Win or Lose

In his Campaign column: Make or break, Tom Carver writes:

If Bush loses, 'there will be civil war in the Party on November the 3rd,' Pat Buchanan, the former Republican presidential candidate, told me this summer.

Conservatives will say that Bush's unusual mix of tax cuts and military interventionism failed because it departed from the straight and narrow of Conservatism which is small government, fiscal discipline and no foreign adventures.

OK, but in Without a Doubt, Ron Suskind writes:

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that "if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3."

It sounds like both Buchanan and Bartlett want the Republicans to split up. Suskind goes on to identify Bartlett as very different faction from Buchanan, as he is

a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, [and who] went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . ."

"This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis...."

...Jim Wallis [of the Sojourners] recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, "'but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr. President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on terrorism.'"

Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy.

"No, Mr. President," Wallis says he told Bush, "We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism."

Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that.

..."When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking," Wallis says now. "What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him...

While I'd just as soon religion played no part in public life, the trouble with Suskind's analysis is that there are plenty of people on all sides who "[dispense] with people who confront [them] with inconvenient facts" or who truly believe they're on a quasi-divine mission, and have absolute faith in their own breed of dogma. Consider Wallis, who takes it as common sense that poverty breeds terrorism. I find this contention dubious.