Why the Immigration Bill is Doomed to Succeed

Vidalia, Georgia, is actually a pleasant place. Most Yankees would think it a blip on the road as they drive through (do Yankees drive?), but it's actually in many ways a very pleasant Georgia town with nice people, a certain kind of picturesque landscape, and a subtly bustling work ethic.

Vidalia is (unfairly) famous for one thing and one thing only: its sweet onions. The soil in the Vidalia area produces a special kind of onion that is actually palatable raw, unlike most onions which require cooking or disguise inside of some other food. As with most agricultural producers, the farmers who produce those onions have historically relied on migrant day labor to harvest the crops. In pre-2013 PC-speak, of course, "migrant day labor" means "illegal aliens." (Now, it apparently means "undocumented already-Americans whom racists won't admit are already Americans.")

The onion crop is harvested by undocumented-already-Americans in the spring, and so in 1998, after the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the precursor to the lightning-quick and efficient Immigration and Customs Enforcement) spent over a year warning the farmers that they were cheating the wage and hour laws and the immigration laws and that this was, you know, illegal, INS decided to launch raids on the farms when the illegals, pardon, undocumenteds would be present.

That's harvest time.

The farmers squawked. Congressman Jack Kingston and the late Senator Paul Coverdell, both Republicans, took time out of failing to do anything in particular about the Clinton Administration and thundered at INS. INS knew who wrote their checks and who was President at the time and so backed down. The "compromise" the parties reached would be utterly unsurprising to anyone who has watched American immigration policy in execution for the last three decades: INS would agree not to deport any illegals, the farmers would pinky swear not to do this again, and the Republican Congressmen, one of whom had spent a decade thundering about illegal immigration, praised this humane solution.

Coverdell, absolutely immune to situational irony, implied that INS was duty-bound to ignore the immigration laws because the laws had been flouted and largely ignored for years by that point.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. It is basically the way in which Republicans have approached immigration for nearly three decades: when the rubes are listening it's secure the border and our laws must be obeyed. When money talks, it's the rules are for suckers.

Senators Ayotte and Rubio are of course the most recent examples of this; they are hardly alone.
The problem is of course larger than immigration. It extends to the pro-life cause (Republicans are not nearly in danger of taking federal funds from Planned Parenthood, and abortion will be unsafe, legal, and common into the twenty-second century in no small parts thanks to the party), spending (John McCain is not the only Senator to rail against prolific spending in general and demand it for his home state), and indeed, almost everything else. (I could also take shots at former Presidents Bush and Reagan, but you get the idea.)

Yet today, the issue is immigration, so let's discuss that.

We Will Have Comprehensive Immigration Reform Precisely Because It's A Bad Idea

I feel I should put my cards on the table. My views on immigration have liberalized over the last eight years, spurred in part by my realization at the time that world birth rates are plummeting, and by the realization that Republicans dare not actually do anything to fix the mess they've created over the last three decades. I favor legalization of those here (blah blah exceptions) and a path to citizenship, albeit one significantly more arduous than legal immigrants face. (We should not, after all, reward lawbreaking, even if we must stomach it.) We don't make new people at home, so we need more of them, and as business interests just want a helot class, I want to deny them that.

I feel we also need to liberalize our unskilled and skilled immigration laws to allow more of both into the country.

But I also feel that it is important to be honest. An honest description of what I am describing, regardless of any soon-to-be-waived taxes or fines on which legalization and citizenship are predicated, is an amnesty. The immigration bill before the Senate now, with due respect to Congressman Ryan, is an amnesty, in the same way that the militia will be absolved of its crimes if it disarms is an amnesty. No one thinks the latter isn't an amnesty; merely because conditions are attached to legal forgiveness of lawbreaking does not change the nature of the forgiveness.

I say all of this because I feel we also need to know what elected Republicans have said for three decades. They say we must secure the border and our laws must be respected when facing the electorate. But what they are really saying by their actions is this:

We think you're too stupid to get this, so here it is. We don't care about being a permanent minority party under Democrat rule. We don't care about depressing and at the same time burdening the labor market in weird ways. We don't care about a political shift to the left because frankly that's where we live anyway. We don't care about enforcing the law, and that after what we've done for three decades you think we do, is a persuasive argument about ending elections permanently. We think you're all a bunch of dumb racists, you were too stupid to know not to elect us, and so we are going to have a big amnesty and make the next wave of this easier because our big money backers think you're dumb racists and half of them want a helot class. Dig? What are you gonna do, vote for the Democrats?

Now as I said, this is hardly limited to immigration. If you took the Republican Party at its word, you would expect to see men and women dedicated to cutting spending, balancing the budget, ending the slaughter of the unborn, enforcing our laws, beefing up our national security, and slowly easing down the welfare state. If you take them on their actions, you would expect to hear them talk about growing government, running deficits, keeping abortion legal, tossing our laws out the window, spending a lot on defense systems while shuddering at using them, and expanding entitlements.

The problem for Republicans is that on none of these things have they been honest. Ayotte and Rubio campaigned against comprehensive immigration reform and are now staking their credibility on it. The House leadership is a reminder that the House leadership is pretty awful and worse, hasn't really changed since the 2006 drubbing.

So when Rubio or Cornyn (haha!) or any other Republican other than John McCain promises there will be border security, no one believes them because no one is that stupid any longer. When they promise that there will be hurdles to jump before the people whose first act on entering our country was to break our laws can become citizens, no one believes them because those hurdles are already being horse-traded away, and again, three decades is too long for even Republican voters to remain stupid.

But the bill will pass anyway. Elected Republicans will calculate that the opponents of the bill are racists, because the fellow members of their class will say so, and will ignore the fact that it merely fossilizes decades of broken promises, burdens the labor market, dragoons employers into being federal agents, does nothing to alleviate labor shortages, depresses prevailing wages, expands entitlement spending, and incidentally treats our laws as dreck.

Because, and this is important, they don't care about those things either.

But the Party Will Suffer

The problem in the short term is not the anti-immigration-reform folks (as opposed to anti-immigrant folks, who are a fraction of a fraction of a minority, or the racists, who are less). Republicans know they'll just stupidly vote for Republicans, because the Democrats are at least honest about what they're doing.

The short term problem is that the upset people, racist or not, anti-immigrant or not, will jump like scalded cats, and media folks desperate to protect the Precious will latch onto this to prove Republicans are racist. Good-bye independent votes, hello President Clinton, Redux. That Marco Rubio cannot see this, and cannot see what he is creating, should permanently disqualify him from the Presidency.

The long run problem is that those same people will gradually wonder why they bother. They will be like those missing Republican voters in 2000 and 2012 who looked at what was on offer and couldn't figure out why to vote. Lest you think they were wrong to make that conclusion (and they were), you aren't going to argue them out of it. And God knows we don't try, and even if we did, I'm not sure what we'd say to them.

The problem is that in the long run, Republican voters will realize that their elected officials hold them in contempt, and accelerate the path downhill. That's a bad thing, though as I get older, the relative badness of it seems less with each passing day.

But don't worry. There will always be a few rubes left who believe Republicans.

This dates to November 13, 2006.


Oh, this is simply priceless. With Ken Mehlman retiring, we need a new RNC Chair.

We could have had a promising up-and-comer with a great life story, fantastic political skills, and odds-on-sharps like you wouldn't believe.

We could have had a dirty machine politico, who may make us all cringe a little at what he's willing to countenance, but who is used to the odd knifefight with a K-Bar and a rusty razor, and who could help us work our way back into the majority.

We could have had a lobotomized sea lion, who would at least know to bark to get some kind of fish on command.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next best thing (by a little) to making Kevin Phillips the new RNC Chair: Bonehead Martinez. Yes, that's right, Bonehead, who with a five-point Bush win in trending-Red Florida at his back, barely managed to beat one of the more anodyne, bland Democrats to run for the Senate outside of Massachusetts; Bonehead, who managed to take a dicey political situation in the Terri Schiavo affair and make himself into a Google search result; Bonehead, who if asked to eat eggs over easy and shave at the same time, would end up with shiny whites and yolk smeared in fork-tine streaks across his face; Bonehead is going to be the RNC Chair.

And if gets better! He's going to multitask!

This was brought to you today by the same morons who griped all last week about do-nothing leadership in the House, only to ... wait for it ... prepare to vote in the same losers!

I'm proud to be a Republican today.

This dates to October 16, 2007.


On general principle, I try very hard to avoid disagreeing with my fellow contributors anywhere but in the comment sections of their pieces; generally, it feels unseemly to turn the front page, or diaries, into a back-and-forth on some issue or another. This is just me; Heaven knows others have different perspectives, and have displayed them.

That said, I'm breaking that personal rule this time to take issue with almost everything Erick said here. Before I wander out on this thin-looking tree extension, I'd note that I have no small amount of respect for Erick as both a man and as a thinker. Generally, I don't publicly disagree with him because I have the luxury of seeing most of what he writes as essentially correct. Nothing that I write here changes any of that.

With that said, I think with respect to this specific piece, Erick's wrong in general, wrong in his initial premises, and wrong in most of his conclusions. I'll explain why below the fold, but I do want to ask you to follow me there, because there is one thing I think he's absolutely right about; and that one thing contains within it so much awful truth, I'd like you to not only tell me why I'm wrong, I'd like you to prove it.

I take issue more or less from the start.

Erick quotes approvingly Peggy Noonan (whom, I should add, I heart), for her question,

But it's something I often wonder: Why don't people in Washington go home anymore?

This particular question has been asked, so far as I know, twenty-seven of the thirty-one years of my life (and probably many times before that), and pretty well since a smiling guy from California, Noonan's old boss, was sworn into office on a blustery day in 1981. The answer, to any conservative who is not (as Ms. Noonan is) actually in love with humans, is that these people are humans. They have found a niche in which they discovered a place for themselves, and that niche is loaded with power and money they would not otherwise have. Respectfully, duh. While not by any stretch of the imagination a fan of term limits -- I believe people deserve the representation they're stupid enough to elect -- this is the most persuasive case I can imagine for them: That the men and women we send to the halls of power rarely leave of their own volition, and they work to keep themselves there at all costs. We remember and admire Washington and Cincinnatus not because they were normal, but because they were strange, great men, and forsook power to go back to being normal men. Men like Franklin Roosevelt, a cretin who held power until Death came and grabbed it from him, are the norm.

And we -- we being conservatives, we being Republicans -- are particularly shafted, because we do not send, as a general rule, our A team to Washington, or indeed, into government in general. Odd exceptions like Bobby Jindal and a handful of others I'm blessed to know or have met or have read about notwithstanding, our smart and capable people tend to run screaming from government because, well, they're conservative. Government service does not pay well, government service does not yield opportunities to unleash the human imagination, government service saps all that matters in life -- family, home, peace of mind -- and leaves a gray film over it. So generally, we send the slightly (or severely) stupid into battle for us, the slightly dim cousins we thought were safely locked in the basement to press our beliefs and policies, and then we all stand gobsmacked when they either mess up the presentation, get co-opted by the opposition, wander naked past Capitol City Brewing Company in broad daylight, or, worse, decide they never want to leave.

In other words, this is part of our lot in life. Sad, but true. So while Noonan's amazement (and by extension Erick's) is somewhat off-note, it does tie into Erick's critically correct insight. Which you'll have to keep reading to get.

Next, Erick laments:

The GOP has ceased to be a party of ideas. We have John Boehner playing to keep Jerry Lewis on the Appropriations Committee, despite his FBI investigation. He's added to the Appropriations Committee Ken Calvert, also under investigation.

Properly, there are two errors in here, one per thought.

First, the GOP was never the party of ideas. In point of fact, except for a brief portion of the 1994 mid-term election campaign, the GOP has been pretty darned awful at even having ideas. (This is, like so many other things, both a good and bad thing.) We earned and have retained the title Stupid Party, and by God, no one will wrest it from our hands. Look back at the start of the modern political era, which I date to 1960. Name a single GOP-spawned political idea. Go for it. Not a conservative, neoconservative (sorry, Ron, but they were the idea guys for a couple decades there), or libertarian one; not an idea spawned in the think tanks or by samizdat communique between conservative university professors; a GOP-spawned one. Ya can't. And this is because, oh, you know what I'm going to say, we send morons to government. We are talking, folks, about people who sent an embryonic-stem-cell research funding bill to the President, the head of their own Party, in the face of his veto threat and significant warnings from large segments of their own base, in an election year where they knew they'd have trouble anyway, and gave their opposition a wedge issue. Does this sound like people who have ideas larger than Make belt match shoes, ugh? The GOP was never the Party of ideas; it was the party of men who tried vainly to put good ideas into play, and usually failed.

The second is the suggestion that profound, complementary butt-covering is somehow something new (and suggestive) in GOP politics. It is not. Again, because we send morons to do our dirty work, we get the Boehners, we get the Lewises and Youngs and Stevenses, and we get the Packwoods and Gingriches and... Newsflash: When you send idiots somewhere with money and power, they are going to mess it up, awful. They are going to ride their gravy train until it runs off the track, and then they're going to grab everything that isn't nailed down and bail.

Now, I have to confess -- and this is my own pet peeve, so bear with me -- that I took serious issue with this:

For the longest time, "policy as a game" meant supporting the social conservative agenda at the expense of the fiscal conservative agenda.

Actually, this is true only if "supporting" means "providing lip service to." Now, I will be the last to say that the GOP Congress, especially after getting spanked in the government shutdown over a decade ago, has shown the slightest tendency toward fiscal conservatism. Indeed, the GOP of the 1980s, say, thought they were showing their fiscal conservative bonafides with Gramm-Rudman, which was so brilliant, it never actually worked. In point of fact, the only fiscally conservative thing the GOP has done during my lifetime is cutting taxes -- I count four large tax cut packages during that time -- and that usually over a not insignificant amount of intra-Party opposition.

But. Let's consider the monstrous advances the social conservative movement has made since Reagan's inauguration. Well, hm. First, we got Roe reversed... no, wait. Well, we made sure that there would be no gay marr-- Ok, scratch that one. Oh, I know! We ensured there would be no Federal funding for embryon--

The social conservative movement has, in my lifetime, actually scored the following successes, through the Grand Old Party, at the national level: After ten years of trying, a ban on one particular procedure for a tiny handful of late-term abortions; a limit (not a ban) on Federal funding for slicing and dicing children for medical research; and a bill, signed by a Democrat President, that unconstitutionally denies Full Faith and Credit to contracts for gay marriage entered in one State in another. (I'm willing to toss welfare reform in there, but only as a joint victory for both the social and fiscal cons.)

What the Republican Party has been simply marvelous at -- no way around this -- is talking one Hell of a good game on social issues, even though it cares, sometimes, sorta, more about fiscal ones. Furthermore, all this talk about "who was suffered more from Stockholm Syndrome" is pointless, a waste of perfectly good energy, playing into our idiot opponents' talking points, and a good way to have a nice, futile, self-destructive intra-Party war. (On a related note, I'm neither convinced that Rudy Giuliani will actually give a running flip about what social conservatives think or do, nor that a man who called the progressive tax system the basis of our economy is going to be a great fiscal conservative. But that's me.)

Now, never let it be said that I don't think Erick is capable of high comedy:

Second, while you and I are having our pity party and observing the Republican party cracking up around a lack of ideas, there's life over at Mordor. They are mobilizing behind a set of ideas to entrench their power.

Give the man credit for a pitch-perfect feel for absurdist comedy. The very last thing we need to worry about is what a ravening horde of morons, led by a wedge of rotting cheese, will accomplish. They will accomplish what they've shown they can accomplish: Ruining perfectly good chances at victory by the strategic use of blackface; writing absolutely awful gibberish about Coretta Scott King; raising a lot of money from saps who think they care about change; and copiously abusing the English language, including but not limited to the f-word. It may be true that a million monkeys typing long enough will produce Shakespeare's works, but it is not clear that a million troglodytes banging out their rage at the behest of moral midgets and weeks-old gorgonzola are going to produce new ideas that will set the electorate on a left-wing agenda for decades.

And that leads to where Erick is both wrong, and right, and where I'd like you to prove him and me wrong. Don't just say it; do it.

Let's move beyond the punditry folks. We've got enough of those. Now we need thinkers and doers. And we online conservatives, online Republicans, we need to fight -- first to get our party back, then to get back the majority.

We don't need thinkers; we have those by the millions, and we have them in well-funded (though not well-funded enough, in too many cases) think tanks. And that's the last thing Erick says wrong -- and all the wrong pales compared to what he got right. We have, as Erick correctly noted, the entire right blogosphere, sitting here and sharing its thoughts en masse, and not doing anything.

That is Erick's critically correct insight: We are not a party of activists. The rotting pile of cheese curds mentioned above is indicative of why we're well and truly handicapped in our fight: They make time for government, and we do not. We whine about it. Take me; I'm an excellent example. I'm a father of four with a job that usually consumes 12-14 hours a day, every weekday, and far too often, weekends, too. I patrol the comments section here, I write the occasional piece of punditry (no longer even things like this -- and by the way, R and B, if you're reading this, and I hope you are, sorry I haven't written in a while; sincere congratulations; and avoid the name Arthur for that reason, and because, dangit, that sounds like an accountant's name). When I have money, I donate it. I vote in every election. I've even done some GOTV (including for Dole-Kemp, God help us all). And that's it. Largely, government is something that happens to me; I have too many other things about which to worry.

And pretty much everyone reading this is like that too.

C'mon. Remember last week, when everyone was yammering about some folks announcing that if Rudy Giuliani is selected for the Presidential run, they'll vote third party for the Presidency? Aside from the colossal stupidity of the uproar -- whether or not they vote third party at the top of the ticket, I think we'd like to have them all the way down the rest of the ticket, thanks -- no one really paid attention to what was happening. A group of activists was trying to change the direction of the party. In response, a large number of commenters yelled about it.

That is what we do. If we want to win, win big, and keep winning, we cannot. Take an easy example: When Louisiana Democrats try to paint Bobby Jindal as a bigot because not only is he Catholic, but he believes it, where are the conservatives, the Republicans, the libertarians, the anyone, getting in that idiot Mary Landrieu's face and asking her if Jindal's stated belief in the correctness of Catholicism is bigotry?

I'll tell you where: They were whining about it on internet boards.

Got another: ActBlue, which was actually a great way to help the left blogosphere feel good about itself, is nominally the gold standard in grassroots fundraising. On the right, we've been slow to catch up. Here on RedState, we hawked a few sites that were trying to close the gap. The response? Wow, these aren't just like ActBlue. These aren't as good as ActBlue. These don't allow you to make your own candidate list like ActBlue. Why won't someone make something like ActBlue? Ladies and gentlemen, you are that someone. We have phenomenal communication methods that can link individuals with identical interests and beliefs, and a wide range of talents, to produce something better than ActBlue, and yet it's been left up to a handful of brave folks to try to do all this -- and to the rest to whine that it's not happening fast enough.

So let me lay it out for you: We are, well and truly, toast. We lack the time, the motivation, the energy, and the will to get out there and cause change, to fix all the things our Party and theirs have done wrong, individually or in unison. That is where Erick is sadly, gloriously right, in a way he's been preaching since I first met him very close to three years ago: We have millions of pundits, and a bare handful or two of activists.

But! Here's your chance: Do it. Start a group here, or in our blogs, or on your own email list. Start working out what needs to be done, and do it. Don't comment except to try to get something started, and if that doesn't work, try it a different way.

My money says this blog entry will be read, noted, and ignored, much as Erick's ultimately will be. My money says folks will get fired up, then forget it about it, and wonder why we don't mobilize as well as the baby socialists.

Prove me wrong. Or prove me right, and let's see how the 1970s play out this time.

This post dates to November 5, 2007.

It's another Giuliani/Huckabee diary. If just those five words are enough to turn your stomach, you should probably read something else.

Anyway: We're in the middle of something a lot of folks haven't really seen since 1980, and perhaps haven't seen in their lifetimes: A well-and-truly contested Republican Presidential Primary. Now, because we're unused to it, it's my theory that we don't remember how to react; and because the Party was a very different animal then, the coalition of groups who compose it have little to no institutional memory of how to resolve formational problems before they get out of hand.

Put differently: Depending on which candidate is ascendant at any given time, a lot of otherwise good-faith Republicans are threatening to take their ball and run away, because they don't know precisely what else to do.

I'm not going to sit here and argue that anyone must vote for this guy, or must not vote for that one; I'm not going to get into the middle of the what-happens-when-the-general-comes argument. I have enough headaches without engaging that.

What I'd like to do is offer every camp an insight into why we are where we are, and point to some possible resolutions of the problem. I would suggest that we need to get this done now, rather than, say, September 2008. So, if you have some time, read on.

I used to be a pretty fair hand at game theory, but as with so much else in my intellectual life, what sense I had for it at anything but the intuitive level has largely atrophied from disuse. I hope you'll pardon any obvious gaffes on my part as I try to work through this; but I really think it's the best analytical framework for this election, and I'm going to offer it that way.

I'm going to make two simplifications that I hope don't destroy the model, for explanatory purposes, and that will save a lot of "but ifs" sprinkled through the discussion. First, I'm going to assume that each group described below has more or less homogeneous beliefs, and internally consistent priorities, thereby allowing me to treat groups as an equivalent number of individuals. Second, while essentially, every participant in coalition politics has a slightly-to-highly uneven hand in the nomination process, let's simply assume that each has the same vote. Like I said, these assumptions glaze over a lot, but I'm looking for a basic model more than anything else.

Given that, here's where I think we are:

The "social conservatives" -- shorthand for conservatives whose first (though not only) priority is social issues -- want a nominee who will (1) win and (2) advance policy on abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, and probably some other things we don't need to rehash here. The "fiscal conservatives" -- shorthand for conservatives whose first (though not only) priority is money and market, i.e., spending, taxes, and government regulation of the market -- want a nominee who will (1) win and (2) advance policy on taxes, government expenditures (and size), and government regulation of life in general but the markets in particular. There are of course other factions -- the "immigration conservatives," the "gun conservatives," the "liberty conservatives," etc. -- but I won't deal with those because (1) they complicate what's already a too-long blog post, (2) I think hyphenated conservatism is so much media hooplah, and (3) each of those groups, if they exist, can find something to adamantly dislike in either or both Mike Huckabee and/or Rudy Giuliani.

The problem we're experiencing is that Rudy Giuliani is currently the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, and Mike Huckabee is making a poorly funded darkhorse surge. Both men, on paper, have great credentials; however, each has the potential, based on current pronouncements and past acts, to split off large, vitally-needed chunks of the party come election time, should he make it to the general election. For Rudy, it's the social conservatives; for Mike, it's the fiscal ones. Social conservatives, now warming up the signs for the thirty-fifty anniversary of Roe, are wondering why they give their time, effort, and boots on the ground to a Party that not only can't get Roe reversed, but that actually got it affirmed the last time it made it to the High Court, with Justices appointed by post-Roe Republican Presidents providing the critical votes to uphold that monstrosity. Fiscal conservatives, listening to Reagan's rhetoric about government being the problem and but rarely the solution, wonder why every Republican President since Nixon has presided over vastly increased spending, increased taxes, or both; why the Code of Federal Regulations never shrinks; and why a Republican Congress showed admirable fiscal restraint for about five months in 1995, then went a-porking.

In Rudolph Giuliani, the social conservatives see an avatar of all the things they believe wrong with the Republican Party: A greater emphasis on electability and belligerence than on protecting the unborn, a liberal (sorry, guys, it's true) on social issues that don't directly affect crime rates whose personal life suggests that we don't want to spend too much time poking at the Clintons this time around. In Michael Huckabee, the fiscal conservatives see all the morass that is "compassionate conservatism" without even the little motes of sunlight offered with, say, No Child Left Behind and Medicare D -- a bigspending Southern Populist who'll say, "I'm with the people, not with the powerful," and mean it, forgetting that in the Republican Party, we believe that the "powerful" are not merely composed of the "people," but that they, through extraordinary selfishness run amok, actually help the people.

Now, what makes this problematic is that all of this has been simmering for decades now, and the various members of the Republican coalition are rather wondering why they bother with all the effort if nothing comes of it. This is further exacerbated by having a President of whom both sides can say bad and good things (again), and of having on the other side of the upcoming v a woman whom both sides detest enough to actually cause blood-vomiting; in other words, the stakes are highest just when everyone's patience is worn thinnest.

And that leads to the game-playing. There's a complex series of calculations at work here, for each faction, relative to each candidate. Each decision made in this particular game could yield disaster for the moving faction; for the non-moving faction; and for the Party as a whole.

Let's take the example that's received the most ink (and pixels): The social conservatives who have threatened to vote third-party rather than vote for Giuliani. Say they don't follow through, and vote for Giuliani:

(1) The Party/Giuliani might decide it doesn't need to even pay lip service to social conservatives if they'll simply shut up and vote when called to do so, regardless of the candidate's record (ample historical precedent exists for this in the Democrat Party);

(2) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives as the deciding vote in a close election;

(3) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives as irrelevant in a landslide election, and elect to stay with a socially moderate message to keep the landslide voters on-board;

(4) The Party/Giuliani may view social conservatives, to whom it/he believes there was a need to pander, as the reason for a loss in a close election/landslide, and so decides to dump those social conservatives, as they were never well-loved to start.

Implicit in this, of course, is how the other player -- let's say "the Party as a whole" -- reacts both to the action by the social conservatives, and how the election turns out -- and that all of this is taking place behind a double-blind. But let's continue, on the "sit out" option, to show what the social conservatives have in store:

(1) After a narrow win, the Party/Giuliani decides that they can't take any part of the coalition for granted again, and sets about wooing the disaffected.

(2) After a landslide win, the Party/Giuliani decides that they don't need the social conservatives any more, and the social conservatives spend the next twenty years in the political wilderness.

(3) After a loss of any kind, the Party/Giuliani decides that they can't take any part of the coalition for granted again, and sets about wooing the disaffected.

(4) After a loss of any kind, the Party/Giuliani decides that the Party's coalition structure needs to be totally revamped, and tosses the social conservatives out the door, forty years in the wilderness, etc.

The moving party -- the social conservatives -- not only doesn't know how their participation or non-participation will affect the election, nor how the rest of the Party will react, but the rest of the Party is clueless too.

The same thing might come to pass with the fiscal conservatives and Huckabee; just plug and chug and you can see the same kind of analysis. As an added bonus, both sets of players are playing for the highest set of stakes possible in a coalition: Perceived electoral significance. Take the Huckabee example: I'd submit that a true populist ticket could make a serious run at the Presidency. If successful, why would the fiscal conservatives matter? (As a son of Louisiana, let me go on the record and say if a true populist wins the Presidency, I'm moving to Poland.) On the other hand, maybe those fiscal conservatives, even if overrepresented on the internet, are a vital component of the coalition, and their absence means doom for the Party. The only way to know if you're gonna win at Russian roulette is to put the revolver to your forehead and pull the trigger.

All of this was to make a simple point: The fellow you're accusing of bad faith is not acting in bad faith; instead, he's playing a game maybe more complex than even he realizes, for stakes he considers worth it. More importantly, you are too. As we're going to need these people in downticket races, I'd respectfully submit we keep the "Hit the road" rhetoric to a bare minimum. We have a Wicked Witch to melt in a year, after all.

Running into the 1988 Presidential election, Bloom County -- for those of you who were even more children than I at the time, a left-leaning comic strip penned by, what else, an Austinite -- took to calling the two major party nominees the Wimp and the Shrimp. The joke -- with respect to one of only three one-term Presidents of the twentieth century -- took aim at the elder Bush's penchant for genteel, Rockefeller Republicanism; love of bipartisanship; and general image of softness, compared to the giant who came before him.

Little did we know that the truth of that image would come back to haunt us throughout the man's presidency, culminating (but hardly ending) in that great bipartisan moment in which President Bush (1) decided that everyone who'd read his lips scant years before had been suffering from mass dyslexia.

One of the great worries many of us had in 2000 -- aside from the fear that we'd soon have an android in charge of the nuclear codes, and that his alien masters would overrun us all -- was that the Wimp's wimpiness was congenital, and a dominant gene. This did not overly concern me, because, first, any idiot -- and George W. Bush is not an idiot -- could figure out what cost his father the Presidency; and, second, I watched the younger Bush absolutely annihilate that old crone Ann Richards, and not gently, either. Sure, he liked the bipartisan game, but he knew where the long knives were kept.

I maintain that I was right, but to a point; and the beginning of my error is the beginning of the explanation for the absolute fecklessness of the last two and a half years of President Bush's last term.

It is a commonplace analysis that the Bush Administration is actually a tale of two Presidencies: The first was staffed with Executive officers who could each have been President; remarkable for an attitude Hell-bent on establishing Republican dominance for a generation; characterized by a poorly communicated, but determined efforts to make absolutely certain that another September 11 never happened; and willing to pull out knives for use in impromptu surgery on the Democrats. The second term has been filled with Executive officers more notable for loyalty than competence; political missteps a-plenty; a squandered Congress; and even more sporadic attempts to fight, and marshal support for, a war that the Administration still holds vital. The difference, the common wisdom holds, is that the Bush administration (1) was too wounded by Katrina, (2) had lame-duck written on it in December 2004, (3) burned too much political capital on Harriet Miers and a badly prosecuted Iraq War, and/or (4) discharged too many good Executive officers for mere sycophants.

I say this is a mistaken analysis, if not in first premises, then certainly in its underlying understanding of the Bush Administration. I would submit that President Bush's administration has suffered from two, related, but not identical, problems.

First, although the left side of the political spectrum likes to imagine that President Bush and his administration are filled with relentless knife-fighters willing to cut any femoral to win, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that they're willing to play hardball on a tiny number of issues, and to give ground more or less everywhere else. While this might have been a viable governing strategy fifty years ago, the times have changed -- whether those times changed with Nixon, Reagan, or Clinton depends on your political perspective and your tendency to romanticize the past (and your party's involvement in it) -- and they have changed in such a way as to make bipartisanship on large issues more or less impossible. Because this Bush subscribes to his father's view of governance -- electioneering is for election time, governing is for everything else -- he has been wholly unprepared to deal with the world as it exists now. In other words, the single insight of the Clinton Administration worth noting for Republicans -- the need for a permanent campaign in today's media environment -- was and is not so much missed by this Administration as it is utterly repugnant to their way of doing things.

Think about it: Candidate Bush actually touched the third rail of Social Security reform. He suggested, let us be frank, privatization. He ran on it. He clearly wanted it. He talked about it. And come election time, he hammered on it. Then, when he finally had a Congress to work with; when he finally had his shot at ending the biggest boondoggle coming down the pike at us ... the term of art is "communications failure." Normal humans call it "silence." As a result, the Democrats -- then the minority, so for them, it's always campaign time -- campaigned against it. Republican Congresscritters, one of the latest evolved subphyla of invertebrates, naturally rolled over and played dead. In other words, the election campaign long over, Bush played soft, expected executive pronouncements (with the strength of a majority mandate behind him) to carry the day; the Democrats campaigned; and on the election of Which Social Security Option Wins, the Democrats won.

Any conservative -- any libertarian, any fusionist, any Republican -- with skin in the game has a similar tale to tell: A barnstorming, sincere Bush who charges out in front on a given issue, swinging for the fences come election time; followed by a quiet, almost passive Bush come governing time. Pick an issue; it's there.

This also goes a long way to explaining why the second term has seen a more withdrawn, less active President than the first term: Because there is no campaign coming. President Bush was out on the trail in 2002 -- making a critical difference there -- for a whole host of reasons, but undeniably to soften the terrain for 2004. In a development that I'm sure is still breaking a large number of moonbat hearts, there will be no Bush on the ticket in 2008; ergo, there is no need to campaign.

That silence -- that quiescence -- reflects the Bush family's somewhat patrician view of electoral and governing politics; and for that honorable, if somewhat (from today's perspective) daft reason, the Republican Party has one more weight on its back. (Fill in dozens of others as needed.)

Second, the related-but-not-identical problem is that candidate Bush made no secret of the fact that he openly disdained President Clinton's style of governance, which was, charitably, to publicly, loudly emote every time someone fell down and skinned his knee. Essentially, Bush said, you are wasting valuable, limited political capital; that capital must be hoarded for when you are swinging for the fences. If I may continue the baseball analogy -- and I may -- President Clinton's Administration was a story of constant political small ball: Here a hit, there a walk, oops, someone leaned into the pitch, pop fly, end of the inning. President Bush's administration is a story of putting the bat way above your shoulder, taking a lot of strikeouts looking, and when you get one clean over the middle or just a hair low and inside, swinging that bat for all you're worth.

I confess that even now I admire that approach to governance. That doesn't, however, eliminate its obvious flaws. In other words, you'd better damned well connect with one of those balls, preferably with the bases loaded, or you're gonna have a poem written about you and an out achieved by passing the ball over the plate three times.

Now, don't misunderstand: It seems beyond dispute that Bush -- candidate or President -- had a fundamental insight that Clinton -- adulterer or President -- lacked: If you keep wasting your time on small, ugly, inconsequential things, you'll never accomplish anything great. The story of 1993-2001 is nothing more than the story of a massive peace dividend unleashed as a result of the acts of 1981-1989, and a caretaker managing more or less nothing on his own, except a few things that fundamentally cheesed off his party's faithful, and and a handful of inconsequential things that enraged the faithful of his opponents. I say this not as a partisan, but as an honest observer: To what great accomplishment can William Jefferson Clinton point and say, I did that. Me. I wrested the direction of the country in the way I thought it should go, and for that, I am applauded, because I was right?

But behold the effect of playing an all-power lineup: A first term filled with landmark achievements, some awful, some great, some with a jury still trying to figure out who will be foreman; and a second term of strikeouts punctuated by a bare handful of home runs.

The fundamental insight that Candidate, and now President, Bush missed is this: Political capital, while assuredly not infinite, is not precisely finite either. It may be analogized to musculature: If you let it atrophy, you lose it; if you feed and use it, even minimally, you keep it. By failing to expend political capital on small things as well as great -- and there is a balance in this, to be sure -- the Bush administration is like the great warrior who felled his enemies with but a swing of his sword, and who has now gone to fat. He has lost his musculature because he so rarely uses it.

I would submit that in today's media environment, the only way to remain influential -- to retain political capital -- through two terms is to use what you have consistently, whether on offense or defense. Bush's failure to actually fire back at his opponents on a regular basis may or may not make him more noble, but it assuredly has left him enervated before them. Having been bludgeoned on social security reform, and lacking the quick musculature needed to fire back, this administration was gutted -- without basis in truth, but truth doesn't matter in politics or political perception -- by Katrina, and what came after. Lacking the will to constantly engage on the vital nature of the Iraq project, when the President elects to speak on it, he no longer commands a national audience, or even the opening clip on the evening news.

There is implicit in this the lurking suggestion that the modern media environment has made it impossible, or nearly so, to achieve a Presidency filled with great accomplishments; that 24/7 media and new media coverage has accomplished what a bloated bureaucracy could not, and has actually made it impossible for one man to stand successfully atop the Executive Branch. Perhaps this is true; perhaps not. That is something we will have to test with the next President, because the current one is -- sadly for those of us who remain fans of his -- pretty well done.