The right's explicit and candid rejection of "the rule of law"

Wednesday May 2, 2007 10:32 EST

-- Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)

The Wall St. Journal online has today published a lengthy and truly astonishing article by Harvard Government Professor Harvey Mansfield, which expressly argues that the power of the President is greater than "the rule of law."

The article bears this headline: The Case for the Strong Executive -- Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for Energy. And it is the most explicit argument I have seen yet for vesting in the President the power to override and ignore the rule of law in order to recieve the glories of what Mansfield calls "one-man rule."

That such an argument comes from Mansfield is unsurprising. He has long been a folk hero to the what used to be the most extremist right-wing fringe but is now the core of the Republican Party. He devoted earlier parts of his career to warning of the dangers of homosexuality, particularly its effeminizing effect on our culture.

He has a career-long obsession with the glories of tyrannical power as embodied by Machiavelli's Prince, which is his model for how America ought to be governed. And last year, he wrote a book called Manliness in which "he urges men, and especially women, to understand and accept manliness" -- which means that "women are the weaker sex," "women's bodies are made to attract and to please men" and "now that women are equal, they should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite." Publisher's Weekly called it a "juvenile screed."

I'll leave it to Bob Altemeyer and others to dig though all of that to analyze what motivates Mansfield and his decades-long craving for strong, powerful, unchallengeable one-man masculine rule -- though it's more self-evident than anything else.

But reading Mansfield has real value for understanding the dominant right-wing movement in this country. Because he is an academic, and a quite intelligent one, he makes intellectually honest arguments, by which I mean that he does not disguise what he thinks in politically palatable slogans, but instead really describes the actual premises on which political beliefs are based.

And that is Mansfield's value; he is a clear and honest embodiment of what the Bush movement is. In particular, he makes crystal clear that the so-called devotion to a "strong executive" by the Bush administration and the movement which supports it is nothing more than a belief that the Leader has the power to disregard, violate, and remain above the rule of law. And that is clear because Mansfied explicitly says that. And that is not just Mansfield's idiosyncratic belief. He is simply stating -- honestly and clearly -- the necessary premises of the model of the Omnipotent Presidency which has taken root under the Bush presidency.

This is not the first time Mansfield has expressly called for the subordination of the rule of law to the Power of the President. In January of 2006 -- in the immediate aftermath of revelations that President Bush had been breaking the law for years by spying on the telephone conversations of Americans without warrants -- Mansfield went to The Weekly Standard and authored a truly amazing article, which I wrote about here (see item 2).

Unlike dishonest Bush followers who ludicrously claimed that Bush's eavesdropping was not illegal, Mansfield embraced reality and candidly argued that President Bush possesses the power to break the law in order to fight The Terrorists. The headline of that article presented the same mutually exclusive choice as the WSJ article today: The Law and the President -- in a national emergency, who you gonna call?

In that article, Mansfied claimed, among other things, that our "enemies, being extra-legal, need to be faced with extra-legal force"; that the "Office of President" is "larger than the law"; that "the rule of law is not enough to run a government"; that "ordinary power needs to be supplemented or corrected by the extraordinary power of a prince, using wise discretion"; that "with one person in charge we can have both secrecy and responsibility"; and most of all:

Much present-day thinking puts civil liberties and the rule of law to the fore and forgets to consider emergencies when liberties are dangerous and law does not apply.

"Law does not apply" -- that is Mansfield's belief, and the belief of the Bush movement. I didn't think it was possible, but Mansfield, with today's article in The Wall St. Journal, actually goes even further in advocating pure lawlessness and tyranny than he did in that remarkable Weekly Standard screed. He begins by describing "the debate between the strong executive and its adversary, the rule of law." He then says: "In some circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law," but "the rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule."

The rule of law has two defects, each of which suggests the need for one-man rule. That is what is on the Op-Ed page of The Wall St. Journal this morning. The article is then filled with one paragraph after the next paying homage to the need for a Great Leader who stomps on the rule of law when he chooses -- literally:

The best source of energy turns out to be the same as the best source of reason--one man. One man, or, to use Machiavelli's expression, uno solo, will be the greatest source of energy if he regards it as necessary to maintaining his own rule. Such a person will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant. . .

The president takes an oath "to execute the Office of President" of which only one function is to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." In addition, he is commander-in-chief of the military, makes treaties (with the Senate), and receives ambassadors. He has the power of pardon, a power with more than a whiff of prerogative for the sake of a public good that cannot be achieved, indeed that is endangered, by executing the laws. . . .

In quiet times the rule of law will come to the fore, and the executive can be weak. In stormy times, the rule of law may seem to require the prudence and force that law, or present law, cannot supply, and the executive must be strong.

In the course of explaining how the rule of law applies only in "quiet times," Mansfield also argues that "civil liberties are subject to circumstances," not inalienable, and that "in time of war the greater dangers may be to the majority from a minority." Thus, he explains -- in what might be my favorite sentence -- "A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away."

I'm not going to spend much time rebutting the notion that the American President has the power to act as a Prince and override the rule of law when circumstances supposedly justify that. For one thing, given that this belief has governed our country since the 9/11 attacks, I've made the argument many times before, including here and here, as well as in my book.

But more so, one would hope that no response is really necessary, since most Americans -- outside of the authoritarian cult that has followed George W. Bush as Infallible War Leader -- instinctively understand that America does not recognize such a thing as a political official with the power of "one-man rule" that overrides the rule of law. That we are a nation of laws, not men, is so basic to our political identity that it should need no defense.

And for those with any lingering doubts about how repugnant Mansfield's vision is to the defining American political principle, I would simply turn the floor over to the great American revolutionary Thomas Paine (.pdf), writing in Common Sense:


The point here is not to spend much time arguing that Mansfield's authoritarian cravings are repugnant to our political traditions. The real point is that Mansfield's mindset is the mindset of the Bush movement, of the right-wing extremists who have taken over the Republican Party and governed our country completely outside of the rule of law for the last six years. Mansfield makes these arguments more honestly and more explicitly, but there is nothing unusual or uncommon about him. He is simply expounding the belief in tyrannical lawlessness on which the Bush movement (soon to be led by someone else, but otherwise unchanged) is fundamentally based.

This is why he is published in The Weekly Standard and The Wall St. Journal -- the two most influential organs for so-called "conservative" political thought. All sorts of the most political influential people in our country -- from Dick Cheney to Richard Posner to John Yoo and The Weekly Standard -- believe and have argued for exactly this vision of government. They literally do not believe in our constitutional framework and our most defining political values. They have declared a literally endless War which, they claim, not only justifies but compels the vesting of unlimited power in the President -- "unlimited" by Congress, the courts, American public opinion and the rule of law.

That continues to be the central political crisis we have in this country. It is an encouraging development that Congress is exercising aggressive oversight and investigative powers, but the administration is stonewalling completely, and will continue to, because they do not recognize any duty to respond, to answer questions, to be subject to scrutiny or accountability. We live in stormy times, and thus, as Mansfield says: "In stormy times, the rule of law may seem to require the prudence and force that law, or present law, cannot supply, and the executive must be strong."

That is why -- as jarring as it is -- it is actually necessary to ask presidential candidates whether they intend to exercise the power to imprison American citizens with no charges of any kind. The dominant political movement in this country believes in that power and has defended and exercised it. Mansfield's beliefs may be twisted and tyrannical and radical and profoundly un-American. But they are also the beliefs that have propelled our government for the last six years and -- absent some serious change -- very well may continue to propel it into the future.

UPDATE: I just want to add one related point here. Much of the intense dissatisfaction I have with the American media arises out of the fact that these extraordinary developments -- the dominant political movement advocating lawlessness and tyranny out in the open in The Wall St. Journal and Weekly Standard -- receive almost no attention.

While the Bush administration expressly adopts these theories to detain American citizens without charges, engage in domestic surveillance on Americans in clear violation of the laws we enacted to limit that power, and asserts a general right to disregard laws which interfere with the President's will, our media still barely discusses those issues.

They write about John Edwards' haircut and John Kerry's windsurfing and which political consultant has whispered what gossip to them about some painfully petty matter, but the extraordinary fact that our nation's dominant political movement is openly advocating the most radical theories of tyranny -- that "liberties are dangerous and law does not apply" -- is barely noticed by our most prestigious and self-loving national journalists. Merely to take note of that failure is to demonstrate how profoundly dysfunctional our political press is.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Print Email Digg it Del.icio.us

Permalink

Post a comment | Read comments (173)

Tuesday May 1, 2007 10:27 EST

Fred Hiatt and the "Triumphant Top Gun"

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Thus far in 2007, the most politically insightful observation was made by Rep. David Obey in responding to one of Fred Hiatt's war-mongering, patriotism-challenging screeds: "Let me submit to you the problem we have today is not that we didn't listen enough to people like the Washington Post. It's that we listened too much."

As the Four Year Anniversary of "Mission Accomplished Day" approaches, and we fondly recall the inspiring media swooning over George Bush's glorious Declaration of Victory while prancing around in his fighter pilot costume, there are few commentaries as revealing as the Bush-worshipping Editorial in The Washington Post authored by Fred Hiatt on May 11, 2003.

The Editorial Hiatt churned out that day (via Lexis -- and also, via sysprog, here) -- devoted to mocking Democrats for criticizing the Leader's Mission Accomplished Festival -- by itself could serve as a time capsule conveying to future generations all that went wrong in our country during this period. First is the Editorial's headline:

Misfiring at 'Top Gun'

George Bush shows off his powerful "top gun." Democrats who criticize him "misfire." The Editorial begins, right in its headline, with drooling adoration for the Leader's faux masculinity so transparent and cringe-inducing that it actually rivals the incomparable Chris Matthews-G. Gordon Liddy session that included admiration for the size of the President's genitalia (literally) so candid and frank that it was virtually pornographic. These are our serious pundits and foreign policy analysts.

This is the first paragraph of Hiatt's Editorial:

DID PRESIDENT BUSH arrive by fighter jet when he could have taken a helicopter -- for $ 7 less per hour? Did the USS Abraham Lincoln delay its return by a day so that Mr. Bush could make his dramatic tailhook landing? Did White House press secretary Ari Fleischer lie when he said that Mr. Bush had to arrive by jet and then switched his story to say that the president chose to land that way? Are the Democrats who are raising these questions secretly working for Karl Rove?

Democrats who question the Leader's conduct or challenge the veracity of his statements are foolish and are inviting their own political doom. War Leaders are endowed with the prerogative of telling us Glorious Lies. It continues:

Presidential staffs -- and we know this is a shocking concept -- worry quite a bit about the way their visits will look on TV -- and they work to get the most picturesque backdrop! And a president who wins a war -- whether you agreed with that war or not -- pretty much gets to greet returning troops wherever he wants.

The Leader won the War in Iraq in May, 2003. Let's repeat that: Fred Hiatt declared, in May, 2003, that George Bush had won the Iraq War. And the triumphant Commander-in-Chief is entitled to engage in whatever Victory Rituals he wants without having to be questioned or challenged. Then:

Not since the ado over whether Mr. Clinton held up Air Force One on the tarmac for an hour to get a $ 200 haircut has there been a controversy this fundamentally silly. The difference is that the Republicans scored political points with haircut-gate; here, Democrats are only hurting themselves with churlish and petty complaints.

The false "controversy" over Clinton's haircut was a powerful political weapon in the potent hands of the Republicans. But challenging President Bush's Declaration of Victory in a plainly not-yet-completed war, and objecting to the grotesque propaganda used to do it, is both petty and self-destructive. And:

Their real gripe with Mr. Bush is that he looked great; the president pulled off his "Top Gun" act as much as Michael Dukakis flubbed his spin in a tank.

George W. Bush is a real warrior who is strong, powerful, masculine and a genuine Man -- even swooningly hot ("he looked great") -- unlike the effeminate, clumsy loser Democrats. The sober, serious Hiatt continued:

And what was the result of their agitating? Even more showings of the same dramatic footage of a triumphant commander-in-chief. The only rational explanation for this conduct is that it is a brushback pitch designed to intimidate the Bush campaign from using carrier footage in campaign commercials -- but even then, it seems destined (a) not to work and (b) to backfire.

George W. Bush was not a public servant. He was not even merely the President. He was the "triumphant commander-in-chief." Therefore, to do anything other than genuflect to his warrior greatness was both improper and stupid. After all, he just won the Iraq War. Finally:

Yes, yes, Republicans seemed to demand investigations every time Mr. Clinton -- or Hillary Clinton, for that matter -- went outside the Beltway, but Democrats are sorely mistaken if they think the "they did it too" argument is going to have any sway with voters. Mr. Bush's visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln may have been the real kickoff of his presidential campaign. If the Democrats' tone-deaf handling of this episode is any indication, he may well get his four more years.

Just because Republicans investigated Bill Clinton for every petty accusation they could invent does not mean that Democrats should try to exercise oversight over the Triumphant Commander-in-Chief. Voters don't want the Victorious War President criticized, and to think otherwise is "tone-deaf."

Any decent human being who authored such idiocy -- who declared the War in Iraq to have been "won" back in May, 2003 and who openly drooled over the "top gun" of the "triumphant Commander-in-Chief" -- would feel a sense of deep shame and regret. But Fred Hiatt continues to prance around as the Serious Adult in Washington, the one who is sober and sophisticated about hard-nosed matters of foreign policy and war, and who continues to mock those who oppose the war as unserious losers -- as though Fred Hiatt's judgment is worth anything.

As Rep. Obey put it: "those of us who voted against the war in the first place wouldn't have nearly as hard a time getting us out of the war if people like The Washington Post and those who criticized us on the floor yesterday hadn't supported going into that stupid war in the first place."

UPDATE: The Politico -- appropriately enough -- is hosting the first debate for GOP presidential candidates, and is deciding which questions to submit based upon popular vote. Silent Patriot of Crooks and Liars had an excellent idea -- to submit a question asking the candidates to state their views as to whether the President has the power to imprison U.S. citizens without charges or process of any kind (a la Jose Padilla), in light of the prior revealing answers from Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney to that question.

S.P. has now submitted the question to The Politico, and has also posted instructions for how you can vote for that question, to ensure that it gets asked (you basically go here, search for "Silent Patriot," and click the "I LIKE THIS QUESTION" button under that question; it's now the most popular question, so it should be at the top).

It's a worthwhile exercise, I think, in order to compel the GOP candidates to go on record as to whether they intend to claim the power to imprison American citizens without charges (I'd like to hear Democratic candidates answer that as well). Vote early and often (rules permitting, of course).

UPDATE II: One has to acknowledge that this commenter at C&L makes quite a good point:

I just can't believe that here in America such a question would be even asked. What the hell happened to our country? Can you imagine that question being asked in the past elections before 2004? No one would have even thought of it.

The most extremist behavior has become so normalized in the last five years that it is easy to forget just how radical it is. The fact that the question even needs to be asked at all -- let alone that most, if not all, of the GOP candidates will almost certainly embrace (or at least not reject) the tyrannical power of process-less imprisonment of U.S. citizens -- is itself rather remarkable.

UPDATE III: The question we submitted regarding lawless detentions of U.S. citizens is now at the top of the list as the most popular question (but keep voting for it to ensure it stays there). As a result, we have decided to submit as many questions as possible, to ensure that the GOP candidates are forced to answer real questions (the top 20 or so highest vote-getting questions will be asked of the candidates).

Thus far, we have submitted these additional questions:

* Do you think the process of waterboarding -- where the U.S. takes prisoners, straps them to a chair, and pours water on their face so they are in terror of drowning to death -- is a practice consistent with America's moral credibility in the world? -- Vote for that question here (search for "Silent Patriot" or the text of the question) -- two of these questions are now on that page for the top vote-getters

* A recent worldwide poll showed that under the Bush presidency, America has become the third most unpopular country in the world -- right behind Iran and just ahead of North Korea. Why has that happened? -- Vote for that question here (search for "CrooksandLiars" or the text of the question)

To vote for those questions, go to the linked page, find the question, and click the "I LIKE THIS QUESTION" button under each questions (you may have to click to the next page to find it). If you have suggestions for more questions, feel free to email them or leave them in comments (there is a 250-character maximum, so they must be quite short and concise).

Justice Department tugged to the right

Under Bush, the department has been tainted by politics, many say.

By Tom Hamburger
Times Staff Writer

March 25, 2007

WASHINGTON — Not long after President Bush was first sworn in, White House political guru Karl Rove and his lieutenants met with officials of nearly every Cabinet agency to brief top officials on the latest polling data and issues that could influence voters and key constituencies.

But the departments of Justice, Defense and State were exempt. Given their missions — to administer federal laws, protect national security and conduct foreign policy — it was considered inappropriate to make such partisan presentations to them.

Nonetheless, suspicions that the White House's partisan political priorities may have made their way into Justice Department decision-making have grown in recent weeks.

Not only have two of eight recently fired U.S. attorneys complained that in specific cases they felt pressure to make decisions that would advance Republican political interests, but last week several former career officials in the Justice Department said they had felt similar pressures on voting rights cases.

"The political decision-making process that led to the dismissal of eight United States attorneys was standard practice in the Civil Rights Division years before these revelations," Joseph D. Rich, recently retired head of the division's voting rights section, said in a sparsely attended House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing last week.

"This connection should not be minimized," he said.

All administrations set law enforcement priorities in the Justice Department. The Clinton administration emphasized white-collar crime and drugs, and Bush has pushed for action on terrorism, border control and voter fraud. Pressuring political appointees and career workers to follow those priorities is considered appropriate.

But injecting partisan considerations into individual cases is another matter.

Some Civil Rights Division veterans — mostly Democrats — have been expressing concern for months. But last week more officials spoke out about what they described as a pattern of partisan decision-making on individual cases.

They said their superiors, who were political appointees, repeatedly bottled up cases that might harm the electoral position of Republicans while encouraging the staff to pursue matters that might damage Democrats' prospects.

Department spokesman Erik Ablin said the allegations were recycled and wrong.

"These are not new allegations. If you look at the actual records of these cases in the courts, it can't be squared with what they are saying."

Nonetheless, the critics tied their allegations to those described by two of the fired U.S. attorneys. David C. Iglesias of Albuquerque, N.M., and John McKay of Seattle have said they felt pressure from Republican officials to prosecute alleged voter fraud in their states.

Both said their offices reviewed the cases and concluded the evidence did not warrant prosecution.

The White House and Justice Department officials have said some of the fired prosecutors did not adequately pursue voter fraud and other administration priorities.

The complaining former Civil Rights Division employees may be well-intentioned, but their allegations are without merit, the officials said, pointing to stepped-up protection of voters speaking foreign languages. They also cited court decisions that they said generally supported the Justice Department in this area.

Rich, a 37-year department veteran, said a partisan litmus test in hiring and decision-making has undermined a tradition of nonpartisan professionalism in the division.

"Unfortunately, since this administration took office, that professionalism and nonpartisan commitment to the historic mission of the division has been replaced by unprecedented political decision-making," he told the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and civil liberties on Thursday.

Rich's views were backed by other department veterans who had left the department in recent years. Many, like Rich, have joined civil rights organizations, such as the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, where Rich now works.

"The U.S. attorneys' firing confirmed my view that at the highest levels of DOJ it was decided that politics would play a role in how decisions were made," said Mark Posner, a former civil rights division attorney who contributed to a book-length report released by a civil rights group in Washington last week called "The Erosion of Rights: Declining Civil Rights Enforcement Under the Bush Administration."

The Civil Rights Division veterans focused their criticism on major voting case decisions over the last six years that they say have generally benefited the GOP.

The most recent case concerned a 2005 Georgia law that required voters to provide photo identification. Staff attorneys raised concerns about the law after the Georgia secretary of state supplied data showing that tens of thousands of voters might not have driver's licenses or other prescribed forms of identification. They said the plan could effectively disenfranchise large numbers of black voters.

The staff objections were ignored, department veterans said, and the Georgia ID rule was approved by the Justice Department 24 hours after the staff report was filed.

Rich and other former department staff have also charged that redistricting cases reviewed by the division have consistently benefited the GOP. These cases were particularly sensitive because redistricting has been a high priority for Rove and earlier GOP strategists. Republican success in redrawing congressional districts has helped increase the number of so-called safe seats for GOP candidates in recent years, especially in the South.

Delays by political appointees effectively allowed "the Republican Party in Mississippi to obtain implementation of a congressional redistricting plan that had been drawn at the party's behest," Rich said in congressional testimony.

The Supreme Court later upheld the process by which the plan was drawn up without addressing the plan's merits or whether the Justice Department delays were inappropriate.

Rich said unanimous staff objections to the Texas redistricting plan engineered by former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were ignored, and the plan was approved with encouragement from Republican officials in the department.

The Supreme Court later ruled 5-4 that most of the map was proper.

Though legal actions have generally declined in the division since Bush was elected, Rich and others said that shortly before the 2004 election, the division filed a series of "friend of the court briefs" in three cases challenging ballot provisions of the federal voting statute.

"In each case, the brief supported the position of the Republican party," Rich said.

tom.hamburger@latimes.com

The One Video Clip Explaining Everything Wrong With Iraq, The Media, And The Right

March 18, 2007

On Meet the Press, they expressed their commitment to "fair and balanced" debate (see MTP's horrid record here) by having on disgraced war supporter Richard Perle and indicted, deposed ex-congressman Tom DeLay against Admiral and Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak and Former Democratic Rep. Tom Andrews of Win Without War.

The killing blow had Perle and DeLay lecturing ADMIRAL Sestak on military strategy. Cons so believe their own propaganda outlets like Fox that they believe that their word is the word of God, what they say is remade in reality, what they say counts and nobody else does. They believe this crap the same way fundamentalists believe their twisted interpretation of the Koran. It is two sides of the same whacked-out coin.

MORE: Permalink

Posted at 12:30 PM in Conservatives, Iraq, Media, Republicans |

How The Reich, Er, Right Went Wrong

Thursday, Mar. 15, 2007

How The Right Went Wrong

By Karen Tumulty

A generation ago, fresh off the second biggest electoral landslide in American history, Ronald Reagan surveyed the wreckage that had been the opposition and declared victory. Standing before 1,700 true believers at the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he proclaimed, "The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital." At this year's conference two weeks ago, Reagan's name was invoked more than anyone else's. But the mood at the most storied annual gathering of conservatives was anything but triumphal. John McCain, the Establishment favorite to win the 2008 Republican nomination, skipped CPAC entirely but did show up on David Letterman the night before, choosing the most aggressively glib venue to semiofficially announce his candidacy. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was there to make his pitch for 2008 but had to compete with a man who was working the crowd in a dolphin costume and a T-shirt identifying him as flip romney: just another flip flopper from massachusetts. Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani barely mentioned the social issues on which he parts ways with conservatives, except to joke, "I don't agree with myself on everything." And the only memorable sound bite of the whole affair came from right-wing telepundit Ann Coulter, whose idea of an ideological rallying cry was to declare Democratic hopeful John Edwards a "faggot." The condemnation that followed, in which at least seven newspapers banished her column from their opinion pages, became a ragged coda for the state of a movement that had once been justly proud of its ability to win an argument.

These are gloomy and uncertain days for conservatives, who—except for the eight-year Clinton interregnum—have dominated political power and thought in this country since Reagan rode in from the West. Their tradition goes back even further, to Founding Fathers who believed that people should do things for themselves and who shook off a monarchy in their conviction that Big Government is more to be feared than encouraged. The Boston Tea Party, as Reagan used to point out, was an antitax initiative.

But everything that Reagan said in 1985 about "the other side" could easily apply to the conservatives of 2007. They are handcuffed to a political party that looks unsettlingly like the Democrats did in the 1980s, one that is more a collection of interest groups than ideas, recognizable more by its campaign tactics than its philosophy. The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan's legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It's true that Reagan didn't live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush's apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick.

Set adrift as it is, the right understandably feels anxious as it contemplates who will carry Reagan's mantle into November 2008. "We're in the political equivalent of a world without the law of gravity," says Republican strategist Ralph Reed. "Nothing we have known in the past seems relevant." At the top of the Republican field in the latest Time poll is the pro-choice, pro-gay-rights former mayor of liberal New York City. Giuliani's lead is as much as 19 points over onetime front runner McCain. But neither Republican manages better than a statistical tie in a hypothetical matchup against the two leading Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Giuliani's lead in the early polls doesn't necessarily mean the Republican race is getting any closer to the kind of early coronation the party usually manages to engineer. A New York Times/CBS News poll out this week found that nearly 6 out of 10 Republican primary voters who responded said they were unsatisfied with the choice of candidates running for the party's nomination; by comparison, nearly 6 in 10 Democrats pronounced themselves happy with their field. The Democrats were also far more confident in the future. Whereas 40% of Republicans predicted the other party would win the White House next year, whomever it nominates, only 12% of Democrats felt that pessimistic about their chances. Then there is the real worry that the whole exercise might already be a lost cause. "In this environment, nobody looks good if you have an R by your name. It doesn't matter who you are," says a Republican campaign consultant in the Midwest. "I don't see how that changes between now and Election Day. It's the war; it's huge. It's just huge."

The Iraq war has challenged the conservative movement's custodianship of America's place in the world, as well as its claim to competence. Reagan restored a sense of America's mission as the "city on a hill" that would be a light to the world and helped bring about the defeat of what he very undiplomatically christened "the evil empire." After 9/11 Bush found his own evil empire, in fact a whole axis of evil. But he hasn't produced Reagan's results: North Korea is nuclear, Iran swaggers across the world stage, Iraq is a morass. "Conservatives are divided on the Iraq war, but there is a growing feeling it was a mistake," says longtime conservative activist and fund-raiser Richard Viguerie. "It's not a Ronald Reagan?type of idea to ride on our white horse around the world trying to save it militarily. Ronald Reagan won the cold war by bankrupting the Soviet Union. No planes flew. No tanks rolled. No armies marched."

Then there are the scandals and the corruption. The dismay that voters expressed in last fall's midterm election was aimed not so much at conservatism as at the G.O.P's failure to honor it with a respect for law and order. And now that subpoena power gives the Democrats their first chance to shine a light into the crevices of an Administration and its very unconservative approach to Executive power, the final years of Bush's presidency are likely to be punctuated by one controversy after another. The past weeks alone have produced a parade of revelations: leftover questions about Vice President Dick Cheney's role in the I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby case; the betrayal by neglect of the war wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and veterans hospitals across the country; the connected dots showing that the White House and the Justice Department exploited the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, of all things, to engineer a purge of U.S. Attorneys across the country.

Conservatives are in many ways victims of their successes, and there have indeed been big ones. At 35%, the top tax rate is about half what it was when Reagan took office; the Soviet Union broke up; inflation is barely a nuisance; crime is down; and welfare is reformed. But if all that's true, what is conservatism's rationale for the next generation? What set of goals is there to hold together a coalition that has always been more fractious than it seemed to be from the outside, with its realists and its neoconservatives, its religious ground troops and its libertarian intelligentsia, its Pat Buchanan populists and its Milton Friedman free traders? That is why the challenge for Republican conservatives goes far deeper than merely trying to figure out how to win the next election. 2008 is a question with a very clear premise: Does the conservative movement still have what it takes to redeem its grand old traditions—or, better, to chart new territory?

There was a time when John McCain would have seemed the most natural heir to Reagan. It was Reagan who first introduced McCain to a conservative audience—ironically enough, given McCain's conspicuous no-show this year, at CPAC's 1974 conference. McCain was one of three former Vietnam POWs in attendance. With their release, Reagan said, "this country had its spirits lifted as they have never been lifted in many years." Twenty-five years later, McCain was a fiscal conservative and security hawk serving his third term in Barry Goldwater's old Senate seat when Nancy Reagan picked him to accept the American Conservative Union's Conservative of the Century Award on behalf of her husband, who was too incapacitated by Alzheimer's to do it himself.

But the right's view of McCain changed when he ran for President in 2000. What bothered conservatives wasn't just the fact that he challenged the Anointed One in a party that treats its primaries like a royal accession. It was also the glee with which he went after all its institutions, from the special interests to the theocrats to Big Business. "Remember that the Establishment is against us," he exulted after winning the New Hampshire primary. "This is an insurgency campaign, and I'm Luke Skywalker." Then again, as both Reagan and Goldwater showed, there is nothing more fundamentally conservative than an insurgency.

On his second try, McCain seems to have become much of what he used to fight against. The deficit hawk who had opposed Bush's tax cuts voted to extend them. The apostate who counted the Rev. Jerry Falwell among the "agents of intolerance" seven years ago delivered the commencement speech at Falwell's Liberty University last May. Ask the candidate what his message is this time around, and he tells Time, "Experience, background, record and vision. Who is best capable to address the challenge of the 21st century, which is the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism?" But what about reform? These days McCain has to be prompted on that one, which he lumps into "all of those things."

McCain veterans insist their candidate hasn't changed, just his prospects. "The key difference is, hopefully, this is a winning campaign," says his chief strategist John Weaver. Trying to rekindle the old magic, they rearranged his schedule to put him back on the Straight Talk Express bus this month. But that could distract him from another goal in this critical period: building up his campaign coffers so that he has the financial muscle of a front runner when the tallies are released for the first reporting period, which ends March 31.

Certainly, McCain's operation has an institutional feel, for better or worse. Whereas he ran his 2000 campaign from shabby offices with a single toilet, McCain 2.0 is housed on the 13th floor (superstitiously identified by the building as the "M" floor) of a soulless office high-rise in northern Virginia. McCain's 2000 campaign was a free for all, but his 2008 operation is more conventional, with far more hands on the wheel.

Being embraced by the Establishment isn't such a good thing when the Establishment is in disrepute. And on the biggest issue on which McCain has shown backbone and hasn't wavered—his support for the war and Bush's troop buildup—he happens to find himself on the opposite side of the fence from 72% of Americans in the latest Time poll.

If McCain is playing up to the right, it's not working all that well. He is still at odds with the conservative base: flexible on immigration, opposed to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and dedicated to preserving the Senate's right to filibuster judicial nominees. "The problem with McCain, and I don't know how he fixes it," says evangelical leader Richard Lands, "is that he's so unpredictable. What makes him appealing to independents makes him worrisome to social conservatives. They say, 'Yeah, he's pro-life, but will that have anything to do with who he nominates to the Supreme Court?' People don't like unpredictability in candidates."

But then the only person who beats McCain in the polls is even further out of line with conservatives. Just out on YouTube is a 1989 video, which quickly made its way to the Drudge Report, in which Giuliani declares, "There must be public funding for abortions for poor women. We cannot deny any woman the right to make her own decision about abortion because she lacks resources." Also getting fresh play are the unsavory details of his second divorce (familiar to anyone who picked up a New York City tabloid at the time): Giuliani's wife got the news that they were splitting when he announced it at a press conference, and then the couple squabbled over whether she or his mistress would get to stay in Gracie Mansion, the mayor's official residence. Now there is an additional, painfully raw story line about how his third marriage has left him estranged from his children.

What draws conservatives to Giuliani, though, are his other qualities: the leadership and strength he showed as New York City's mayor on 9/11; his record transformation of a crumbling, crime-ridden city into a safe and clean one; and the need for that kind of toughness in a dangerous world. Giuliani is talking to conservatives now in a language they want to hear. He promises that whatever his personal views, the judges he appoints as President would be "strict constructionists" in the mold of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts, which is generally understood to mean against abortion and gay marriage.

Romney, meanwhile, has taken a whisk broom to his record in liberal Massachusetts, where he twice ran for statewide office as a pro-choice candidate dedicated to "full equality for America's gay and lesbian citizens." He now says he opposes Roe v. Wade and describes himself as "a champion of traditional marriage." In Massachusetts, he bucked the National Rifle Association by supporting the Brady Bill and an assault-weapons ban, boasting, "I don't line up with the nra." Lately he brags that he has joined the gun-rights organization as a life member. He did that in August.

Romney registers a meager 9% in TIME's poll of Republicans, but there are plenty of signs that conservatives are trying to overlook his past and fall in love. He won the straw poll at CPAC, and the endorsements are piling up. Romney has also picked up much of the political operation of Jeb Bush, who is the could-have-been candidate most longed for on the right. Money doesn't seem to be a problem either; Romney raised $6.5 million on a single National Call Day in early January. The campaign is flush enough to be on the air at this early date with ads to introduce Romney to voters as a "business legend" who "rescued the Olympics" and "turned around a Democratic state." The Mormon in the race also points out—jokingly, but with an edge—that he is the only leading contender who is still with his first wife.

Some on the right have been keeping a light in the window for the last conservative to have led a revolution. Newt Gingrich recently confessed his past marital infidelity on the Christian radio show of James Dobson, admitting he was carrying on with the House aide who became his third wife even as he was lambasting Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the upside-down leap of reasoning that this campaign season has wrought in the movement, hanging his dirty sheets from the window was enough to convince everyone that Gingrich is running—and landed him an invitation from Falwell to be this year's Liberty University commencement speaker. "He has admitted his moral shortcomings to me, as well, in private conversations," Falwell wrote in his weekly newsletter. "And he has also told me that he has, in recent years, come to grips with his personal failures and sought God's forgiveness."

It's no wonder that other potential Republican candidates, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and former Senator turned television star Fred Thompson, are deciding that they can afford to wait a while before making up their minds. There is a full lineup of conservatives who are already in the race and looking for lightning to strike: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and California Congressman Duncan Hunter, to name just a few. Many conservatives say a long election season offers the advantage of letting conservatives work through their doubts about their options for 2008, especially when they turn their attention to November. "When it's Hillary vs. Giuliani," asks antitax activist Grover Norquist, "who's going to vote for Hillary?" But others on the right say they are looking at this election as a write-off. "I'm not focusing on 2008," Viguerie says. "Realistically, it will probably take until the year 2016" before the movement regains anything resembling its former glory.

And where will those new ideas and leaders come from? In this magazine, conservative columnist William Kristol has cited two possible sources, both of which focus on the very middle-class voters that Reagan so successfully peeled away from their Democratic moorings. In a forthcoming book, conservative authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam identify these voters as "Sam's Club Republicans," who could benefit from market-friendly health-care and tax policies that are aimed at families and especially at at-home parents. Another conservative thinker, Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues along a similar vein with a set of policy proposals that he calls "Putting Parents First." Bush's signature approach to domestic policy fell short in that regard, Levin wrote in the Weekly Standard. "Compassionate conservatism, for all its virtues, does not even try to address itself to parents. A conservative agenda that did so would not only cement a relationship with these voters, it would also appeal to many with similar worries who do not share the strong cultural predilections that have drawn middle- and lower-middle-class parents to vote for Republicans."

The Gipper would probably have had little patience for all the fretting his party is doing over its brand. But he also understood, because he embodied the idea, that progress comes from going up against the status quo. To become "creators of the future," as he called his compatriots, he might have suggested that they look back to their past.

—with reporting by Jay Carney and Michael Duffy/Washington and Nancy Gibbs/New York