The 2006 Congressional elections de-railed Rove's plan as Democrats comfortably took back the House and narrowly--in the electoral equivalent of successfully drawing to an inside straight--took back the Senate as well as making dramatic gains in state legislatures.   Like the Hitler's 1000-year Reich, Rove's permanent Republican majority lasted only 12 years.

Democrats look to expand their rollback of the Republican control in 2008.  Gains in the House, Senate, and state legislatures are virtually certain.   The only significant contest is that at the very top of the list, for the White House.  As of now, I can plausibly envision outcomes ranging from McCain winning in a squeaker to Obama winning in a landslide and everything in between.

But McCain's campaign, fitful and sputtering, is notably lacking an enthusiastic response, raising the question, have Bush, Rove, and the philosophy of Bushism fatally wounded the Republican party?

Like an exotic chemical compound that includes a noble gas, such as xenon difluoride, the Rovian coalition merged elements that did not coexist together easily.   John McCain is having problems with attracting the evangelical vote; I predict he will get a lower share of evangelical vote than Bush.   The economic conservatives, such as the Club for Growth, have shown no love for Bush and little transfer of affection to McCain, who at one memorable point during the primaries said something along the lines of "economics isn't his thing."   Mitt Romney was the candidate to make America safe for multimillionaires.   Many of the libertarian-leaning voters are as outraged about the Bush administration's stance on domestic spying, a cause that McCain endorses as well; I expect quite a few libertarian-leaning Republicans will vote for Bob Barr.   The only faction of the GOP that McCain has well in hand in the nationalistic, jingoistic, pro-Iraq (and Iran and any other country that can be bombed with relative impunity) war crowd.

Meanwhile, many culturally moderate and even some culturally conservative Democrats are turning to Obama with one degree of enthusiasm or another, pushed by economic conditions and the unpopularity of the Iraq war.

Looking at the polling numbers, the Republican party is in danger of becoming the party of White Southern Men, a far cry from the "Permanent Majority" envisioned by Karl Rove.  To survive, the Republicans will have to have to go beyond a base of "War and More War."

The political philosophy of Bushism will not survive George Bush.  And in the end, after securing two presidential victories in the short run, it may have killed the Republican party in the long run.   If John McCain does lose to Barack Obama this year, the fight for the soul of the Republican party will become intense in the years immediately ahead.  Mitt Romney has staked out a position as the leader of the Republican party's mainstream economic conservatives, Mike Huckabee currently holds title to the would-be ayahtollahs among the evangelicals.   I don't see who, lurking among the Republican office holders, can transcend the factionalism and re-unite the Bush coalition.   Moreover, a McCain loss and the attendant Democratic gains in the Senate and House will make the core of the Republican party even more purist, more hard conservative, more Southern, reducing the pool of future candidates and exacerbating its difficulties in reaching beyond that base, setting up a vicious cycle leading to future losses.

Nature abhors a vacuum.  If the GOP does wither away by, say, 2020, I wouldn't be surprised to see a split in the Democratic party between its Progressive and Centrist wings, leaving the US with two parties similar to the Social Democratic and Christian Democratic parties of Europe, the latter of which is far more liberal than the Republican party in the United States has been.

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