Run Against Bush

That was a STRONG statement by Tom Tancredo right there, in the debate. He said that Rove called him and told him that, because of his criticism of the President, that he was no longer welcome in the White House, and that if he became President, he'd say the same thing to Bush. It got an ovation from the crowd.

Man, I'd love to be in Germany with the President's team right now. They ought to expect more of this for the next 18 months. He's the lamest duck there ever was.

UPDATE: And in a later answer, Tancredo said, "The President ran as a conservative and governed as a liberal."

Here we go again.

This has been going on for some time. Every time a Republican President screws up - or in other words, every time there's a Republican President - the convenient excuse is that he's not really a conservative. Digby has talked about this over and over again.

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals.

Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It's a lot like communism that way.

This is where we're at right now, and Tancredo, an anti-immigrant conservative, is the perfect example of this. The idea is to save the Republican Party by pretending that the guy who's been their standard-bearer for the last 6 years, the guy who they went to the ends of the Earth to defend right up until the moment they figured out that the voters didn't like him anymore, has actually been a closet liberal all these years.

Everything Bush did will be seen as wrong. They'll highlight the immigration issue (called by a few Republicans the "Kennedy-McCain-Bush" bill), spending, even diplomacy (no less than Duncan Hunter questioned the idea that you don't talk to your enemies). Conservatism is not so much an ideology as a series of think tank and magazine jobs that are struggling to stay in business. The movement must be preserved above all else. And so we have a group of conservatives trying to jettison their President, dismissively calling him a liberal instead of what he is, a through-and-through 21st-century robber baron conservative, embodying all of the ideals of fearmongering, profit-taking and patriotism-questioning that you see on display thoughout the GOP.

UPDATE II: Let me unpack this for a second. Tancredo was responding to a question about "what would you have George Bush do for you if you were President?" Brownback essentially said he thinks the President will step aside for him. Thompson said something like he'd have him run a lecture series or something nonspecific. Tancredo shot back with his broadside. That's normally a lay-up question, a chance for everyone in the Party to praise their leader and say a few graceful things. They didn't even want to give the appearance of doing that.

The other thing is that this may be something that works with hardcore conservatives who are always looking for something to believe in to validate pissing away their vote all their lives, someone who is, finally, "different!" But why would this work with independent who are already skeptical of the trashed Republican brand, which is not limited to George Bush but the Congress as well? I guess I don't see this being a workable strategy, but parties are always trying to reinvent themselves.

And the problem with this strategy is that every one of them that has a public record either voted with Bush 90-95% of the time, or supported his policies in soundbite after soundbite. Including Rudy "Thank God George Bush is our President" Giuliani and Mitt "yes we should have sent more troops to Iraq" Romney.