George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and the “New” American Party System

While he has clearly learned from the example set by Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and his political allies have employed new partisan practices and institutions that have substantially advanced the development of a “new” party system. Nonetheless, Bush’s reliance on the politics of administration and his personalization of party leadership may hinder the full emergence of a party system that can make politics meaningful to ordinary citizens and impose constraints on presidential aggrandizement.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, Bush embraced ideas that were designed to put a conservative stamp on, if not reinforce, some of the principal programs of the welfare state. In language that departed dramatically from Reagan’s ideological jeremiads against the modern state, candidate Bush declared during a televised debate that

I can get something positive done on behalf of the people. That’s what the question in this campaign is about. It’s not only what’s your philosophy and what’s your position on issues, but can you get things done? And I believe I can (quoted in Mucciaroni and Quirk 2004:158).”

Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” claimed to wed traditional Republican principles of individual responsibility, private enterprise, and resistance to government spending, taxes, and regulation with deep compassion for the disadvantaged (Mucciaroni and Quirk 2004:158). His call for substantial tax cuts appealed to the right’s hostility to government. But the presidential candidate also acknowledged that “The invisible hand works many miracles…it cannot touch the human heart….We are a nation of rugged individuals. But we are also the country of the second chance—tied together by bonds of friendship and community and solidarity (Bush 1999).”

In part, the moral commitment Bush envisioned would be served by empowering nonprofit institutions that worked outside government. For example, he proposed changes in federal and state regulations that would allow private “faith-based” charitable organizations to play a larger role in providing government social services to the poor. The national government would have an important role in sustaining moral values as well. As Michael Gerson, Bush’s principal speech writer, argued, the president’s rhetoric did not try to “split the difference between liberalism and conservatism.” Rather, Bush’s speeches sought to convey how “activist government could be used for conservative ends” (Personal Interview with Michael Gerson, November 15, 2001). The Reagan presidency had also made use of national administrative power; but the Bush administration was prepared to take big government conservatism much further. Although Reagan and his conservative allies once talked of eliminating the Department of Education, Bush proposed to make the nation’s public schools more accountable to the department by linking federal aid to national standards of learning. Ultimately, Bush proposed to buttress conservative religious values with affirmative government efforts to help the poor, promote marriage, and ensure that “every child will be educated” (Personal Interview with Karl Rove, November 15, 2001; Bush 1999a).

Thus, like his predecessor, Bill Clinton, candidate Bush sought to forge a “third way,” signifying the modern presidency’s dominant but uneasy place in contemporary American politics. The disjuncture between the bitter partisanship within the Capitol and the weakening of partisan affiliation outside of it won Clinton—along with his skill in combining doctrines— a certain following in the country. At its best, Clinton’s third way sought consensus for a limited but energetic national government. All too often, however, this approach degenerated into a politics of expediency that substituted polls and focus groups for leadership (Skowronek 1997:447-464). Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” seemed to have the same strengths and weakness as Clinton’s “new covenant.” Indeed, Bush’s campaign speeches bore a striking resemblance to Clinton’s rhetoric during the 1992 and 1996 elections. And the Bush administration programs that embodied these values—especially his reform proposals for education, social services, and welfare—invoked many of the ideas incubated at the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a centrist political group, that gave rise to Clinton’s policy initiatives(Milkis 2005; Mucciaroni and Quirk 2004:159).

Important differences marked Bush’s and Clinton’s stance toward partisanship, however. Clinton never made clear how his third way politics would serve the core principles of the Democratic Party; in fact, he and the DLC were highly ambivalent, if not avowedly hostile, to partisanship. But Bush embraced “compassionate conservatism” as a doctrine that he and his close advisors hoped would strengthen the appeal of the Republican Party. Bush’s rhetoric and policy proposals, his top political strategist, Karl Rove, claimed, were a deliberate attempt to play to conservative values without being reflexively antigovernment (Personal Interview with Karl Rove, November 15, 2001). From the start, in fact, the Bush White House sought to exploit the power and independence of the modern presidency to build an enduring Republican majority, a task that required redressing Reagan’s “blind spot” to the important role government had come to play in people’s lives. As Washington Post reporter Dan Balz recollects from his conversations with Rove, Bush and his strategists believed that “compassionate conservatism” would help the president tack among various Republican constituencies while reaching out to moderate voters, simultaneously mobilizing the party’s base and expanding its coalition (PBS Frontline Interview with Dan Balz).


Strengthening the Party Organization
Bush’s devotion to party development has outstripped that of Reagan, and his actions demonstrate the enormous potential of the presidency as an instrument of party-building. Bush has made unprecedented efforts to recruit Republican candidates , raise campaign funds for the Republican National Committee, promote the registration of new Republican voters, rejuvenate the party leadership, and develop national grassroots organizing capacity. Due in part to Bush’s leadership, the Republican Party has entered a period of strength it has not enjoyed since the early 1920s.

The depth of the president’s commitment to building his party was first made evident during the 2002 midterm election campaign. Convinced by Vermont Senator James Jefford’s defection from the Republican Caucus (which gave control of the Senate to Democrats in May 2001) that his best chance to lead Congress was to regain control of the Senate, Bush threw himself into the campaign earlier and more energetically than any president in history.

In seeking a Republican Senate, Bush faced a daunting challenge, however: the average loss for the president’s party in post–World War II midterm elections was four Senate seats. Even worse from the Republicans’ standpoint, their party was more “exposed” in 2002 than the Democrats: twenty Republican seats were at stake in the election, compared with fourteen Democratic seats. In addition, the president’s party had not taken control of the Senate away from the other party in a midterm election since 1882.

Nonetheless, following Rove’s advice, Bush decided well in advance of the elections to become actively involved in the campaign for a Republican majority in Congress. The White House involved itself deeply in the cultivation of Republican candidates for national office, often intervening in state party politics to do so (PBS Frontline interview with Ken Mehlman). As Andrew Busch (2005:51) notes, “even before September 11, Bush began recruiting strong candidates and clearing the primary fields for key challenges and open seats. These candidates included Elizabeth Dole in North Carolina, Norm Coleman in Minnesota, Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, and John Thune in South Dakota.”

Like Bush’s rhetoric, the White House’s recruitment of candidates was pragmatic. In recruiting candidates, the White House focused on finding Republicans with the strongest chances of winning office: as White House Political Director Ken Mehlman described, “there's not a litmus test, not at all [in the administration’s candidate recruitment efforts]. I think that the candidates that we were looking for were the candidates that were most likely to win in their states (PBS Frontline Interview with Ken Mehlman).”

Indeed, Bush and Rove recruited and supported the primary campaigns of many moderates whom militant conservatives such as Steven Moore, the president of the Club for Growth, scorned as unwanted “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only).¹³

During the 2002 campaign, Bush revealed an enthusiasm for his partisan responsibilities that far surpassed Reagan’s efforts. Headlining 70 Republican fundraisers, Bush raised between $140-$150 million dollars for Republican candidates, “[breaking] the previous record for presidential fundraising set by Bill Clinton, who brought in $50 million in his first midterm year of 1994 and $105 million in 2000 (Busch 2005:51).” Bush’s fundraising efforts paid substantial dividends for Republican candidates. As Busch (2005:51) concludes, the president’s fundraising efforts placed the Republican National Committee at a distinct advantage against its Democratic counterpart as the election neared: “because of Bush’s fundraising success, the Republican National Committee had $30 million on hand at the beginning of October to only $5 million for the Democrats.”

Moreover, the president made an unparalleled effort to lend the popularity he enjoyed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks to his congressional partisans, “mak[ing] 108 campaign stops on behalf of 26 House candidates and 20 candidates for the Senate (Herrnson and Morris, n.d., 2).” In the final 5 days before the election, the president traveled 10,000 miles in a whirlwind tour across 15 states and 17 cities to stump for Republican candidates, an unprecedented display of presidential campaigning in an off-year election (Beachler 2004). Bush concentrated his campaign visits in the most competitive races, with the hope that his prestige might make the difference for marginal Republican candidates (Herrnson and Morris, n.d. 12-13; Keele, Fogarty, and Stimson, n.d. 8).¹⁴ Several of these appearances were in states where the Republican candidate was trailing and where, if the Democrat had won, Bush risked being blamed for the defeat.

The results of the election seemed to vindicate Bush’s decision to campaign vigorously on behalf of his fellow partisans. The Republicans gained two seats in the Senate, transforming them from minority to majority status, and increased their majority in the House of Representatives. Some analysts argue that Bush’s campaign stops had a significant and positive effect on the electoral prospects of Republican congressional candidates that were visited (see, especially, Herrnson and Morris (n.d.)). The direct evidence for Bush’s positive influence is not unassailable (see, for example, the contrary findings of Keele, Fogarty, and Stimson, n.d.). Still, Bush’s vigorous campaigning went far to transform the election into a referendum on his presidency, which the public, in the immediate aftermath of September 11, rated very highly. This referendum appeared to benefit Republican candidates: an election eve poll indicated that 50 percent of the voters were basing their decision on their opinion of the president, many more than the 34 percent who had done so in 1990 or the 37 percent who had done so in 1998. Of these 50 percent, 31 percent were pro-Bush and only 19 percent opposed him (Milkis 2005).¹⁵

Political analysts and public officials were quick to describe the historic nature of the Republican victory and to credit Bush as the most successful party-building president since Franklin Roosevelt (Cook 2003). Not only did the 2002 elections mark the first time in more than a century that the president’s party had regained control of the Senate at midterm, it also represented the first time since FDR that a president saw his party gain seats in both houses of Congress in a first-term midterm election. The GOP also emerged from the elections with more state legislative seats than the Democrats for the first time in half a century; and even though the number of Republican governors declined from 29 to 27 during Bush’s first term, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s victory in the 2003 California recall election gave the Republican Party control of the governorships of the four most populous states: California, Texas, New York, and Florida.

Bush could not take all the credit for the Republican gains. As we have discussed above, since the late-1970s the Republican Party had been developing into a formidable national organization, in which the Republican National Committee, rather than state and local organizations, became the principal agent of party building activities. This top down approach to party building appeared to many critics as too centralized and too dependent on television advertising to perform the parties’ traditional role of mobilizing voters and popular support. Significantly, the Bush White House made a major effort to redress this shortcoming of the national Republican party. Believing that they were out organized “on the ground” by Democrats in the 2000 election, Bush and his political advisors enlisted the support of the RNC in putting together an impressive grass roots mobilizing strategy in the midterm elections (Personal Interview with Terry Nelson, August 19, 2005; Franke-Ruta and Meyerson 2004; Personal Interview with Matthew Dowd, July 8, 2004). Whereas Democrats since the New Deal had relied on auxiliary party organizations like labor unions to get out the vote, the GOP created a national partisan organization to mobilize support. Depending on volunteers, albeit closely monitored ones, and face-to-face appeals in the states and localities, the Republicans greatly strengthened the national Republican machine, preparing the groundwork for an even more ambitious national grass roots campaign during the 2004 elections (Personal Interview with Matthew Dowd, July 8, 2004; Bai 2004).

The Republicans’ grassroots efforts during the 2002 election campaign were central to their success at the polls (Jacobson 2003:15). These efforts were on full display in a critical, highly competitive contest in Georgia, where an emphasis on direct, person-to-person contact and the organization of local campaign volunteers helped Republican challengers defeat freshman Democratic Senator Max Cleland and incumbent Democratic governor Roy Barnes (Adams 2002a; Jalonick 2002; Cook 2002). In key races across the country the GOP grassroots organization was particularly effective in helping to boost turnout of Republican loyalists over that of Democrats (Jacobson 2003:15; Cook 2002).

The president’s blitzkrieg in the final days of the campaign trumpeted his proposal for a new Department of Homeland Security, attacking Democratic Senators who had stalled legislation to create a new department. Although both parties supported a homeland security department in principle, congressional Democrats had resisted the Bush administration’s insistence that the president be vested with power to suspend collective bargaining rules for departmental employees. Arguing that every president since John F. Kennedy had been granted the authority to override union rights when national security was at stake, Bush charged that the Democrats were putting “special interests” ahead of the interests of the American people. That charge, reinforced by negative television ads, proved especially important in defeating incumbent Democratic senators in Georgia and Missouri. Democrats were especially incensed by Bush’s partisan assault on the Georgia incumbent Cleland, a Vietnam War hero, for being soft on security issues; however, the Senate seat ultimately went to Representative Saxby Chambliss, who was recruited by the White House. Chambliss’ victory, along with Sonny Perdue’s seizure of the Georgia statehouse for Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction, contributed mightily to the perception that Bush had scored a major partisan triumph (Halbfinger 2002). In a post-election “lame duck” session of Congress, the Democrats relented, joining with Republicans to enact legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security and granting Bush authority to establish flexible work rules for the new department’s employees (Mintz 2002).

Unlike Ronald Reagan’s efforts on behalf of Republican in 1986, therefore, Bush’s intervention in the 2002 congressional elections employed rhetoric and tactics dedicated to a partisan victory. Following the election, Bush continued to embrace his responsibility as party leader. During his first term, Bush broke Reagan’s record for attracting first-time contributors to the Republican Party: under Reagan, 853,595 people donated to the Republican Party for the first time; by the time Bush stood for reelection, he had already attracted more than one million new donors to the GOP. The Bush White House also worked assiduously to expand the Republicans’ political base. When Ed Gillespie became Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Karl Rove told him that his most important job should be to "close the gap between registered Republicans and registered Democrats.” During Gillespie’s tenure as chairman, the RNC focused on registering new Republicans, increasing the party rolls by 3.4 million voters (PBS Frontline Interview with Ed Gillespie).

Bush entered the 2004 presidential campaign hoping to further strengthen the party’s majorities in the House and Senate and increase the number of Republican governorships. According to Kevin Madden, spokesman for the campaign, “the President wanted to avoid a lonely victory – the entire campaign was built on the premise of bringing in a vast number of Republicans at all levels of government” (Personal Interview with Kevin Madden, July 5, 2005). Eschewing the “soft focus” issues that dominated Reagan’s re-election campaign, the Bush White House once again sought to make the president’s personal leadership a partisan issue. Campaign strategists calculated that Bush’s decisive leadership in pursuit of the War on Terrorism, rendered so controversial by the invasion of Iraq, played to Americans’ anxieties about both economic and homeland security. The president’s strong leadership, his campaign strategist Matthew Dowd argued, was championed not to elevate Bush as a Commander In Chief who stood apart from partisan conflict, but to highlight the Republicans’ advantage over Democrats on matters of national security. Trumpeting Republican strength and Democratic equivocation, symbolized by the Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s tendency to change positions (to “flip-flop”), tEschewing th sores he Bush-Cheney campaign sought to create a “politics of identification” between the president and Republican office-seekers at the state and local levels (Personal interview with Matthew Dowd, July 20, 2005). Just as Republican congressional candidates benefited from the president’s popularity during the 2002 midterm election, so too would Republican office-seekers during the 2004 campaign. At the same time, local surrogates (rather than national party officials) were deployed to speak on the president’s behalf. As a result, Madden argues, the president’s own campaign gained from the credibility bestowed by local party leaders (Personal interview with Kevin Madden, July 5, 2005).

Similarly, the extraordinary Bush-Cheney get out the vote efforts were highly partisan. The White House built on the success of its “ground war” in 2002 to construct a grassroots organization for the 2004 presidential election campaign that would help turn out voters who would vote Republican across the board, thereby benefiting Republican congressional and state candidates as well as the president. Rather than merely focusing on “swing voters” who could be persuaded to vote for the president for reasons particular to Bush’s candidacy, the grassroots organization, in coordination with the Republican party committees, emphasized reaching and turning out “unrealiable voters” or, as some strategists called them, “lazy Republicans,” who were predisposed to vote for Republicans at all levels but who were unreliable in their voting habits (Magelby, Monson, and Patterson 2005:31; Personal interview with Matthew Dowd, July 20, 2005; Personal interview with Terry Nelson, August 19, 2005). As we discuss below, the grassroots organization was extremely successful in locating, targeting, and mobilizing latent Republicans.

Following his successful reelection, Bush moved to memorialize the success achieved by the Bush-Cheney campaign. When RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie announced that he was stepping down, Bush nominated his campaign chairman and the architect of his successful grassroots campaign, Ken Mehlman, for the position. According to Mehlman, Bush’s decision indicated the president’s desire to institutionalize Republican’s party-building successes during his presidency: "President Bush's decision shows that there is a four-year effort to make sure whoever the '08 nominee is has a party that is every bit as unified, every bit as effective and every bit as strong as the Bush campaign was in '04 (quoted in Hadfield 2005).” A number of other prominent Bush-Cheney ’04 operatives, including political director Terry Nelson, deputy campaign manager Kelley McCullough, and e-campaign director Michael Turk, followed Mehlman into the RNC, assuming roughly parallel positions within the Party apparatus (Hadfield 2005).

The migration of critical Bush-Cheney operatives into the RNC may have positive consequences for the future prospects of the Republican Party organization and the relationship between the president and the parties. First of all, their presence at the RNC should further strengthen the ties between the party and the president, perhaps compensating somewhat for the distance imposed between the two institutions by the rise of the modern presidency. In addition, the infiltration of high-level Bush-Cheney operatives into the RNC may facilitate the perpetuation of the national Republican “machine”, thereby fostering greater linkages between the public, the parties, and the president and encouraging greater public participation in the political process. Indeed, upon assuming office, Mehlman indicated his intention to continue to build the grassroots organization that he had developed for the presidential campaign (Hadfield 2005).

Strengthening the Republican Coalition

Bush benefited substantially from the legacy of coalition-building bequeathed by Ronald Reagan. By the time Bush entered office, the groups that Reagan had reached out to with such success (such as big business, tax cut advocates, and evangelicals/social conservatives) had become mainstream Republican constituencies (Peterson 2004:243). As President, Bush followed many of Reagan’s coalition-building strategies, making systematic efforts to weaken his opponents and consolidate the support of key constituencies. Just as Bush benefited from and further strengthened Reagan’s close ties to business, so he continued his predecessor’s efforts to weaken public and private labor unions. Bush sought to attack public unions by increasing privatization of government services and by opening up more government sectors to competitive bidding from private contractors (Peterson 2004; Aberbach 2004). Furthermore, Bush’s insistence on the power to suspend the collective bargaining rights of employees in the Department of Homeland Security was widely perceived as an attack on the power of federal employee unions (Aberbach 2004; Warshaw 2004).

Bush could not simply follow in Reagan’s footsteps, however. The ambition to redefine Republican conservatism and achieve an enduring Republican realignment evident in Bush’s rhetoric entailed a difficult balancing act between partisanship and bipartisan cooperation.

With his major policy initiatives, therefore, the president sought to tack between established Republican constituencies and potential Republican voters. In the beginning of his presidency, Bush chose to identify with his party’s strong ideological leaders in Congress, hoping to solidify his base support before reaching out to independent voters. The president persuaded Congress to enact the leading conservative plank in his 2000 platform, a ten-year, $1.5 trillion tax cut. He also placed a strong emphasis on traditional conservative issues such as regulatory relief, energy production, and missile defense. This strategy risked estranging moderate Republicans; indeed, it ultimately cost Republicans control of the Senate when Vermont Senator James Jeffords transferred his allegiance to the Democratic caucus in May 2001. Bush’s conservative partisanship, following such a highly contested election, also risked alienating public opinion, which considered cutting taxes a lower priority than attending to longstanding social issues such as education and health care (Hacker and Pierson 2005: 39; Mucciaroni and Quirk 2004:165).

George W. Bush is wagering his entire presidency on his tax plan, because he understands that tax cutting is the one major issue that energizes all Republicans and can hold together his Center-Right coalition. The modern Republican Party is a coalition of groups and individuals united by a single idea. They want to be left alone, whether they are taxpayers, property owners, home schoolers, or gun owners. Issues that energize crucial parts of the coalition bore or trouble others. But there is no faction or tendency in the Republican Party and the conservative movement that does not support a tax cut (Norquist 2001: emphasis added; Interview with Grover Norquist, August 3, 2004).

Bush’s forceful efforts in Congress to achieve a large tax cut, even in the face of questions surrounding their affordability, the strength of public support, and the support of moderate Republicans and Democrats, also reflected his desire to clearly distinguish his own presidency from that of his father, who paid so dearly for breaking the “No new taxes” pledge that he made during the 1988 presidential campaign (Mucciaroni and Quirk 2004:165). Although they quibbled with some of the details of the initial package of cuts in 2001, Republican groups were, for the most part, ecstatic (Moore 2001). Although the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform expressed some discomfort at Bush’s embrace of “big government” in his support for education and Medicare reform, there is little doubt that the tax cuts strengthened the support of these organizations (Personal interview with Grover Norquist, August 3, 2004; Personal interview with Stephen Moore, July 24, 2004).

Unlike Reagan, however, the Bush White House made self-conscious efforts to break from Republican orthodoxy to attract additional support. Stung by Jeffords’ defection and the loss of the Senate to the Democrats, Bush sought to reach out to moderate voters with initiatives that impinged on issues traditionally “owned” by Democrats. Bush strayed from conservatives’ visceral dislike of government not only in his commitment to faith-based initiatives and education reform, but also in his support for adding a prescription drug program to Medicare. Nonetheless, the Bush White House’s pragmatism was allied to partisan calculation, to the gamble that political capital could be gained by combining a commitment to expanded benefits with provisions that would set the Medicare program on the road to privatization (Personal Interview with Grover Norquist, August 3, 2004; Skocpol 2004). Although these initiatives frustrated more libertarian conservatives (Personal interview with Bruce Bartlett, National Center for Policy Analysis, June 2004; Personal interview with Stephen Moore, Club for Growth, June 2004), support among “movement conservatives,” especially the Christian Right, which staunchly supported Bush’s faith based initiatives and the restriction he imposed on stem cell research, remained very strong.

The President’s attention shifted dramatically away from domestic policy when the United States was struck by terrorists of the al Qaeda network on September 11, 2001. In the short term, the war on terrorism strengthened the modern presidency and greatly tempered the polarized partisanship that had plagued it during the previous three decades. To the Democrats chagrin,

however, bipartisan congressional support for an aggressive response to the 9-11 tragedy largely translated into mass support for the president (and Republicans) at the polls. As discussed above, congressional Republicans benefited tremendously from public confidence in the president’s management of the War on Terrorism in the 2002 midterm elections. The 2004 presidential election also seemed to testify to the enhanced strength of the Republican coalition during Bush’s management of the War on Terrorism. Although the results of the 2004 election indicated that the divisions between Republicans and Democrats appeared to have deepened and become more widespread since 2000, the rough parity between the parties had clearly given way to a small but decisive Republican edge. The conventional wisdom after the election claimed that moral values, especially as they applied to the gay marriage controversy, tipped the election to Bush and the Republican Party. But close analysis reveals that the war on terrorism made more of a difference. The Rasmussen Poll, which proved to be the most accurate survey throughout the election season, showed that the most important issue to voters was “national security,” not “cultural” values. In the end 51% of the voters said they trusted Bush more than Kerry to handle the War on Terror – not surprisingly, Bush received 51% of the popular vote (Rasmussen 2004, see also Freedman 2004).

In truth, Bush’s foreign policy played a critical part in confirming social conservatives’ support for Bush and the Republican Party. As Peterson (2004:252) argues, “the administration and social conservatives have been particularly unified when working in concert on foreign policy issues, including blocking funding for international family-planning programs and supporting the hard-line stance of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.” A Pew report (Green 2004:34) also demonstrates that evangelicals have responded enthusiastically to the president’s doctrine of preemptive war, with more than 70 percent of evangelicals supporting preemption (compared with 40 percent of atheists and agnostics). Evangelicals clearly perceive that they are playing a much more important role in the formulation of policy under the Bush administration. According to Reverand Richard Cizik, head of the National Association of Evangelicals, “We [evangelicals] haven’t had this kind of success on the international front ever before that we’re having today (quoted in Stockman 2004).” Writing in the National Journal, Alexis Simendinger, an associate at the Hudson Institute, concurred, concluding that “the influence of the religious right has never been more robust on foreign policy” (Simendinger 2001).

Rove interpreted the tilt toward Bush and the Republicans following the 2004 elections as another critical advance in the “rolling realignment” that since the 1980s had been slowly but surely establishing the GOP as a governing majority. The changes in southern politics born of the civil rights revolution, which seemed to come to full fruition by the end of Bush’s first term, appeared to support this interpretation. The 2004 election dramatically reinforced the trend of southern realignment: Bush won every southern state, dominating so completely that he carried nearly 85 percent of all the counties across the region—and more than 90 percent of the counties where whites form a majority of the population. Moreover, Bush’s support during the 2002 and 2004 campaigns helped Republicans stretch their southern advantage in both the House and Senate. The 2004 election thus appeared to cap a partisan realignment in the South that may signal the full development of a national party system and the emergence of an enduring Republican majority (Brownstein 2004).

As we have suggested, the Reagan presidency was concerned with strengthening the party at the grass roots, but its project to revitalize state and local party organizations was victimized by the White House’s emphasis on executive politics and administration. In contrast, the Bush White House has been consistently occupied with expanding and mobilizing the Republican base, a project that came to fruition in the 2004 presidential election campaign. The White House set out to construct the largest and most elaborate grassroots campaign in history; should this effort become part of the regular GOP organization, the notion of a national Republican machine that branches out effectively beyond the Beltway might become a reality.

The Republican ground war in 2004 grew out of the deep disappointment Bush and the Republican Party felt with the national campaign’s performance in the 2000 election. The campaign’s “underperformance” at the polls, and the widespread perception that the 2004 election would be extremely close, encouraged Bush campaign strategists (chief strategist Karl Rove, campaign strategist Matthew Dowd, and campaign chairman Ken Mehlman) to reconsider their line of attack for the 2004 campaign (Personal interview with Matthew Dowd, July 2004; Magelby, Monson, and Patterson 2005:9). Although the 2004 campaign would make heavy use of a traditional media strategy, Bush-Cheney officials hoped to develop mechanisms that would allow the campaign to mobilize greater numbers of sympathetic voters on election day (Drew 2004; Personal interview with Matthew Dowd, July 8, 2004).

The Bush White House and Republican operatives created a “72 Hour Task Force” in mid-2001 to study how best to mobilize Republican voters (Personal interview with Christine Iverson, July 7, 2004; Personal interview with Mark Wallace, July 20, 2005). During the gubernatorial elections of 2001 and the congressional elections of 2002, the Task Force experimented with a variety of strategies for mobilizing voters at the local level (Franke-Ruta and Meyerson 2004; Personal interviews with Matthew Dowd, July 9 and July 16, 2004; Personal interview with Christine Iverson, July 7, 2004; Magelby, Monson, and Patterson 2005:9). These experiments provided considerable evidence that person-to-person contact resulted in higher turnout rates (Franke-Ruta and Meyerson 2004).¹⁶ In light of these findings, Bush/Cheney strategists decided to develop an elaborate grassroots organization for the 2004 campaign, which would emphasize face-to-face interaction between locally-based campaign volunteers and targeted publics (Personal interview with Matthew Dowd, July 16, 2004; Personal interview with Christine Iverson, July 7, 2004).

Nearly all of the grassroots resources were concentrated in the 16 “battleground states” (personal communication with Matthew Dowd, August 2005; Personal Interview with Terry Nelson, August 19, 2005). The grassroots organization, developed by Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign manager Ken Mehlman and implemented by campaign political director Terry Nelson, was constructed as a multiple-level hierarchy. The central point of coordination and organization was the Bush-Cheney headquarters in Arlington, Virginia; regional-level coordinators, who were paid campaign officials, oversaw grassroots operations across numerous states; state-level coordinators, also campaign officials, were responsible for coordinating state-wide activities; beneath them served county, city, and even precinct-level volunteers. The campaign recruited volunteers not only though the professional staff on the ground but also through its website, thus making it possible for the Bush-Cheney headquarters to develop a personal line of communication with campaign workers through the use of email (Personal interview with Patrick Ruffini, July 6, 2005).

Campaign volunteers (primarily in the counties, cities, and precincts) were charged with responsibilities for reaching specific goals laid out by the Bush-Cheney headquarters: recruiting a certain number of additional volunteers, organizing rallies or campaign events, writing a certain number of letters to the editor, registering a given number of voters, or canvassing a particular neighborhood (Bai 2004). To maximize the effectiveness of contact between campaign volunteers and groups targeted for mobilization, the campaign sought to “target” appeals to particular Republican constituencies. Using sophisticated analyses of consumer databases and voter files assembled by the Republican National Committee, the campaign and the party identified each individual voter as a particular “type” (or several “types”; for example, hunters, veterans, NASCAR enthusiasts, and so forth). Volunteers were encouraged to interact with voters who shared their interests and concerns, and appeals were constructed to highlight these areas of shared interest and the president’s position on them. Campaign strategists believed that this “micro-targeting” greatly enhanced the effectiveness of their grassroots efforts (Personal Interview with Terry Nelson, August 19, 2005).

The Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign devoted the bulk of its resources to traditional, high-tech campaigning – indeed, it conducted the most expensive media campaign in history. But the tightly disciplined grassroots organization was closely coordinated with the media campaign in an effort to maximize the effectiveness of both. The campaign believed that the grassroots organization would disseminate the campaign’s major media themes – strong leadership, the War on Terrorism, Homeland Security -- increasing their influence (Bai 2004). At the same time, with the help of the “home grown” Bush-Cheney professionals on the ground, the campaign calibrated its media messages to mobilize volunteer support. As Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Kevin Madden explained, “communications and grassroots mobilizing were fused together in a way that mobilized supporters. Each was critical to the other – we couldn’t have a strong communications strategy without grassroots to disseminate it, and couldn’t have a strong grassroots without a strong message that resonated with people” (Interview with Kevin Madden, July 2005).

Democrats too mounted impressive “ground wars,” but the Republican grassroots effort differed from that of the Democrats in crucial ways. While Democrats allowed auxiliary organizations – the so-called 527 groups -- such as Americans Coming Together (ACT) and MoveOn to conduct the bulk of their grassroots efforts, Republicans kept their grassroots organization in-house, creating what was, effectively, a national Republican political “machine.”¹⁸ In their detailed analysis of the parties’ grassroots efforts in the critical battleground state of Florida, Crew, Fine and MacManus (2005:72) noted that

In meeting GOTV [Get Out the Vote] goals, party and outside 527 group resources were combined, but in somewhat different ways. Democratic Party efforts were heavily reinforced by a loosely coordinated coalition of external groups who directed aggressive outreach activities to a wide range of potential voters. Indeed, such was their visibility that casual observers might easily have concluded that it was these groups who were conducting the party’s GOTV campaign. The Republican Party, on the other hand, clearly controlled voter contact efforts and was supported by allied groups who focused primarily on their own memberships (emphasis added).

Mockabee, Margolis, Brooks, Farmer, and Green (2005: 145) reach similar conclusions about the parties’ respective grassroots organizations in their detailed case study of Ohio (see also Atkeson, Carrillo, and Walker 2005 for a similar analysis of New Mexico).

Republicans’ decision to keep their grassroots campaign apparatus within the party and the campaign organization indicated a considerable commitment to building the party’s grassroots capabilities. In contrast, Democrats’ failure to mobilize grassroots supporters within the party seemed to signal a lack of interest in strengthening the party’s connections with the public. Simon Rosenberg, President of the New Democratic Network, argued after Senator John Kerry’s defeat in the presidential election that the party’s failure to tend to the grassroots was a terrible tactical mistake that weakened the party’s ability to compete with Republicans during the campaign (Personal interview with Simon Rosenberg, July 22, 2005). In their case study of the candidates’ respective grassroots mobilization strategies in the critical state of New Mexico, Atkeson, Carrillo, and Walker (2005:132) draw a similar conclusion, arguing that

It is…important to note that the GOP may also have benefited from its style of person-to-person contact that emphasized what neighbors might have in common, e.g. veterans for veterans, hunters for hunters, etc. It seemed to work better than the paid and volunteer staff used more frequently by Democratic allies who often had no specific social connection to those they contacted. In a close race, minor differences in mobilization tactics may be pivotal for a group’s success (emphasis added).
The Republicans’ elaborate grassroots organization was highly successful in mobilizing supporters and voters, especially in crucial battleground states. Campaign officials estimate that between 1.2 and 1.4 million individuals volunteered for the campaign nationwide (PBS Frontline Interview with Ed Gillespie; Personal interview with Patrick Ruffini, July 6, 2005; Personal interview with Terry Nelson, August 19, 2005). As detailed case-studies of individual states have shown, the Bush campaign’s grassroots organization contributed significantly to increased Republican registration and higher voter turnout in the election (for analysis of the grassroots organization in Florida, see Crew, Fine, and MacManus 2005; for Ohio, see Mockabee et al 2005; for New Mexico, see Atkeson, Carrillo, and Walker 2005; ). The 2004 election ended four decades of desultory participation in presidential campaigns: slightly more than 60 percent of the eligible electorate voted, the largest turnout in a presidential campaign since 1968 (Faler 2005). Undoubtedly, the intensive grassroots efforts by Republicans and Democrats, along with the perceived competitiveness of the race, contributed to this increase in turnout.
The Limits of Bush’s Party Leadership

Bush’s partisan leadership marks the most systematic effort by a modern president to create a strong national party. Nonetheless, the question remains whether a national political machine can be created ex-cathedra. The very centrality of the Bush White House in recruiting candidates, mobilizing support, and framing the issues during the 2002 and 2004 election campaigns suggests that modern presidential politics continues to subordinate partisan to executive responsibility.

Held in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the launch of the “war on terrorism,” the midterm elections celebrated executive power, turning on issues of international and domestic security that emphasized the modern presidency as the center of government action. As Beachler (2005:41-42) argues, “The Republican congressional strategy [in the campaign], with regard to the war on terrorism, was to associate with a president who had the support of a large majority of the country as he battled terrorism.” At the same time, Republicans sought to minimize discussion of economic issues, which, due to the weak economy at the time of the election, would not have served them as well (Mitchell and Nagourney 2002:A1). This campaign strategy was conceived within the administration and urged on congressional candidates: Karl Rove exhorted Republican candidates to “run on the war” (Busch 2005:45), while Bush’s campaign manager Ken Mehlman argued in a presentation to Republican officials that the party’s greatest advantages in the campaign were the president’s high levels of public approval and the increased salience of national security issues (Beachler 2004: 41).

We have noted that Bush’s blitzkrieg in the final days of the 2002 campaign exploited executive issues, especially the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, for partisan gain. But the stamp of the president on the campaign and the emphasis on national security served to transform the election into a referendum on Bush’s leadership in the war on terrorism. Following the election, the chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee declared, in telling language, that “We made history tonight …It was a great win for the President of the United States (New York Times, November 6, 2002, as quoted in Keele, Fogarty, and Stimson n.d.; Emphasis added).”

Although the Iraqi War, which began in March, 2003, further aggravated the partisan rancor aroused by Bush’s aggressive campaigning in the midterm elections, Republicans and Democrats both subscribed to the idea that the president, rather than Congress or the political parties, should assume principal responsibility for the war against terrorism. When Congress took up the question of Iraq in October 2002, Democrats had been divided about whether the country should go to war. But facing a popular president and elections in November, they were anxious to get the war issue behind them and change the subject to the flagging economy. Many justified their vote by claiming that the Iraqi resolution did not declare war, but, instead, delegated to the president authority to go to war and determine its scope and duration (Fisher 2004:119).

The subordination of partisan to executive responsibility was reaffirmed in the 2004 election campaign. Once again, though the Bush campaign’s emphasis on leadership was skillfully tied to values of national security and traditional values that appealed to Republican partisans, the centrality of presidential leadership tended to emphasize loyalty to Bush rather than a collective party organization with a past and a future. As Matthew Dowd put it, “Leadership is a window into the soul – people want someone they can count on in tough times, and Bush filled this paternalistic role” (Dowd Interview, July 20, 2005). The celebration of Bush’s guardianship raised questions about the sustainability of the parties’ grassroots organizations and the high level of public engagement beyond the 2004 election. The success of the remarkable grass roots effort in Ohio, a local Bush-Cheney official insisted, was due in large part to the “volunteers’ admiration for and loyalty to George W. Bush.” Significantly, the Bush-Cheney campaign relied on frequent presidential visits, during which he met with the most effective volunteers, as a method of “firing up” the grass roots organization (Klinger interview). Indeed, as Dowd acknowledged, “both parties’ organizing force has focused on President Bush—the Republicans in defense of his leadership; the Democrats in opposition—hostility—to it. After the election, both parties will be challenged to sustain a collective commitment independently of their devotion to or hatred of Bush” (Interview with Matthew Dowd, July 26, 2004).

Moreover, although the 2004 election campaign aroused intense partisan activity and, in comparison with recent previous elections, the rapt attention of the American people, the contest, like the 2002 midterm congressional campaign before it, was not so much about Republican or Democratic principles as whether the president or his challenger, Senator Kerry, was best suited to manage the Herculean tasks of economic and homeland security effectively and justly (Aldrich, Griffin, and Rickershauser, n.d., 11). As Aldrich, Griffin, and Rickershauser (n.d., 12) show in an empirical analysis of issues discussed in Bush’s campaign speeches, the president clearly sought to focus the campaign on the issue of terrorism. Democrats, who placed somewhat greater emphasis on the economy, nonetheless conceded, as they had in 2002, that war-time “competence” was the principal focus of the campaign: a prominent figure in the Kerry campaign admitted the Democratic campaign did not emphasize party principles, but focused instead on presenting the Democratic senator as a “plausible alternative” to the incumbent president, one who displayed the “strength required of a leader in post–9-11 America” (Personal interview with Tad Devine, August 4, 2004). As early analyses of the presidential vote have demonstrated, voters’ primary considerations in the presidential election were their perceptions of the relative competence of George W. Bush and John Kerry to direct the United States’ War on Terrorism and the national economy (Ramussen 2004; Freedman 2004; Hilligus and Shields n.d.).

The 2004 election, widely regarded as a referendum on the Bush presidency, appeared to sanction Bush’s approach to homeland security and the War on Terrorism. Bush won 51 percent of the popular vote to Kerry’s 48 percent, and the Republicans gained three seats in the House and four in the Senate. Significantly, the gains in Congress were built on Bush’s narrow but solid victory. In all the key Senate races, such as the five open southern seats, which the Republicans swept, Bush did better at the polls than the GOP’s candidate, winning by an average of 18 percentage points to their 6. Although Republican gains in the House were due in part to Tom DeLay’s controversial redistricting plan (which led to the defeat of four Democratic incumbents), the Democrats’ failure to make gains, let alone retake the House, also followed from their inability to make significant electoral advances anywhere in the country. Democrats acknowledged, for example, that they failed to take away two vulnerable seats in Connecticut, partly because Bush did much better in the state than they had expected (Busch and Ceaser 2005, Chapter 5).

In light of the dominant role the White House played in mobilizing voters and framing the issues, Bush’s win may have been as much a personal victory (of a limited sort, given the narrow margin) as a partisan achievement. The referendum on his presidency electrified the national party organizations, but it appeared to subordinate partisan to executive responsibility.¹⁹

Bush’s Administrative Presidency – The Ongoing Tension between Executive Administration and Party Responsibility
Bush’s emphasis on executive administration reinforced the subordination of partisan to executive responsibility. Buffeted by demands from a Congress that was usually in the hands of his opponents, Ronald Reagan made extensive use of the administrative presidency to achieve his programmatic objectives, often at the expense of collaboration with his party or Congress. As president, George W. Bush also has made considerable use of administrative mechanisms to achieve his programmatic goals, even though his party has controlled both houses of Congress for most of his presidency. Bush’s reliance on bureaucratic politics even in the presence of unified Republican control of government suggests that the administrative presidency remains a powerful temptation, and one that may continue to impede the emergence of a more collaborative, party-centered policy process under the most favorable circumstances.

Just as the Bush-Cheney campaign was highly disciplined, so Bush and a small circle of White House aides have sought to consolidate political and policy responsibility in the White House. Karl Rove, whom the president benighted as “The Architect” of his administration’s political success, has also played a central role as a policy maker in the Bush White House. He staffed a new Office of Strategic Initiatives that oversaw a nearly complete melding of presidential and partisan politics. Rove granted that the national parties that had emerged since the 1980s “were of great importance in the tactical and mechanical aspects of electing a president.” But they were “less important in developing a political and policy strategy for the White House.” In effect, he said, parties served as a critical “means to the president’s end.” The emergence of the modern executive office presupposed that “the White House had to determine the administration’s objectives” and by implication the party’s.²⁰

Beyond centralizing policymaking authority in the White House, the Bush administration has engaged in wide-ranging efforts to enhance the powers of the presidency against Congress and the independent agencies (Aberbach 2004; Kelley n.d.). For example, Vice President Dick Cheney vigorously resisted efforts by the General Accounting Office, a legislative agency created to assist Congress in the performance of its constitutional responsibilities, to acquire information about the secret operations of the administration’s National Energy Policy Development Group, claiming that the administration possesses a prerogative to “solicit advice from anybody they want in confidence – get good, solid unvarnished advice without having to make it available to a member of Congress.”

In another example of the Bush White House’s efforts to expand presidential prerogative, the president claimed that Tom Ridge, his Director of Homeland Security, did not have to testify before Congress, and refused to allow him to appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee (Aberbach 2004). Although both of these decisions drew extensive criticism from Democrats and some Republicans, the president remained adamant in his exercise of presidential prerogative, and successfully rebuffed efforts to constrain his discretion.

Bush also sought to maximize presidential control over the civil service by infusing the bureaucracy with appointments – even at the subcabinet level – that shared his ideological convictions (Hult 2003). Like Reagan before him, Bush has employed an elaborate vetting process to ensure that appointees share his political and ideological views (Aberbach 2004). These efforts have largely been successful. As Warshaw (2004:102) describes,

Appointments throughout the cabinet in the Bush administration focused on ideologically conservative Republicans with ties to the Bush campaign and with managerial capabilities…the subcabinet was populated not with managers or Bush friends but instead with political ideologues who had a deep philosophical commitment to conservative goals and objectives for the role of the federal government.

There is substantial evidence that the president has used regulatory rule-making to alter the course of public policy. Much of the retrenchment has gone on in the realm of environmental policy. According to Hult (2003:24; see also Adams 2001), presidential initiatives in the realm of environmental policy included “easing wetlands rules affecting developers; reducing energy-saving standards for air conditioners; allowing more road-building and power lines in national forests; delaying a ban on snowmobiles in national parks; and easing restrictions on mining on public lands.” Under Bush’s administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s rule-making also has become substantially more sympathetic to business concerns, weakening or retracting rules regulating workplace environments that imposed costs on industry (Goldstein and Cohen 2004). Under Bush, OSHA has departed dramatically from its practices under the Clinton administration, emphasizing voluntary efforts by business (rather than regulation) as the primary mechanism of achieving workplace safety (Goldstein and Cohen 2004)

Bush also has used executive orders and directives aggressively to achieve controversial policy goals without congressional action. Executive orders have been used to launch the much touted faith based initiatives, overturn a Clinton-era policy of providing aid to family-planning organizations outside the United States that offered abortion counseling, and establish a controversial plan for the limited funding of stem-cell research. The president’s willingness to “settle” controversial issues touching on the relationship between church and state and the issue of abortion through executive order has discouraged partisan debate and resolution of some of the most difficult issues facing the country.

Already executive centered in its approach to politics and policy, the Bush White House became even more insulated from Congress and the Republican Party as it planned and fought the war against terrorism. To be sure, Bush did not ignore Congress in managing the War on Terrorism (McCormick 2004), seeking and receiving congressional authorization to respond militarily to 9/11 and use force against Iraq, and receiving congressional sanction for new anti-terrorism policies in the USA PATRIOT Act, the Terrorist Bombings Convention Implementation Act, and the National Defense Reauthorization Act. These authorizations and statutes, however, largely served to grant the president considerable discretion in pursuing the White House’s military and security goals.

Although the president has made controversial use of this discretion, Congress has not been able to uphold its constitutional responsibilities.²¹ Because the deployment of the administrative presidency has permitted President Bush to transcend political debate in Congress (and because Bush has vigorously defended his discretionary powers), political conflict over the president’s war powers has been transferred to the legal arena, mediated by the federal judiciary.

Soon after 9-11, the administration claimed plenary authority to establish military tribunals to try “any individual who is not a U.S. citizen” who participated in or aided the September 11 attacks (Fisher 2005:106), a controversial elaboration of a presidential authority last invoked by FDR to deal with Nazi saboteurs (Fisher 2004:167). The tribunals would permit conviction on a 2/3 (rather than unanimous) vote from a jury of military men and women, would be authorized to impose the death penalty, could be held in secret, and “gave only the president (or the Secretary of Defense if he so designated) the power to review a verdict [explicitly rejecting judicial review of tribunal decisions]” (McMahon 2004:125; Fisher 2004:166). Although the administration’s plan was received with much criticism from the American and foreign publics, in June 2004 military tribunals began to try prisoners held at the United States’ detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In November 2004, however, a federal district court ruled that the military tribunals violated both American and international law, thereby threatening the system devised by the president.

The White House also claimed sweeping executive authority to arrest and hold individuals (both American citizens and foreign citizens) suspected of links to terrorists without formally charging them with crimes, and argued that the judiciary had no authority to review the status of these detainees (Fisher 2005:114). These “enemy combatants”, according to the administration, were not subject to the standards of treatment delineated by the Geneva Conventions, did not possess rights to attorney, and could be held incommunicado for an indefinite period of time. The administration’s claims to plenary authority over the fate of “enemy combatants” shocked even some conservatives inside and outside Congress (McMahon 2004:130). The White House’s position on “enemy combatants” ultimately faced review by the Supreme Court, which held in Rasul v. Bush (2004) and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) that the courts did possess the authority to review the status of both American citizens and foreign citizens deemed “enemy combatants” and held without charge in the United States and at Guantanamo Bay.

A sober assessment of Bush’s administrative presidency suggests that Bush has been as ambitious as Ronald Reagan in his use of bureaucratic politics in the realm of domestic affairs, despite the considerably more favorable political environment he has enjoyed throughout his presidency. In foreign affairs, Bush has permitted Congress to play an important role, but one that has been limited to enacting sweeping grants of authority that have given the administration wide latitude in deciding where and how to fight a war against terror and to provide for homeland security. Bush’s extensive use of administrative politics suggests that even presidents who take party-building seriously and enjoy strong partisan support in Congress are likely to be sorely tempted by the siren call of administrative aggrandizement. The question thus remains whether the profound revival of the executive’s governing authority in the wake of September 11 has brought to fruition a national party system or continued the long-term development of a modern presidency that renders collective partisanship impractical.