TPM Reader JM on Bush’s fall. And no, JM is not “Josh Marshall”, no internal sock-puppetry here …
I’m glad someone pointed out that Bush’s downward trend started significantly before Katrina last year. It’s my belief that the stunning unpopularity of Bush’s Social Security scheme was what really instigated his fall, by showing just how ineffective, tone-deaf and weak he could be. (Of course Iraq was rapidly doing the same thing.)
Before the Social Security debacle, Bush had an air of inevitibility about him. All of his major proposals had passed Congress. Yet the privatization push showed him giving an ardent sales job for something no one wanted – a classic Republican idea that was so bad the Republican Congress never got to first base in enacting it. But they wasted enough time on it that Bush and the Congress never accomplished anything this term. It all came to a head during the summer recess of ’05, before Katrina. Blood was in the water.
Katrina ensured Bush’s destruction. But when it hit, his politcal levy was already compromised.
Obviously, I have something of an attachment to this issue. But I think it’s an greatly underestimated factor in what happened over the last two years. Also, the DeLay Rule. This operates on many levels. And the degree to which it put the public on notice of how out-of-touch and how much of an extremist Bush was was a very big deal. But it also showed that Bush could be beaten and beaten badly on a proposal he put all of his resources behind. A lot of Bush’s strength by early 2005 was based on the fact that he’d put his mind to pushing through a series of not-very-popular proposals that he really shouldn’t have been able to get through. But he did. That created a vicious (or virtuous, depending on your viewpoint) cycle in which he was able to maintain greater and greater degrees of party loyalty on the Hill. Party loyalty allowed him to push stuff through successfully. And his repeated successes enabled greater and greater levels of party loyalty. Both fed on each other.
All political power is unitary. You don’t lose it in one sphere and not lose it in another. In addition to what it showed the public, the Social Security debacle showed Bush’s fellow Republicans that he was beatable (and thus that he couldn’t protect them) and the press that he was a loser. The Social Security battle showed everyone that Bush wasn’t as strong or as tough as he looked.
