by Jacob T. Levy

While I'll be happy to see Republicans punished at the polls tomorrow (with no particular pleasure at a Democratic victory per se), I can't help but be both a little disspirited and a little confused. Among the sources of Republican trouble this year: - Anger among fiscal conservatives about feckless spending and the massive growth of the deficit under Republican control - Widespread annoyance or disgust among both independents and conservatives at the gross incompetence and cronyism in the administration--incompetence that has as its most serious instance the terrible series of misjudgments in Iraq, closely followed by the apaprent willingness to neglect both Afghanistan - Across-the-board revulsion at the corruption and power-hunger evident among Congressional Republicans-- the Abramoff scandals and their kin having shown that the revolutionaries of 1994 took just a decade to surpass the depths to which House Democrats had descended after fifty years of uninterrupted rule - A loss of faith among Christian conservatives that Republicans ever do much of substance that they care about, with the exception of the Terri Schiavo fiasco. (Sadly, I don't think that the various reinforcing Bush doctrines regarding executive power, secrecy, and torture are doing much to hurt Republicans; the same is true for the administration's failures in trade policy.) Most striking to my eye has been the willingness of prominent conservatives to say that, as The Washington Monthly put it, it's "Time For Us to Go." See also: Ramesh Ponnuru, one of the smartest conservatives in my generation of the commentariat, "How to Win by Losing;" Jonah Goldberg, "Governing Realities;" neocons on the war; Jonathan Rauch; and, most prominently, Bruce Bartlett, Impostor. On the right the lack of enthusiasm for the Republican cause this time has been noteworthy. And I'm disspirited because it's all so very late, and in part misdirected. Yes, the Republican House majority has been corrupt and obnoxious. But the heart of all these troubles has not been on Capitol Hill; it's been in the White House. Iraq policy, cronyism, incompetence, spending, deficits--the buck for these stops on the Oval Office's desk. Among the participants in the Washington Monthly symposium, I remember only Bruce Bartlett as standing up against Bush and Bushism in 2004. Andrew Sullivan was a prominent enthusiast-turned-skeptic of Republican Party rule in 2004. Robert A. George made his stand as well. Our own Dan Drezner did so. I annoyed some libertarian friends with my own minor contributions to that 2004 literature. But there was no widespread revolt in the conservative base; there was no serious let's-lose-this-one contingent at National Review; there were no defectors other than Bartlett among major Republican figures prominent in offline politics. As now-TNR-editor Franklin Foer documented, plenty of major conservatives understood the problems with the administration perfectly well in 2004, and were willing to channel their energy into anti-Kerryism, as if the reelection of an incumbent is a referendum were a referendum on the challenger. What I cant figure out is: what's different now? All of the Republican sins were evident in 2004. The budget was out of control; so was Iraq. Though torture hadn't yet been statutorily enacted, Abu Ghraib had been exposed. Harriet Miers and Michael Brown hadn't yet become the poster children for incompetence and cronyism, but there was no shortage of other names for that list. Go read that Robert George article from TNR 2004 linked to above; is there any essential part of this year's conservative indictment that wasn't already in his piece? The House Republican caucus flew apart at the seams after DeLay's indictment; but in the past two years it hasn't been a fundamentally different creature from what it's been ever since Bush assumed the White House and assumed such extraordinary control over his co-partisans in Congress. The Bush White House is certainly as it was in 2004. Where was the disaffection of the base when it might have made the most difference? What is the reason for Bush 04 supporters to have become de facto Hastert 06 opponents? The election tomorow at best will deprive the White House of some of its enablers. But, in the absence of a parliamentary no-confidence system, the GOP could lose both houses overwhelmingly and we'd still have two years of the Bush Administration left. I worry that an administration already in-principle committed to executive branch supremacy won't be much affected by the loss of its legislative-branch enablers; and I'm bewildered why those both in the intellectual leadership of the conservative movement and in its voting base have chosen this, less-important, election in which to make their displeasure felt.