CHICAGO: The 2008 election is poised to end the Republican era in American politics – an era that began in reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the Vietnam war and the civil rights revolution, was pioneered by Richard Nixon, consolidated by Ronald Reagan and wrecked by George W. Bush.

Almost every aspect of the Republican ascendancy has been discredited and lies in tatters – its policies, politics, and even its version of patriotism – down to the rock-bottom notion that progressive taxation itself, initiated by a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who John McCain hails as his personal icon, is unpatriotic.

McCain’s own chronic helplessness in establishing rapport, prompting him to latch on to mediums from Sarah Palin to Joe the Plumber, is aggravated by his party’s decay. He is an ironic character to make the last stand on behalf of a party he has been at odds with for virtually his whole career.

McCain is less a victim of age than of the age – the end of the age of Reagan. Realignments in American party politics are the consequence of catastrophe. The coming of the civil war produced the Republican party that more or less ruled until the Great Depression brought about the New Deal. The modern Republican era began with the fragmentation of the liberal Democratic consensus in 1968 over Vietnam, civil rights and urban mayhem. Southerners and the urban ethnic working and middle classes shifted allegiance, forging a coalition that delivered 49 states first to Nixon in 1972 and then to Reagan in 1984.

The strange death of Republican America has been a long time in the making. As early as 1988, the Reagan coalition threatened to unravel. Only when the Republican candidate, George H.W. Bush, resorted to a vicious campaign, conjuring the pledge of allegiance to the flag and an African-American rapist named Willie Horton, against a worthy and weak Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, was the hold on power preserved.

In 1992, Bill Clinton won back the white working class and parts of the South, but Republicans fiercely resisted his efforts to restore the authority of progressive government. They shut down the federal government twice and impeached him in the struggle for power. Then in 2000, when his vice-president, Al Gore, ran to succeed him, the conservative majority of the supreme court, by a five to four decision, ordered that votes in Florida not be counted and handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

Bush was surrounded by the aura of illegitimacy until September 11 granted him what the election had not. But even before this, he acted as if he had won office with a commanding mandate, radicalising the unfulfilled agendas of Nixon and Reagan.

Two figures whose origins lay in the Nixon operation, his vice-president Dick Cheney and chief political strategist Karl Rove, provided the grand designs for an imperial presidency and a permanent Republican majority. Just as Reagan was a more radical version of Nixon, Bush was a radicalisation of Reagan. After nearly two terms, his experiment has resulted in worldwide disaster.

McCain, Bush’s bitter rival in 2000, won the Republican nomination only because conservatives were too fractured to unify behind a single candidate. Bush had shattered them and his influence in choosing a successor was nil. McCain’s choice of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate was a symptom of his simultaneous disdain for his party and need to patch over its divisions.

Despite Bush’s unprecedented unpopularity and the general disgrace of the Republicans, two weeks after the Republican convention McCain led in the polls and the key swing states. He appeared to be defying political gravity. Obama, still an uncertainty, was sliding. His advisers held panicked emergency meetings.

Then came the crushing blow of the economic crisis. The sub-prime mortgage problem and widespread housing foreclosures was already an issue in the early spring.

But few predicted the collapse of great financial houses just eight weeks before voters were due to go to the polls. Never before in US history had such a sudden and profound shock to the system struck so close to an election.

The crisis brought out the greatest vulnerabilities of the Republicans. Even former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testified that he had been blinkered by ideology. With Reaganite conservatism dishonoured, McCain was cornered into half-denying his beliefs.

During the congressional debate over the bail-out of the banks, Obama adopted a posture of dignified caution. McCain, however, threw himself into the maelstrom without any plan. The rightwing members of the House of Representatives, contemptuous of McCain and tired of making excuses for the Bush White House, voted it down, demolishing McCain’s claim to experience, stability and effectiveness. The bail-out eventually passed, but he did not recover.McCain desperately elevated Joe the Plumber as the voice of the people against Obama’s “socialism”. Joe was a ghost of Republican campaigns past, the stalwart member of Nixon’s “silent majority”, the “Reagan Democrat”.

But the symbol was an atavism; the reality was a guy on the make seeking to own a business and avoid taxes. Once the spotlight focused on him, he hired an agent to hustle commercial endorsements and a book deal. Just as McCain’s campaign has been an extended seance trying to call forth Reagan, he found himself at a rally summoning Joe the Plumber, who wasn’t there. “You’re all Joe the Plumber!” yelled McCain in frustration.

McCain long despised Bush, then embraced him and, by the campaign’s end, condemned him. One thing he has not done is to reflect on his own incoherence and whether it represents more than the vicissitudes of ambition. Bush, too, envisioned himself as Reagan’s true son. In his campaign McCain has acted as though he had only to repeat magical phrases and symbols that lifted Republicans into the White House to restore the natural order.

Obama may still be a largely unknown quantity, but the judgment will be made about the known. The election will determine more than the identity of the president. It will decide whether one era is to end and another will begin.—Dawn/Guardian News Service