The last thin thread binding George W Bush to the conservative base has been cut

Peggy Noonan writes a conservative post-mortem of the Bush presidency:

What political conservatives and on-the-ground Republicans must understand at this point is that they are not breaking with the White House on immigration. They are not resisting, fighting and thereby setting down a historical marker--"At this point the break became final." That's not what's happening. What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad.

But on immigration it has changed from "Too bad" to "You're bad."

The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic--they "don't want to do what's right for America." His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, "We're gonna tell the bigots to shut up." On Fox last weekend he vowed to "push back." Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want "mass deportation." Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are "anti-immigrant" and suggested they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism."

Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens? And often, though not exclusively, concerned conservatives? It is odd, but it is of a piece with, or a variation on, the "Too bad" governing style. And it is one that has, day by day for at least the past three years, been tearing apart the conservative movement.
I suspect the White House and its allies have turned to name calling because they're defensive, and they're defensive because they know they have produced a big and indecipherable mess of a bill--one that is literally bigger than the Bible, though as someone noted last week, at least we actually had a few years to read the Bible. The White House and its supporters seem to be marshalling not facts but only sentiments, and self-aggrandizing ones at that. They make a call to emotions--this is, always and on every issue, the administration's default position--but not, I think, to seriously influence the debate.

They are trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!

If they'd really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done--actually and believably done--the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.

There were people who said that George W Bush would ruin the Republican Party. I do not think that things have gone that far only because of the resistance which is being shown to his betrayal on illegal immigration. The Party has too much fight left in it to be dead. But it is in trouble.

I do not agree with those who think that it would have been better to let Gore or Kerry win because the good things that Bush has done, like lower taxes and go to war against the Islamofascists, would not have been done in a Democrat administration and the bad thing (actually the amnesty bill goes far beyond "bad") that he is trying to do would have already been done in a Democrat administration.

However the Republican Party can not take any more damage and survive. That is why it would be better to elect Hillary Clinton than allow Rudolph Giuliani to become president. If the Republican Party has to spend another eight or even four years fighting off attacks on its core values from its own leadership it will go the way of the Whigs.

I pray that Fred Thompson enters the race and takes the nomination then wins the White House. Absent that, and absent one of the acceptable second tier candidates like Duncan Hunter or Mike Huckabee or Tom Tancredo managing to pull off a come from behind victory in the primaries, I will - with some reluctance - support Mitt Romney. A politician who has changed his stand on an important issue to get elected will usually stay changed at least as long as he is in office. I don't completely trust him, but he's better than Hillary and he will not put the final nail in the Republican Party's (and thus the United State's) coffin.

Enough "social" conservatives might hold their nose and pull the lever for Julie Annie on the theory that he is better than Hillary. But after four years of governance by someone with the lifestyle and domestic agenda of a Manhattan liberal the only people in the Republican Party will be Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snow and Sean Hannity (John McCain will implode and collapse into a micro black hole upon losing the nomination in Feb. '08, otherwise he would be there too).

Of course it will not matter who gets elected in 2008 if the amnesty bill passes. Even if it is Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney that will just mean that they will go down in history as the last Republican president of the United States of America.