resign, now, so that there will be something left of
the
United States of America in the future?

Bush and his friends may have talents but running America clearly isn't
one
of them. We've seen enough.

Time for them to go home.

Its the best thing for America.