president’s party had regained control of the Senate at midterm and the first time since 1934 that
a president saw his party gain seats in both houses of Congress in a first-term midterm election.
Building on the successes in the 2002 elections, Bush and his advisors designed and
implemented the most ambitious grassroots campaign in the party’s history for the 2004
elections. This “national party machine,” composed of more than a million campaign volunteers
across the country, was credited as a key to Bush’s narrow but decisive victory over his
opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, in the presidential election and helping to
increase Republicans’ command of the Senate and House.
Bush’s leadership of the Republican Party represents a considerable political
achievement. The critical question at hand, however, is whether Bush’s party leadership
represents a significant new development in the party system, or merely continues the “new”
party politics of the 1970s-1990s. We seek to evaluate whether (and how) the institutions and
practices of Bush’s Republican Party depart from those of the national programmatic parties
described by contemporary students of party politics, and whether Bush’s party leadership
diverges in significant ways from that of his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, whose enthusiastic
party-building was marred by his tendency to campaign and govern through the instrumentalities
of the modern presidency rather than through cooperation with Congress or his party.
We want to press ahead to the more fundamental question whether the party innovations
undertaken during President Bush’s tenure will permit the contemporary parties to perform the
parties’ historic role of moderating presidential ambition and mobilizing public support for
political values and governing policies. Although the modern presidency’s responsibilities for the
managing the national economy and waging the War on Terrorism render impractical the kind of
accountability provided by the decentralized patronage parties, it is yet unclear whether modern
parties can provide a new sense of collective responsibility, one more suited to the era of big
6
Convention