Republicans Call Bush Era Ancient History, But Polls Show That Voters Remember

Michael Steele, the puzzling, embattled chairman of the Republican National Committee, spoke to his flock last week, trying to spur them on to more squarely confront President Barack Obama and the Democrats. It was, by his own reckoning, an epochal moment. "Today we are declaring an end to the era of Republicans looking backward," he said, adding that the "era of apologizing for Republican mistakes of the past" also was "officially over," as was the "era of Republican navel gazing." No word on when the era of trite platitudes will close.

Declaring the party has "turned the corner on regret, recrimination, self-pity, and self-doubt," Steele announced that a "Republican renaissance has begun!" This is the political equivalent of the owner of the hapless Washington Nationals today declaring that his franchise has commenced a golden age. Steele reached back to Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley, and Ronald Reagan to propel the GOP into the future. (It sounds like the plot for the new Star Trek or Terminator movies.)

In essence, Steele was telling his fellow Republicans that they can forgive themselves for and forget the hash they made of things when they were in power. While his magnanimity is admirable, and while his fellow GOPers are undoubtedly anxious to turn the corner on the Bush era, voters still remember. Indeed, recent public opinion polls are bringing into focus the full measure of the Bush administration debacle—while also giving hints of how Republicans might come back.

Gallup compared self-identified Republicans in 2009 and 2001 and found that the GOP had lost support in all but one of more than two dozen categories. Men? Down 7 percentage points. Whites? Down 6 points. Midwesterners? Down 9 points. Those who graduated from college (10-point loss) and those who didn't (3 percentage points), married (off 5) and not married (down 8), and so on. The only group that did not see a GOP decline was frequent churchgoers, with whom the party broke even. Overall, while the two parties were at parity in terms of identification in 2001, Democrats have now opened a 9-point lead.

Perhaps more startling, according to a poll from the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, Democrats have erased the GOP's historic advantage on national security issues. The poll showed that voters were virtually evenly split on which party they trusted more regarding the "war on terrorism" and "national security." In 2003, Republicans were leading Democrats by 29 points on "national security." Much if not all of this Democratic improvement can be credited to President Obama, according to the pollsters. His approval rating on "national security," which stands at 64 percent, is higher than his overall approval rating of 58 percent. In fact, in the poll, Obama almost universally gets higher marks on foreign policy and national security issues (improving America's standing abroad, for example, and dealing with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somali pirates) than on domestic ones (such as the economy and the budget deficit).

But the news is not all bad for Republicans. By nearly 2 to 1, likely voters thought "not decisive enough in a crisis" was a better description of Democrats than Republicans. And by a 45-to-26 spread, they thought Republicans were more patriotic. And there are possible problems for Obama and the Democrats within specific foreign policy issues. While 73 percent of voters approve of Obama's plan to withdraw from Iraq, 53 percent think greater violence will occur when U.S. troops leave. "That verdict crosses partisan lines," the Democratic pollsters write, "and it may be that if this expectation bears out, the public could revise its positive view on the Obama strategy."

Likewise, regarding Afghanistan, nearly three quarters of voters approve of Obama's plan to send in 21,000 more combat troops, but a plurality think that the military doesn't have a clear mission there, with Democrats expressing especially strong doubts. And Obama's clearest negative comes regarding nuclear weapons. In early April he gave a speech advocating a "world without nuclear weapons." But while 58 percent of likely voters approve of his job performance on "America's policies on nuclear weapons," the Democratic pollsters found that 63 percent think a nuclear-free world is not a realistic goal—or one that would improve U.S. security. More broadly, even if Democrats as a party have closed the national security gap in public opinion, their officeholders seem unaware of it, as demonstrated by Senate Democrats' refusal to fund Obama's shuttering of the Guantánamo Bay prison facility. In retreat, they seemed just as worried as ever about the GOP national security cudgel.

The fault lines and apparent contradictions within the polling numbers raise another critical question: To what extent do people approve of Obama's policies specifically, and to what extent are they extending personal approval of him to foreign policy? In other words, are people saying, "He's got good ideas generally, he's not named George W. Bush, and he's breaking from the foreign policies I grew to dislike over the past eight years, so he must be doing a good job"? Soft support can disappear quickly.

Can the GOP capitalize? Not on their current course. Dick Cheney's tortured gloom-doggling last Thursday only figures to remind voters why they wanted to break from the Bush years. And Gallup reported that the party has become distinctly more socially conservative. To the extent that Republicans let Democrats occupy both the center and the left, they diminish their own chances.

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