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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
When the official mourning for Ronald Reagan ends, the party's two leading luminaries will leave the big tent and go back to their corners.
Jun 11, 2004 | In death as he did in life, Ronald Reagan has united the increasingly divergent wings of the Republican Party. The neocons who plotted George W. Bush's ill-fated Iraq adventure, religious conservatives drooling for a fight over indecency, abortion and gay marriage, the libertarian-minded fiscal conservatives and the Main Street moderates: This week, they're all mourning under one Big Tent.
But as Reagan makes his last trip back to California Friday night, the nation's two remaining best-known Republicans will once again go their separate ways. President Bush will be back in Washington, holding on tight to the hard right. And California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back in Sacramento, working deals with Indian tribes, labor unions and -- say it isn't so! -- Democrats as he wins the grudging admiration of even some voters inclined to see him more as a groper than a Gipper.
As president and governor, Bush and Schwarzenegger are reading from very different pages of the Ronald Reagan playbook. The question now, as the November election approaches: Will these star-power Republicans even be playing for the same team?
So far, at least, the answer appears to be no.
While Schwarzenegger certainly won't be campaigning for Sen. John Kerry, it's increasingly clear he won't play a major role in Bush-Cheney '04, either. Other Republican governors may clamor for face time with Bush, but Schwarzenegger has largely stayed away. When Bush visited California in March, Schwarzenegger steered clear of the president's public events, choosing to appear with him only at a private fundraiser. There are no Bush-Schwarzenegger appearances on the campaign schedule now, and it's not even clear whether Schwarzenegger will speak at the Republican National Convention.
Schwarzenegger aides say it's just a matter of scheduling. "The governor wants to be as helpful as he can given the constraints that California has a lot of issues that need to be addressed," Schwarzenegger's press secretary, Margita Thompson, told Salon this week. "The people of California elected him to get the state back on track, and he's been working on that with laser-like focus."
Still, if -- as the Los Angeles Times recently reported -- the Republican governors of Arkansas, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota and Texas have managed to find time to stump for Bush, it's fair to ask why Schwarzenegger hasn't been able to squeeze in an hour or two of campaigning for his president.
When Schwarzenegger was running for office last fall, religious conservatives warned the White House that it would lose a lot of born-again goodwill if Bush cozied up to the pro-choice playboy. By and large, Bush took the advice: Aside from saying Schwarzenegger would be a "good governor," Bush played no public role in the contentious California recall vote that put Schwarzenegger in the statehouse. Now the shoe may be on the other foot. With Bush alienating moderates with a slavish devotion to the far right and a stubborn resistance to admitting mistakes, Schwarzenegger -- whose approval ratings have soared with a more bipartisan approach to governance -- may see the advantage in remaining what one observer calls a "party of one."
