Something there is about the experience of being the leader of the free world that can drive a man to paint. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s homely canvases of barns and the like weren’t that bad, an opinion the artist did not share. “Let’s get something straight here, Cohen,” the great man told Richard Cohen, now a Washington Post columnist but then, in 1967, a wire-service cub. “They would have burned this shit a long time ago if I weren’t the President of the United States.” Jimmy Carter’s folkloric watercolors of home-town scenes sell for respectable sums to benefit the Carter Center. What you won’t find in the oeuvres of Ike and Jimmy are any nude self-portraits. But, as the wired world has learned, courtesy of an unscrupulous hacker, the works of W include two.
George W. Bush may be technically less adept than his White House predecessors, but his subject matter—while perfectly SFW, in his rendering—is far more challenging. It’s worse painting, but it’s better art. In one picture, we see him in the bathtub from his own perspective, his knees and toes poking out of the soapy bathwater. In the other, he’s in the shower with his back to us, visible from the waist up. In a round shaving mirror that hangs from the showerhead, his reflected face looks out at us. Maybe Bush was thinking of a fragment of John Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”:
How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand
Filtered and influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you.
On the other hand, maybe not. But Republicans have been doing a lot of looking in the mirror lately, trying to work out who they surely are and why they went so surely wrong last November, and they’re seeing double. Was it the message, or merely the messengers? Too far right, or not far enough? Bad policies, or just bad politics? They saw double last week, when President Obama’s State of the Union address was followed by not one but two prepackaged Republican “responses”—two speeches, one light (especially on substance) and one dark (especially in its fiscal doomsaying). Marco Rubio, freshly anointed the Party’s savior on the cover of Time, gave the official, authorized one; Rand Paul gave the unofficial, unauthorized one, which was as much a response to Rubio as to Obama. Rubio’s, of course, will be remembered longer for what went into the speaker’s mouth than for what came out of it. Are the biggest moments of his otherwise smooth ascent destined to be spoiled by aquatic fiascos? At last summer’s Republican National Convention, where his keynote address was the fanfare for Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech, Rubio was preceded by an actor lecturing an empty chair. Approaching the lectern, he paused to wet his whistle. “Thank you, thank you,” he told the applauding crowd. “I think I just drank Clint Eastwood’s water.” Just so.
What Rubio offered last Tuesday evening was a dry—very dry—compendium of orthodox “conservative” banalities spanning the good (free enterprise, the Second Amendment, coal), the bad (government, taxes, Obamacare), and the ugly (a coded suggestion that wishing to do something about climate change is equivalent to believing that “government” can “control the weather”). His sole heresies were an avowal that “both Republicans and Democrats love America” and a daring penultimate line: “May God bless our President.” Rand Paul eschewed any such grace notes. Instead, he delivered amped-up versions of Rubio’s anti-government bromides, added some libertarian extras (such as abolishing progressive taxation and turning public education into a voucher system), and threw in a denunciation of “both parties” for “backroom deals.”
This is the third year that the Republicans’ Tea Party faction has elbowed its way into the post-SOTU spotlight. Its previous spokespersons, Representative Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, the pizza mini-mogul, were marginal cranks. Rand Paul, though a crank, is not so marginal: like Rubio, he is a member of the United States Senate, nominally subject to the disciplines of that august body’s Republican caucus. In the wake of November’s Democratic sweep of the popular vote—White House, Senate, House of Representatives—the G.O.P. is turning on itself. Karl Rove’s Super PAC, American Crossroads, has started a pest-control subsidiary called the Conservative Victory Project, tasked with delousing the Party of hard-to-elect Senate hopefuls like Representative Steve King, the gay-baiting Iowa birther, and Representative Paul Broun, of Georgia, who regards evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang theory as “lies from the pit of Hell.” Fox News appears to be on board, but much of the “base” is not. “This is war,” Michelle Malkin, the popular blogger, wrote. “The civil war has begun,” David Bossie, the president of Citizens United (the group behind the case), announced.
Underlying such skirmishes are intimations of crackup in the Reagan-forged alliance of the economic-royalist right and the social-Christianist right. Both are trying to slough off the political dead weight of anti-immigrant nativism, which, anyhow, is not central to the core ideology of either. Abortion is different. The Party is rife with politicians who, whatever their private views, have spent four decades demanding its recriminalization. They could get away with it because it was understood that, thanks to the Supreme Court, their own wives, daughters, and friends would not be inconvenienced. But, with the Court just one Justice away from reversing Roe v. Wade, and with the blurring of the border between hostility to abortion and hostility to contraception, the political cost of “pro-life” posturing has been mounting. Railing against gay marriage used to be an easy call. As recently as 2004, three-fifths of the public rejected it. Now the wedge cuts the other way. More than half are in favor, including three-quarters of the under-thirty set and, among Republicans under forty-five, about half.
What still holds the Party together is its implacable opposition to Obama and all he stands for—and the apparent willingness of its congressional cohort to thwart him by any means, fair or (more often) foul. At the emotional climax of his address, the President repeatedly called on Congress to bring his gun-control proposals to a vote. He wasn’t even asking that they be passed. (“If you want to vote no, that’s your choice.”) He was simply asking—demanding? begging?—that they at least be considered in what was once, with very rare exceptions, the customary manner. He was also preparing the public for the likelihood that the gun-control proposals—and, by extension, the rest of his legislative recommendations—will be gutted or simply buried. In the Senate, the Republican minority wields the filibuster with unprecedented frequency and ferocity. At the other end of the Capitol, the Republican Speaker almost always keeps from the floor any measure disfavored by a majority of his caucus, even if a majority of the House itself supports it. Last Thursday, Republicans prevented a vote on the confirmation of Obama’s nominee to oversee the Pentagon, the war hero and former Republican senator Chuck Hagel, and the President finally made his frustration explicit. “We’ve never had a Secretary of Defense filibustered before. There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that somebody should get sixty votes,” he said. “The Republican minority in the Senate seems to think that the rule now is that you have to have sixty votes for everything. Well, that’s not the rule.” But it’s the power, as naked as Bush in the bathtub and a lot more indecent. ♦