It appears that John McCain really is running for George W. Bush’s third term. In a nice column in Slate, Daniel Gross outlines how, for McCain, “[t]he problem with the last eight years isn't that the Bush administration had the wrong policies or was incompetent. No, the problem is that it lacked intensity.” (A similar piece from Salon is here.) This is true, Gross shows, on issues from Iraq to taxes, and he is, if anything, to the deregulatory right of the Bush administration on the housing crisis. (See this story explaining the administration’s proposal and criticisms of its woeful inadequacy here and here.) Nevertheless, as several recent articles are suggesting, McCain’s campaign—running on Iraq and on anti-consumer pseudo-economics—is increasingly anachronistic, even in Republican circles. Many Republicans are now acting like New Democrats, which could mean that the era of anti-government is over.

Many Republican activists and intellectuals are now embracing a role for government in both social welfare and effective regulation while rejecting hawkish foreign-policy positions. “[Newt] Gingrich,” writes Ryan Lizza recently in the New Yorker, “now argues that the era of running against the government has ended. ‘The Republican Party cannot win over time as the permanently angry anti-government party because neither appeals to most voters.’ . . . Rather, he argues, Republicans must learn to be competent managers of the bureaucracy and “pro-good government.” Michael Gersen and David Frum, both former Bush speech-writers, have written books advocating “compassionate conservatism”—i.e., a cultural conservatism in which America is “under God” but where government has an important role in making people’s lives better. Lizza quotes Mallory Factor (a Grover Norquist-type anti-government stalwart) saying, “[The war in Iraq]’s not the glue that keeps conservatives together. There is an enormous amount of frustration over the war on a number of grounds, from the cost, to the way the war has been fought, to what the outcome is.”

Ben Stein, the long-time conservative commentator and activist, noted last week (refreshingly) in the Times, “the Republican Party (my party and yours) has for the last 30 years or so been operating under a demonstrably false and misleading premise: that tax cuts pay for themselves by generating so much economic growth that they replace the sums lost by tax cutting.” The costs of running a deficit (costs of interest, a weaker dollar) and the non-negotiability of all the big-ticket items in the budget make tax hikes necessary. Stein writes, “But whom to tax? The poor are, well, poor. The middle class is struggling to pay for its middle-class life. That leaves the rich. It would be lovely if we did not have to tax them. Many have worked hard for their money. Many have created useful businesses. Many of them are fine people. But as Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks, ‘Because that’s where the money is.’” In other words, Stein is urging McCain to adopt the tax policies of mainstream Democrats. (However, in a way at odds with the Lizza piece, he does consider our overblown military budget—see this excellent piece on Cold-War military budgets—but not Social Security, as “morally mandatory.”)

Amidst the housing and credit crisis, these sentiments are reflected on the ground as well. The constituents of Republicans are demanding, in the words of one lifelong Republican from Southern Florida, “The government should help. . . . Somebody ought to do something.” As this article suggests, Republicans in Washington are thus caught between their constituents demanding governmental help—not unlike after Hurricane Katrina, the credit crisis is showing the necessity of government—and the party line, being articulated by nominee McCain, that the solution is less government. (It’s simply not compelling, in response to the credit crisis or Hurricane Katrina, to say, quoting President Reagan, “[i]n this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”)

Hopefully Democrats will embrace the legacy of the New Deal proudly and eschew trying to triangulate McCain. Despite its rhetoric, the Bush administration is relying on four Roosevelt-era creations to mitigate the current crisis (the Federal Home Loan Bank system, the Federal Housing Authority, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp). Part of this legacy is FDR's 1936 speech announcing the Second New Deal: “We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Who will welcome their hatred, and not just their campaign contributions, today?