We should have known the long-shot presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was doomed when the maverick McCain first opposed, during the Republican primaries, Gov. George W. Bush's big tax plan with a characteristic wisecrack: "I don't think Bill Gates needs a tax cut."
For conforming Republicans of the true party faith, McCain had admitted the ultimate heresy. To argue that the fabulously wealthy founder of Microsoft did not need or deserve a tax cut was to openly provide aid, comfort and ammunition to rabble-rousing critics on the other side.
It was OK if you wanted to abolish the U.S. Department of Education during the last administration and now want President Bush to increase that department's budget by 11.5 percent. You can still be a good Republican. It's also even acceptable in most Republican circles to be pro-choice on abortion. But you'd better understand one immutable truth: Republicans believe in and stand for tax cuts especially any that lighten the painful burden on America's Most Productive and Most Successful residents.
Not that long ago, Republicans had many arrows in their philosophical quiver. As recently as the winning campaign of the first President Bush, the GOP stood for getting tough with godless Commies. Since the implosion of the Soviet Union and the happy arrival of democracy in Eastern Europe, anti-communism has lost both its cachet and its consistency: Cuba, with an economy slightly smaller than that of metropolitan Kankakee, Ill., is such a formidable threat to our national security (and the GOP candidates in Florida's Dade County) it must be quarantined and we must keep our military dukes up.
Toward China, which persecutes priests, tortures workers, bullies it neighbors and provides nuclear technology to the planet's most dangerous outlaw regimes, Republicans and, yes, most Democrats are cowardly and uncritical. China, we must understand, is not a belligerent Communist superpower, it is a market of 1.2 billion Coke-drinking, Marlboro-smoking cheap and docile workers.
Then, most Republicans were united in their condemnation of the notorious Welfare Queen in her Lexus or designer original. Sorry, that no longer sells. Neither does the soft-on-crime charge against the Democrats, which the Republicans lost to Democrat Bill Clinton, who shrewdly lined up with the police seeking to outlaw military assault weapons while most of the GOP stood not with cops who put their lives on the line, but with the NRA, which put money into politicians pockets.
Now in the time of the second President Bush, for Republicans tax cuts are all that's left or right. Please do not get the mistaken idea that on the tax issue the Democrats are Captains Courageous. They have been anything but. A friend, Alan Ginsberg of Maine, compares today's Democrats to an earlier edition of liberal Republicans who too often seemed to be pale imitations of the then-dominant Democrats, promising to do everything the other side would do, but at 10 percent off.
Contemporary Democrats fierce converts to, and relentless champions of, the balanced federal budget endure smaller (but constantly growing) tax cuts with the Deserving Rich getting less. On the proposed repeal of the federal estate tax, which applies only to the wealthiest 2 percent of the estates, Democrats were wobbly until they got a vertebrae transplant from the public opposition to the tax's repeal by billionaire venture capitalist Warren Buffet and members of the Rockefeller family.
Don't be too tough on George W. Bush, who originally insisted that in the warm afterglow of the nation's blooming economy, tax cuts were imperative because "you can't trust Washington with your money." Now the tune is the same but the lyrics have changed a more pessimistic president tells us the tax cut is imperative to reignite the sputtering economy.
For good times? A tax cut. For bad times? A tax cut. For Republicans, any time and all the time? A tax cut. It's the single remaining idea that holds the party together.
Mark Shields is a columnist for Creators Syndicate.
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