George Packer in the Nov. 26, 2007 New Yorker, on Republicans running for president:

As the tide goes out on President Bush's foreign policy, the mass of flotsam left behind includes a Republican Party that no longer knows how to be reasonable. Whenever its leading Presidential candidates appear before partisan audiences, they try to outdo one another in pledging loyalty oaths to the use of force, pandering to the war lobby as if they were Democrats addressing the teachers' union. Giuliani has surrounded himself with a group of advisers -- from Norman Podhoretz to the former Pentagon official Michael Rubin -- who, having got Iraq spectacularly wrong, seem determined to make up for it by doing the same thing in Iran. Giuliani approaches foreign policy in the same mood of barely restrained eagerness for confrontation with which, as mayor of New York, he went after criminals. He has essentially promised to go to war with Iran in order to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, and he recently suggested that waterboarding is only torture when the wrong people are doing it, and blamed the "liberal media" for giving it a bad name. He has said that he would improve America's miserable image around the world by threatening State Department diplomats with unnamed consequences unless they defend United States foreign policy more aggressively. "The era of cost-free anti-Americanism must end," Giuliani snarled in the polite pages of Foreign Affairs, which had invited candidates to lay out their views.

Mitt Romney, perhaps sensing that his military bona fides might be in question, has declared his readiness to out-Cheney Dick Cheney and "double Guantánamo." In an ad, he strolls across the lawn of a large suburban home, like a financial adviser in a Charles Schwab commercial, and intones, "It's this century's nightmare -- jihadism. Violent, radical Islamic fundamentalism. Their goal is to unite the world under a single jihadist caliphate. To do that, they must collapse freedom-loving nations, like us." John McCain, who does not believe that the definition of torture depends on who's doing it, has staked his campaign on a long-term victory in Iraq through the strategy of the surge, which is destined to end around the time the parties gather to nominate their candidates, next summer. For Fred Thompson foreign policy is mostly immigration policy -- he wants the borders patrolled with heavy force.

In 1968, when the Democrats tried to hold on to the White House during a disastrous war, the Party self-destructed at the Chicago Convention. But in 2008, in Minneapolis, the Republicans will nominate a candidate on a promise of four more years of the same. The one piece of Bush's foreign policy that the leading Republicans haven't taken up (again, with the occasional exception of McCain) is his "freedom agenda." In this, they are probably responding to the true feelings of the Party's base, for which the war on terror is more about nationalism, Christianity, and raw fear than about idealistic blandishments of democracy promotion.

This could have been sharped up a bit. One clue is that even for Bush democracy is something to talk about after deciding to go to war, mostly because it's been proven to sucker in saps like Packer. The campaign is currently firmly centered on the Republican base, which is still lusting for blood -- Jim Geraghty caught the mood when he titled his rousingly boosterish book on the Republican leadership Voting to Kill. After the nomination, at least after it is effectively settled, the candidate will check back with his focus groups and sing a different tune, with occasional coded reminders to reassure the base. The problem is that the base has gotten so jaded, so virulently agitated, so malicious, that it will be impossible for anyone to make the transition at all gracefully. I've always assumed that the smart money in the Republican party was backing Romney and Giuliani figuring those candidates would be able to separate themselves most credibly from Bush, but you can already see what they're having to go through to even get a shot at the nomination. How they undo that may still look plausible on paper, but a lot of people are going to be tough sells.

This is an extreme contrast to the 2000 election when Bush was able to slide through the election without hardly anyone identifying, much less getting alarmed about, his real political agenda. Not only do we know now, we more or less know how they did it, and so what to look for. On the other hand, Bush's survival depends on keeping the party in line, and to do that they need to remain impervious to fact and reason. The easiest way to keep them together (perhaps the only way) is to crank up the paranoia. Bush and the base in effect are holding each other hostage, and the candidates have to adapt to that reality. That this whole dynamic is insane is just one more thing all involved have to learn to deny -- and indeed they have, but sooner or later such self-delusion is going to collapse. One has to wonder then how many of those currently satisfied with voting to kill will start taking matters into their own hands.