JOHN HARWOOD POLITICAL MEMO

Shadowed by economic peril, the two major political parties enter the campaign’s final weeks a study in contrasts of philosophy, strategy and confidence.
Democrats view Wall Street’s cry for a government rescue in light of what Senator Barack Obama calls “the final verdict” on the free-market ideology that has reigned, for the most part, in American politics for the last generation. Most Republicans condemn the bailout as a betrayal of that ideology.
Obama Democrats press for Washington to regulate financial institutions, augment the health insurance system and redistribute income through adjustments to the tax code. John McCain Republicans seek to direct voters’ unhappiness toward Washington’s corruption, rather than its underlying priorities, and raise doubts about Mr. Obama personally.
Flush with cash, Mr. Obama’s party embraces opportunities to carry usually Republican states in the presidential race and build larger House and Senate majorities to enact their agenda. Mr. McCain’s party aims at a narrow presidential victory on a shrunken battlefield as some Congressional Republicans have begun viewing his potential defeat as a step toward political renewal.
The first stirrings of conservative ascendance came in the 1950s, after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition won five straight elections. The cultural divisions of the 1960s lent new force to Republican candidates.
But it was stagnating incomes in the 1970s that allowed Ronald Reagan to knit free-market economic policies with cultural and foreign policy conservatism into a Republican revolution. In 1994, Newt Gingrich matched his achievement in Congressional elections. Democratic politicians like Bill Clinton adapted, ending the federal welfare entitlement and declaring the era of big government over.
With the collapse of the markets, the party traditionally identified with big government - the Democrats - has reason to wonder if public sentiment has decisively shifted in its direction. “Are we looking at another inflection point today?” Michael Barone, a political analyst and historian, wrote in National Review recently. “Maybe so.”
If so, House Republicans refused to acquiesce in initially opposing, by a two-to-one ratio, the bailout that a Republican president and Treasury secretary called essential. Fear of political fallout played a role . But so did Republicans’ philosophic commitment, to an extent that worried some party leaders. “In a crisis Americans want decisive action,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. And in the first vote rejecting the bailout, he said, the party was unable to demonstrate that to voters.
Majority Democrats cast their greater willingness to back President Bush as “the first step” in recasting economic policies away from laissez-faire. They look to gain support from upscale constituencies on Wall Street and elsewhere, who lately have felt estranged from Republicans on social issues.
Democrats acted as “problem solvers,” argued Mr. Cole’s counterpart, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, who is the House Democrats’ campaign committee chairman. Republican “ideology got us into this mess,” he said, “and their ideology made it more difficult to get out of this mess.”
The results have clearly lifted the Democratic ticket. Mr. Obama’s lead over Mr. McCain in polls consistently exceeds the margin for error.
Mr. McCain’s campaign has responded by stepping up attacks on Mr. Obama’s background . Mr. Obama has answered by criticizing Mr. McCain as “erratic” during the financial crisis and “radical” in pressing a marketbased health care approach resembling Mr. Bush’s.
Mr. McCain’s “maverick” stance has long left Republican regulars ambivalent. As Republicans in Congress learned under Bill Clinton, and Democrats under Mr. Bush, opposing a president of the other party can help legislative minorities refocus message and agenda.
“They are resigned to a probable Obama victory,” observed Jim L. Brulte, a prominent California Republican who once led his party’s caucus in both the state Assembly and Senate. Republicans, he added, “understand that that is a necessity in order to set the stage to retake the majority.”