2008: The Gauntlet

Forty.

Fifty-seven.

Sixty-three.

Those are the three numbers Brad Woodhouse of Americans United for Change is begging progressives to worry about in the months leading up to the November election.

"Forty" represents President Ronald Reagan's lowest approval rating, at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, in 1987. "Fifty-seven" represents his approval rating a year later. "Sixty-three" was his approval rating when he left office in January of 1989.

The "Reagan rebound," he said at this morning's panel "Bushed: Conservative Failure and the Danger the Legacy Lives On," "allowed them to define conservative government as a success." It had, indeed, been a conscious plan: squeeze out all the approval points they could in order to spin the press into recalling President Reagan just as they ended up doing—as popular from start to finish, across the board. And, Brad argued with forceful brilliance, that's precisely the conservatives' strategy for the final seven months of George W. Bush's presidency. They've even admitted it: if they can just get his approval ratings up into the forties by the inauguration of the next president, they can more credibly claim to credulous reporters that Bush was at least a moderately successful president. They can claim conservatism hasn't failed.

Thus the cause Brad Woodhouse and Americans United are devoted their professional lives to this year. They call it the Bush Legacy Project. The goal: "no Reagan Rebound for Bush."

What if, Brad thundered from the podium (with hilarious Powerpoint slides—a liberal driving a wooden stake though the vampire conservatism, that sort of thing), there had been no Reagan Rebound? What if progressives had thought ahead and launched a concerted campaign to keep Reagan's negatives down, where they deserved to be, of course, in the first place?

No President George H.W. Bush, certainly.

But even better. No headlines, in 1994, like "Reagan Name a Great Tool for Election"—and no chance of Newt Gingrich drafting off the public's vague perception that being called a "Reaganite" was a desirable thing, all the way to the conservative takeover of Congress. No headlines, like the ones in 2000, reading, "Bush: I'm Ronald Reagan's Heir."

Because the pathetic fumes of vestigial Reagan worship are the only card they truly have to play. We cannot give them the opportunity to play that card with Bush. We also can't let them get away with claiming Bush was somehow a betrayer of conservatism. If they do, conservatism can live to fight another day. "Don't like Bush? Doesn't matter. He wasn't a conservative. Conservatism is still the greatest thing since oven-fresh baguettes. We got rid of Bush, so now we can move on to a true conservative."

The Bush Legacy Project is investing considerable sums to render that impossible: paid ads, coordinated rapid response, online video, issue forums, bus ads, billboards, concerts—and even better, Brad promised, the "Bush Legacy Bus." A Greyhound-sized thing, wrapped around 360 degrees with graphics making the case that Bush is conservatism, and—altogether now, Big Con readers!—conservatism has failed. "It's going to be tricked out," he pronounced with fiendish relish. Flat-screen TV's, booming sound, the works. It will also be toured through some 200 locations in key battleground states. The right has thrown down the gauntlet: rehabilitate Bush, to rehabilitate conservatism, and if they can't do that, sever Bush from conservatism. Bottom line: "We have accepted the challenge."

So have I. Watch this space.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future