The Transition Era; Part 7: Muir Begins With Assuming Inevitable Victory.

 And now we reach the opening of the 2008 campaign, and right from the start, something will become obvious--Muir opens the year blithely convinced of one thing, that the presidency is the Republican Party's to lose. Despite the disaster of the last three years, despite Dubya's popularity collapsing into a black hole... he thinks it's in the bag.

Now, this is not going to be his consistent frame of mind. Muir will have moments of doubt, moments where he acknowledges that, yeah, things aren't looking good. We will deal with what brings them on in due course, because, yeah, it's going to be a surprise. But by and large, this is going to be his base setting. It is not going to take much for Muir to get bullish on the Republican's chances in 2008. And this raises the question... why? What gave Muir this tendency to assume that obviously things were going to go his way?

The simple answer is, he just hadn't adjusted his priors.

You will recall that Muir spent nearly all of 2006 chortling at the Democrats thinking they had a chance of winning. To Muir, the post-Gingrich "Revolution" Congress was as much the natural property of the Republicans as the Presidency. The victory in 2006 was met  not so much with outrage initially as befuddlement, a bizarre freak that he couldn't quite wrap his head around.

The Democrats of the very tail end of the Late Mystery Business(tm) Period of the last Era, and the Hardware Store Period of this are, like so much of the strip, in an odd state of transformation. They are not quite the Cabal, those shadowy masters of intrigue who despite their degeneracy, rule from the shadows. But they are not quite the ineffectual jokers that they'd been previously.

Not quite, but still mostly. In essence, Muir treated the Democratic Congress as a mass of frauds and crooks who'd tricked and lucked themselves into power. They were a bunch of lightweights traipsing about in things that didn't belong to them, destined to be removed like the jokes they were. While Muir was starting to hint at their sinister connections to malevolent forces, he still largely saw them as a joke. Everything that had happened did not change his beliefs.

This is an important aspect of Muir's overall psychology. Any success by his faction is viewed as total and completely vindicating, no matter how partial and how many qualifications it has, or how quickly it turns to dust. Any success by his opponents, no matter how impressive, is treated as a technicality and frequently a fraudulent one. In Muir's mental universe, he is never ever wrong. No matter what happens. And his opponents are never actually right. Again, no matter what happens.

And so, from that starting point, Muir thought he had a pretty good idea what was happening. His party would triumphantly rally around the conservative politics the nation loved, pick an appropriate Presidential candidate--he was quite fond of Fred Thompson, something we'll explore in more detail in the future--and then go on to teach the Democrats the lesson they should have taught them in 2006, if the Democrats hadn't cheated somehow. (Muir was vague on this somehow at this point. It involved the press, and also, he was starting to grumble about George Soros, though not as much as he would later.)

Now, this was an incredible amount of delusion. George W. Bush was not the triumphant, vindicated figure Muir had long imagined--he was looking at one of the lowest approval ratings in polling history. The policies that Muir had long championed were despised by most of the public, and there was very little mystery why--they had failed. No one but an absolutely blind partisan looked at this Administration as anything but a millstone for the GOP in the upcoming race. Likewise, only a fool assumed anything but that the party would need a drastically retooled message for the upcoming election. But for Muir, his admittedly nebulous philosophy could never fail, only be failed. Muir might turn on something he'd supported, but only years later, and frequently from a set of premises that were close to what he'd started with. He remained convinced that everything he believed was wildly successful and popular. Just ignore all that pesky evidence.

All of which left him in a very uncomfortable state as the GOP primaries began...