hat are the chances that John McCain will have wrested the Republican Party nomination from George W. Bush by May 1, giving the GOP some much-needed time to regroup behind its new leader before its convention? They are pretty good - even with all the hurdles remaining. If so, McCain stands a very good chance to beat Al Gore in the fall's general election.
Astonishing! Unprecedented! Or maybe not. The key to understanding how it happened is to reflect on why the GOP so quickly settled on young George W. in the first place.
In The Wall Street Journal last week, columnist Paul Gigot pointed out that, if it were to eventuate, a McCain presidency would not be the first instance in which an outsider successfully challenged his party's establishment for its nomination, then went on to win the general election.
General Dwight Eisenhower did it in 1952, defeating party stalwart Robert Taft. And the unknown Jimmy Carter did it in 1976, defeating a crowded field that included Frank Church, Morris Udall, Henry Jackson, Edmund ''Jerry'' Brown, Lloyd Bentsen, and George Wallace.
Like McCain, Eisenhower and Carter were graduates of military academies, Gigot noted. He asserted that both owed their popularity ''much more to their biography and character than to any policy or ideology.'' That's only partly true.
What Gigot didn't say - perhaps because it is too painful to admit - was that both Eisenhower and Carter had been called upon to take the helm of parties that were in severe distress, confounded by the successes of their opposition, and otherwise facing nearly certain defeat.
In 1952, the Republicans had been out of the White House for 20 years. The unexpected defeat of their nominee Thomas Dewey by Harry Truman in 1948 had divided them into warring camps.
In 1976, the Democrats twice had been defeated decisively by Richard Nixon. Not even Nixon's resignation after the Watergate scandals seemed likely to deflect the trajectory of incumbent President Gerald Ford.
In each case, however, voters yearned to change the management in the White House just enough that an outsider at the head of the out-of-power party got the job.
It is here that George W. Bush enters the drama.
The GOP never quite got over the election of 1992, when surprise entrant Bill Clinton knocked incumbent George Bush out of a seemingly sure-fire second term. From the outset, Republicans challenged the legitimacy of Clinton's election in a series of investigations of his participation in the failed Whitewater land development. Then Clintonian arrogance over health care reform handed leadership of the House of Representatives to the GOP for the first time in nearly 40 years in the landslide election of 1994.
But under House Speaker Newt Gingrich the Republican leadership repeatedly over-reached, closing down government operations and permitting Clinton to regain leadership on the key issue of eliminating the budget deficit. And after again being defeated by Clinton in 1996, the Republican leadership escalated its politics-by-investigation, culminating in the discovery of the Lewinsky matter.
The failed impeachment crusade damaged the Republicans as much - maybe more - than Clinton. In the dark days after the Senate vote in early 1999, practical Republican politicians quickly realized that their only chance of regaining the White House in 2000 was to put the party in a kind of receivership - limited, they hoped.
They figured that - as a relatively young man, as governor of Texas, with no obvious role in the impeachment process - George W. Bush had been far enough away from the bitter battles of the 1990s to qualify as a fresh start.
In fact he had not been very far away at all. He nursed the Bush family's resentment of Clinton, the man who had turned his father out of office. Though he was careful not to publicly address the issue of impeachment, he and his family clearly favored the tactic of ''going all the way.'' He promptly set out to campaign against ''Clinton-Gore'' when he announced for 2000.
Moreover, George W. had been conditioned by the cauldron of the Gulf War. When his father agreed to dress up the nation's balance sheet with some minor tax increases on the eve of battle, he was savaged by the GOP's right wing in the 1992 primaries. So Bush the younger made the centerpiece of his platform a big tax cut designed to dissipate the Clinton surplus. The idea immediately came under fire from Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greespan.
Thus did George W. invest heavily in the losing sides of the two most divisive issues of the last 20 years (leaving aside the question of abortion). Most significant, he didn't really even seem to want the job. Nothing in his history suggested the kind of singular commitment ordinarily necessary to win the presidency.
The receivership, in other words, was phony. With George W., the various GOP chieftains could expect to party on with their various ''culture wars,'' including the discredited ''supply-side economics.''
Enter McCain, the Arizona senator who had invested in neither fiasco. He had almost no hand in the impeachment effort, though in the trial he voted to convict. Within a month, he was telling the moderate Republican Leadership Council, ''We Republicans have a great deal of work to do to remind voters we are not simply the anti-Clinton party. I believe the American people understand very well what we stood against. We now need to remind them what we stand for.''
Then McCain attacked Bush's $480 billion tax cut as a ''risky'' venture. The money should be used to shore up the Social Security system instead, he said. The rest of his economics seems to consist mainly of returning to the spirit of the 1986 tax reform, with its two simple brackets of 15 percent and 28 percent. (Gutting it had been one of Bill Clinton's first initiatives.) And McCain's opposition to an Internet sales tax is really a wedge designed to push states toward consumption, rather than income taxation. (A team of highly competent young economists has been working overtime drafting position papers.)
Moreover, there is McCain's conversion experience from his experience as one of the ''Keating Five'' - five senators (including former astronaut John Glenn) who in the mid-1980s were accused of pressuring the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to keep afloat the troubled savings and loan of campaign contributor Charles Keating. The episode led to McCain's vow to break the ''iron-triangle'' of special interest contributors, Washington lobbyists, and accommodating legislators through serious campaign finance reform.
Finally, of course, there is McCain's irreducible and unassailable character, honed by his 51/2 years as a prisoner of war. Who among his advisers is going to push him around after that?
What kind of president would McCain make? How does he differ from Al Gore? Those are questions for another day. Many uncertainties lie ahead. But the answer to the most fundamental question is clear already. Why John McCain? He is the legacy of Whitewater.
