US President George W. Bush begins his second term with the Republican Party in its strongest position in more than 50 years, but his clout is already being tested by Republican doubts about his domestic agenda, rising national unease about Iraq, and the threat of second-term overreaching, officials in both parties say.
With this election producing a second-term Republican president and solid majorities in both the Senate and the House, Bush's party is more dominant than at any time since Herbert Hoover was elected in 1928. As he embarks on an explicit effort to put an imprint on politics and policy that will long outlast his presidency, his advisors are heady over what several described as an opportunity to make a long-lasting realignment in the nation's political balance of power.
ILLUSTRATION: YUSHA
But even those advisors said Bush had at most two years before he faced the ebb that historically saps the authority of a second-term incumbent, a relatively short time to sell a far-reaching agenda to a wary Congress and a skeptical public. And Republicans say his situation could be complicated by the absence of an obvious heir, opening the way for competing wings of the party to battle over details and tactics on the very issues Bush is embracing.
Richard Norton Smith, a presidential scholar who is director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, said the Republican Party had "come closer now than they've been at any time in my lifetime" to being the nation's majority party. But Smith said historical cycles over the past century suggested that its dominance might be coming to a close.
"The calendar alone tells you this conservative cycle is long in the tooth," he said. "Add to that the divisions, or latent divisions, that exist with your own coalition. Once Bush is removed from the scene, and once he becomes in effect a lame duck, all those tensions are there."
The White House has described the election results as a mandate, and in his inaugural address, Bush laid out his vision in sweeping terms.
But some Republicans said they were worried about overconfidence, including South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who invoked his experience serving alongside former speaker Newt Gingrich when Republicans first captured the House in 1994.
"Hubris is deadly," Sanford said.
And Gary Bauer, a conservative who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said that while he applauded Bush's ambition in pursuing two major domestic goals -- overhauling social security and the tax code -- those issues, if handled incorrectly, could undercut Bush's long-term goal for the party.
"They could provide the president's opponents with fodder for some of the old canards, that Republicans don't want a social safety net, that they're the party of the rich, all those things," Bauer said. "It's going to take a very astute effort and massive amounts of presidential involvement to keep that from happening."
Bush received a reminder of the difficulties he faces on the Sunday talk shows, as Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who is talking about running for president, said on ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos that he did not believe the White House had a strategy to extricate the US from Iraq.
On NBC's Meet the Press, Republican Representative Bill Thomas, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, laid out his own ideas for how to change the social security system, which were to a large degree different from what the White House has suggested.
Democrats, even while struggling with their own party divisions and confusion, are showing signs of coalescing into an aggressive opposition party, especially on issues like judicial appointments and social security.
Bush has repeatedly overcome doubts about his ability to win approval of controversial proposals. And his political advisors are confident going into this second term. They say that the party is poised to at least begin the broad political realignment and the diminishment of the Democratic Party that has been a goal of Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove.
"It is now fair to say that today the Republican Party is the dominant party in America," said Ken Mehlman, the new Republican National Committee chairman. "It's not a deep majority, it is not a broad majority, but it is a very strong majority."
"Now what does that mean?" Mehlman continued in an interview at his new office on Capitol Hill. "We're certainly not in the position that [Franklin Roosevelt's] Democrats were in the 1930s and 40s. We're not the overwhelming favorite. There are going to be challenges. We're going to lose elections sometime. But it does mean we're in a very strong position."
Before 2001, the last time Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress was 1953. Gary Jacobson, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, argued that given the longevity and margins of Republican control in the House and Senate over the past decade, this was the most powerful period the party had enjoyed since 1928, the year Hoover was elected and Republicans held 56 Senate seats and 267 House seats. The numbers now are 55 and 232.
With this presidential election, the Democrats lost a nearly 30-year advantage in party identification in presidential elections; in a survey of voters leaving the polls, 37 percent said they were Republican and 37 percent said they were Democrats. Bush won by nearly 3 million votes after losing the popular vote last time. He drew more than 11 million more votes than in 2000; by contrast, Democratic Senator John Kerry drew about 8 million more votes than Al Gore, the Democratic candidate in 2000.
It is a sign of Republican ascendance that the party is already forcing its opponents to re-examine some of their most strongly held positions. Democrats, for example, have been openly discussing whether to decrease their emphasis on one of their touchstone issues, abortion rights, after an election in which Bush ran aggressively as an opponent of abortion.
Still, Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, disputed that long-term meaning of the gains, arguing Democrats would have won the White House had 60,000 votes shifted in Ohio, and said Bush and had enjoyed a "huge advantage" because of the attacks of Sept. 11.
"George Bush is in serious difficulties on social security, tax reform, all the cornerstones of the Bush agenda that the Republicans can't agree on," McAuliffe said.
And even Republicans acknowledge there are questions about the durability and significance of the changes taking place. Most fundamentally, it is difficult today to measure whether the Republican successes of 2002 and last year were merely a ratification of Bush himself -- a president running for re-election in the middle of a war -- or the start of a long-lasting shift to the Republican Party.
"It's still a story waiting to be told," said Matthew Dowd, a senior Bush campaign advisor. "You can't say after a national election that you won by 2.7 percent nationally, and a lot of states were close, that the Republican Party is going to be dominant."
The critical question for Bush, his advisors and Democrats say, is the success or failure of his agenda, both in terms of getting it through Congress and winning support for it from the public. Recent polls show apprehension about important aspects of his social security plan, and an overwhelming sentiment that Bush does not know how to end the war in Iraq, which is increasingly unpopular.
And Sanford pointed to the public perception of an economy in trouble, saying, "If we were to see some sort of storm in our economy, well, there are advantages to holding all the cards, and there are disadvantages."
Republican leaders say the challenge now is to deliver on the ambitious agenda Bush set out in last year's campaign. He is trying to persuade Congress and the American people to embrace his plan to reshape social security by adding private investment accounts and to create a new tax system that rewards more saving and investment. He wants to reduce the costs that lawsuits and regulations impose on businesses and put more conservative judges in the nation's courtrooms.
Against the backdrop of continued violence in Iraq, Bush is seeking to rally the nation behind a national security policy that is at once pre-emptive, interventionist and wrapped in a moral imperative to spread freedom.
If he can succeed at all or even most of those undertakings, and those changes leave voters feeling more prosperous and secure, Bush's aides say it could usher in an enduring change in the balance of political power in the nation. If he fails, Republicans may well remember this moment as little more than a fleeting alignment of the political stars: the short-lived victory of an incumbent president running for re-election in wartime against an unsteady opponent and a weakened opposition party.
David Mayhew, a professor of political science at Yale, suggested that Bush's task was not easy and that the historical import of his victory had been overstated.
"I do not think this is a lasting, mountainous achievement in terms of building coalitions," Mayhew said. "Knowing what we know now, the presidential election of 2008 is probably a toss-up."
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