GAME PLAN.(The Talk of the Town)

Nine months ago, Inauguration Day in Washington had all the trappings of a coronation. Karl Rove, the President's blandly smiling Richelieu, told gatherings of partisans that George W. Bush's three-per-cent margin of victory was a mandate for the consolidation of Republican power; at bars throughout the capital, young conservatives raised toasts to years of political domination. With its majority in both Houses of Congress expanded by yet another crop of radical freshmen, the ruling party appeared poised to achieve the last remaining items on its agenda and consign the opposition to oblivion. It was hard to believe that the Democrats would ever win another election.

The Republican implosion has come with startling speed. In the normally disciplined ranks of Republican opinion-makers, Harriet Miers is reviled as a mediocrity and a squandered chance to move the Supreme Court firmly to the right for the next few decades; those Inauguration Night revellers are now tearing her and one another apart on right-wing Web sites. The conservatives' other grand objectives, in economic and foreign policy, have also failed this year: the President's attempt to privatize Social Security went nowhere, and the "Bush doctrine" has been so damaged in Iraq that even the American Enterprise Institute, where the idea of invading Iraq was incubated, just held a funereal conference on the war.

These policy failures coincide with a rash of legal trouble: the congressional enforcer Tom DeLay has been indicted for political money-laundering; a White House procurement official has been arrested in connection with the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal; and, as the grand-jury investigation into the Valerie Plame leak nears its end, America awaits the fate of Karl Rove. All of this, together with the cronyism and incompetence exposed by the Administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina, has destroyed the image of a ruthlessly unified party led by a President who always wins.

It was an image that inspired fear in the opposition and in Republicans who were tempted to stray. But uncontested power hollowed out the Bush White House and the Republican Party: ideology became cant, and political triumphs supplanted real achievements. The unravelling has been all the more dramatic considering the Republicans' total control of Washington. Since August, Bush's political standing has collapsed faster than Lyndon Johnson's in 1965, when the Democrats ruled the capital and the Watts riots and the escalation in Vietnam set off the decline of modern liberalism. The following year, Republicans made large gains in the midterm congressional elections, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, and the conservative movement began its ascent.

Part of the movement's success came from its ability to pursue common goals in spite of divisions--between pro-business libertarians and social conservatives, tax cutters and deficit hawks, intellectuals and evangelicals, millionaires and the white working class. But Bush's philosophy of corporate conservatism--more Harding than Reagan; not anti-government, just anti-good-government, with a tone of authoritarian piety and legislation written by lobbyists--has shown that Republican unity was always based less on intellectual coherence than on a willingness to keep one's mouth shut.

Yet the Republicans did once present the country with a strong collective vision, most notably in 1994, when they came to power swearing to enact a document called the Contract with America. Few remember anymore what those Republicans signed: vows to reform Congress, along with ...