GEORGE BUSH AND FURTHER POLARIZATION

Mark D. Brewer; Jeffrey M. Stonecash

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511805424.010

9 - GEORGE BUSH AND FURTHER POLARIZATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Mark D. Brewer and

Jeffrey M. Stonecash

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Mark D. Brewer: Affiliation:
University of Maine, Orono
Jeffrey M. Stonecash: Affiliation:
Syracuse University, New York

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Summary

While Democrats continued to search for direction, Republicans had their own struggles. By January 2001, political trends and events appeared to have put them in their best situation in decades. Then, following the 2006 and 2008 elections, the party was clearly in trouble. Republicans had to decide if voters did not like their party and its policies or if anti-Republican sentiment was simply a reflection of the thoroughly unpopular presidency of George W. Bush. If it was the latter, then the party could wait for the memory of Bush to fade away. If it was the former, then Republicans had some serious reassessment to do. Determining which of these explanations was more likely was not an easy task.

The George W. Bush presidency represented the first unified Republican control of the presidency and Congress since 1953. The primary question was what the GOP would do with its power. Republican success had been gradually increasing in recent decades, and the early 2000s was the party's best chance to implement the policies they supported. With the attraction of more conservatives to the Republican Party and the loss of Northeast moderates, the party now had less internal diversity and its best opportunity to enact a conservative agenda.

There was little doubt that Congress was primed for such an agenda. Conservative Republicans had a stranglehold on the majority in the House, and although conservative prospects were not as bright in the Senate, Republican leadership in that body was also clearly conservative and they had high hopes of finishing what Ronald Reagan had started twenty years earlier.

Type: Chapter
Information: Dynamics of American Political Parties , pp. 166 - 183

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805424.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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9 - GEORGE BUSH AND FURTHER POLARIZATION

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