A Republican Senator's Lament

A few reporters and I has lunch with a Republican senator today. We spoke on background which means that I can identify this person (assume nothing about the gender) as a "Republican senator." What I thought was most interesting, if not most surprising, was the despair about the party's political predicament. This Republican Senator saw little chance of regaining the majority in 2008, and acknowledged that there's lots of Bush fatigue in the Senate Republican conference. There was deep despair about Iraq although a willingness to see what Gen. David Petraeus reports in September and to give him more time but also an acknowledgment that sometime next spring there's going to be a drawdown of troops, close to 100,000. The Senator didn't have any great ways out of the mess for the Republicans otherwise to keep battling against pork projects or "earmarks" as they're called. On immigration, the senator joked that it was the one issue guaranteed to piss off the 25% of Americans who still support Bush. Oh, and this was not one of the handful of Republican senators who takes shots at Bush. When a guy/gal like this is down in the dumps, the party is in real trouble.