A Bush love-fest

One thing that's sure to help Democratic party going into 2008 is that its base and its elite are quite a bit more aligned than are its Republican counterparts. The Republican primary has, to an extraordinary degree, become a nostalgia competition, wherein each candidate is doing its best to out-Bush Bush based, I suppose, on the idea that the Bush years have been created a perfectly normal and sustainable mode of governance. Until recently this was all just implied. But lately the candidates seem at great pains to bring the president's name into the race for the nomination.

Here's Mike Huckabee:

I’m the one who actually supported the President’s surge. I supported the Bush tax cuts, when Mr. Romney didn’t. I was with President Bush on gun control, when Mitt Romney wasn’t. I was with the President on the President’s pro-life position, when Mitt Romney wasn’t.

And here's Mitt Romney:

We ought to be saying thank you to the president for keeping us safe these last six years.

And so on. This may be what it takes to become the Republican candidate. But once the 30 percent of the country that's still enamored of the Bush-Cheney years are placated... well, that's it. Nobody else agrees at all and as they inevitably move closer to the center during the general election, that candidate will be in the tangled position of having to be both for and against the Bush years at the same time. And statements like these won't do much to help them.