“People should be concerned — we’ve had a tough last year and a half or so,” said Glenn Bolger, a Republican strategist. “But if you go back in time to 1991, the Democrats had a lot of the same concerns, both about the candidates running and their possibility of winning. And it turned out pretty well for them.” ~The New York Times

That’s a nice pep talk, but as the new wisdom is shaping up it is telling us that this election will not be like any other cycle before it in important respects.  The lack of an incumbent President or Vice-President in the race is a huge difference, but then so is the protracted, unpopular Iraq war.  The former might theoretically help the Republicans escape the shadow of Bush, but the latter will continue to drag down the GOP barring some near-miraculous turnaround.  Where Bushian foreign policy triumphs fed into an image of a globe-trotting President indifferent to his countrymen in 1991-92 that somewhat counterintuitively worked to the incumbent’s disadvantage, Bushian foreign policy disasters have possibly irreparably damaged the Republican reputation for national security competence and will continue to have negative consequences for Republican candidates through the next several cycles.  Since every Republican candidate except for Ron Paul supports the Iraq war to one degree or another, and the major candidates all support it to the hilt, this bad reputation will translate into a liability for almost every prospective nominee.  Unlike Clinton or Tsongas in the ’92 cycle, all Republican candidates except for Ron Paul basically see nothing really amiss in how the GOP governed in the past on most things, or they certainly don’t make a point of mentioning it very much.  Rather than adapting to the landscape and innovating in their message to respond to new realities, most of the Republican candidates for ’08 are reiterating messages, particularly on foreign policy, that have no resonance with the general electorate. 

Except for Ron Paul, that is.  He has not had to chang or adapt, but has simply retained the same constitutionalist principles he has always had, which naturally led him to oppose the war before it became a popular thing to do.  Unlike some, he has not had to become a “convert” on questions of life, nor did he, a practicing physician, need to wait until he was in his fifties to discover the ethical and moral implications of abortion, but at the same time he manages to espouse a consistent constitutionalist view of the appropriate remedy to legalised abortion.  Unlike a third of the Republican field, he opposes illegal immigration and all forms of amnesty.  Logically, Republicans unsatisfied with the rest of the field and the state of their party should rally behind him en masse.  Who knows?  They say that this is supposedly the most open year in presidential politics in our lifetime. 

1992 comparisons cannot be encouraging for Republicans, because they are not acting in 2007 as the Democrats acted in 1991.  How did the Democrats respond to the environment of 1991?  Most of the prominent, well-known Democratic leaders bowed out, assuming that the ’92 election was almost automatically Bush’s to be had.  Back in the days of stratospheric, post-Gulf War Bush approval numbers, that seemed like the wise move.  As it turned out, a politically savvy, unknown governor was able to exploit populist discontent and the unusual entrance of a major third party challenge, but this was only possible because the opposition party had not saddled itself with an anointed establishment candidate who could be easily pigeonholed as Dukakis had been. 

None of that is happening this time around, because there is no presumptive favourite or incumbent to run against.  To the extent that there are actually any prominent Republican leaders, they are in the race.  The GOP establishment is trying to put a stranglehold on the process, making sure that only those figures most complicit in the Bush Era, whether ideologically or personally, are able to get the nomination.  This is so phenomenally stupid that it is almost too stupid even for the Stupid Party, but this is what they are doing.  They are playing this election as if it were the anointing of a nominee in 1988 when the GOP had most advantages, when it is nothing like that election. 

The frequent comparisons with 1928 are also somewhat misleading, since Hoover inherited the goodwill and popularity of Coolidge, even though he was not the Vice-President of the administration.  1920 is the most apt comparison, and in that year the administration’s party was shellacked in a historic repudiation of its war, domestic tyranny and taxation.  Like Wilson in so many things (his tiresome temperament, his self-righteous arrogance and his idealistic foreign polict nonsense), Bush has probably similarly destroyed his party’s fortunes for a decade.  Perversely, the departing administration’s party may benefit from the continuation of the war through the election, which was something that the Democrats did not have working in their favour in 1920.  Then again, the public may have already passed its point of having lost all patience with the Iraq war.