This e-mail is along those lines, Jonah:
Peggy Noonan wrote this in 2002. I think she was right then and I
think this is what we’re seeing now too:
The reason is Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The reason is that GWB is doing an FDR.
And I think people know this without quite knowing it.
FDR would sacrifice anything, he’d tack left right and center, to win
World War II. You can almost literally trace the end of FDR’s New Deal
legislation to the beginning of the war in Europe in September 1939. Yes,
the court-packing scandal had something to do with it, and so did the
Supreme Court finding aspects of the New Deal unconstitutional. But after
Hitler moved on Poland, Roosevelt sacrificed almost all his liberal
domestic plans, angering his own supporters and disappointing his party’s
interest groups, in order to mollify conservatives and refocus voters’
attention away from the Depression and onto the war. He knew he would need
broadened support to execute a war. He disappointed much of his base to
get it.
Mr. Bush is doing the same thing. He is accepting what he thinks he has to
accept (pork, a bad trade bill) in order to keep or expand the power
balance he has in Washington, and in order to keep from angering or
offending your basic, normal, politically nonobsessed citizen.