The Republican Double-Bind: 2008 Edition

[Jackpine Radical]

The only prayer the Republicans have of retaining the White House in 2008 will be to repudiate Bush and run somebody like Hagel, who is speaking against the escalation. The general public is simply not going to buy any more war and, if we are out of Iraq by then, will not elect a candidate who rode the war train all the way to the end of the line. They will almost certainly forgive a politician for having signed on to the IWR, particularly if the politician admits it was a mistake or says he was duped by Bush's lies, but they will not cast their lots with anyone tainted by a history of military adventurism. They are just not going to want anyone taking them into any more elective wars for a long time.

Now, the problem for the Republicans is this: There will remain a hard core of armchair hawks and Fox news junkies in the party who will cling to their militarist delusions, and who will consider themselves and America to have been betrayed by the wimps in both parties who refused to give Bush his surge, and who will thereby have "lost Iraq." This crowd is not a large percentage of the national population, but they are a large segment of Karl Rove's infamous Base, and it will be very hard to get the nomination without their support.

So the Republican Double Bind is that they need a Hagel-type antiwar candidate for the general election, but they will be hard-pressed to get such a beast past the wacko Party Faithful in the nominating process. It will take more than the usual amount of ham-handed fumbling, bickering and general bad strategy for the Dems to blow it in the upcoming electoral environment.