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The real measure of how far George W. Bush's Texas conservatism has put him out of sync with moderates is that he's become the first Republican president to have a rumored renomination challenger even before he spends 100 days in office. Part of why Bush has been unusually provocative so unusually early in his administration is because potentially crippling circumstances are dancing on the 2001 horizon.
Sure, Arizona Sen. John McCain quickly denied any intention of running in 2004. But his emergence as a White House opponent not just on campaign-finance reform but also on health maintenance organizations, the environment, gun control and other issues is a revealing litmus. When Democrat John F. Kennedy won the last real squeaker of a presidential election in 1960, he named two Republicans to his Cabinet and governed from the center. Bush, who actually lost the popular vote in November by some 500,000 votes, has forsaken the center nd snuggled up to the right, just as he did in last year's critical Dixie primaries.
The explanation is probably a rare combination of rapacity and hurried nervousness. There's no time for statesmanship. True, Bush may have given the GOP's right wing several of these recent hugs to make it more accepting of future compromises. But the real driver of GOP insistence on behalf of big oil, big donors and all the other bigs is a simple five-letter word: clock.
We are not just talking about a narrow time frame but also about a narrow politics. Republican congresses, rare and dominated by hard- core conservatives, try to pull even GOP presidents into their corner of right field. On top of which, history strongly argues that the Republicans will lose both houses in the 2002 midterm elections.
Worse still, their 50-50 tie in the U.S. Senate could vanish any day that 98-year-old Strom Thurmond of South Carolina loses his battle with the actuarial tables, at which point the state's Democratic governor would turn the Senate Democratic by 51-49, changing the control and organization of committees and stopping most of the conservative "must have" list dead in its tracks. Then there are Florida's still-to-be-tabulated overvotes and non- admitted ballots from last November....