Republican Predictions From 2004

From Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard, November 22, 2004. He explains that the Republicans taking over in the 2004 elections was just the culmination of years of Republican progress, and definitely not some fleeting thing that could be lost right away:

KARL ROVE SAID LAST YEAR that the question of realignment—whether Republicans have at last become the majority party—would be decided by the election of 2004. And it has. Even by the cautious reckoning of Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, Republicans now have both an operational majority in Washington (control of the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives) and an ideological majority in the country (51 percent popular vote for a center-right president). They also control a majority of governorships, a plurality of state legislatures, and are at rough parity with Democrats in the number of state legislators. Rove says that under Bush a “rolling realignment” favoring Republicans continues, and he’s right. So Republican hegemony in America is now expected to last for years, maybe decades.

Listen to Walter Dean Burnham, professor emeritus at University of Texas at Austin, who is the nation’s leading theorist of realignment, the shift of political power from one party to another. The 2004 election, he says, “consolidates it all”—that is, it solidifies the trend that has favored Republicans over the past decade. To Burnham, it means there’s “a stable pattern” of Republican rule. “If Republicans keep playing the religious card along with the terrorism card, this could last a long time,” he says. Burnham, by the way, is neither a Republican nor a conservative.

Burnham goes on to explain that it would take a major catastrophe for the Republicans to lose this power that they had built up and finally achieved in the 2004 elections:

For Republicans to slip into minority status again, [Burnham] says, it would take a monumental party split like that in 1912 or “a colossal increase in the pain level” of Americans as happened with the Great Depression. Neither is likely.

That’s really a surprising thing to write, given that Bush had already been President for 4 years at this point. Didn’t he already see the pain level of Americans rising as they had to watch Bush destroy the country, day after day? Didn’t he expect that eventually Bush’s ineptitude would eventually come crashing down around the whole Republican party? Or at least consider it likely? I’m sure most people were hoping that would happen, since Bush was already well on his way by the 2004 elections.

Anyway, it’s just nice to look back on their feelings of safety and stability and realize how significantly Bush destroyed the Republicans’ chances in 2006 and 2008. I guess he was always hoping to be remembered in the history books, and now he surely will be. Just not in the way he was hoping. Guess he should have paid more attention in school, huh?