I had thought that President Bush seemed oddly relaxed and comfortable last week, in the wake of losing both houses of Congress to the Democrats. Two recent OpinionJournal columns show me that I’m not alone in intuiting not only that the Administration may be destined for a shift to the Left, but that the President may like it better that way.

Newt Gingrich writes of two kinds of bipartisanship, and warns against the “establishment bipartisanship which cuts deals between liberals and the White House”. Peggy Noonan, meanwhile, looks ahead and says: “If the Democrats are moderate, I think [Bush] will do something surprising, and yet much in line with his personality and nature.” That “something” being exactly what Gingrich is warning of.

Disenchanted conservatives should hardly be surprised to see such further disenchantment ahead, for it is indeed in line with the President’s nature. “Compassionate conservativism” was always something quite apart from, and even opposed to, the Reagan tradition; indeed, the very name of the idea betrays its acceptance of the Democratic critique of conservatism. It is this internalization of the liberal world-view that made it possible for the President to govern as an exemplar of bipartisanship in Texas. “He accepted many Democratic assumptions,” says Noonan, “he shared them, it wasn’t hard.”

It is dangerous enough to accept Democratic assumptions about the size and role of government—we see where that has led the country in domestic policy these past six years. Even more dangerous, however, is the traditional Bush family internalization of liberal assumptions about the two parties themselves and their ideologies. To wit: Democrats are the natural party of government and the Republicans are not; fair play in elections and in D.C. requires Republicans to pull punches and lose gracefully on occasion, even as the Democrats do not; and there is something inherently virtuous about leaning left and something fundamentally wicked about leaning right.

This is the mindset that led the first President Bush to make a grand bargain with Senator Mitchell and his Congressional Democrats. The President’s purposes for entering into that deal were: a) to work together on a bipartisan basis to straighten out the Federal government and its finances, which simply seemed the right thing to do; b) to cooperate with Democrats in the hope that some of their virtue would rub off on him, and help absolve him of his Republican sins, foremost among which was his mean and nasty use of Governor Dukakis’ own prison furlough policies and ACLU sympathies against him in a national election. (This was incredibly naughty because he knew full well that such unfairly effective tactics would cost the Democrats the Presidency, and knew also that this office was rightfully theirs after Reagan’s two, even more unfair, landslides.)

Senator Mitchell’s objectives were much more straightforward: a) to secure a major tax increase, and b) to destroy Bush’s presidency and spoil Republican chances in 1992, up and down the ticket. Much simpler, and much more successful in the end.

It’s all depressingly familiar, and easy enough to comprehend. But here is the real puzzle. The current President Bush is famed for being stubborn, for demanding loyalty, for having a White House that, in Noonan’s words, will “muscle critics, silence dissent, force obedience.” This is how the Administration’s friends on the right are treated, anyhow; and even Tony Blair is considered enough of a friend to get the high hat from time to time.

But when it comes to the President’s sworn enemies, disloyalty is not only not punished, it is rewarded. The Bushite RNC went to the mat to defend first Arlen Specter, and then Lincoln Chafee (who didn’t even vote for W.! and bragged about it!). And of course the Bushes have always craved the approval of the likes of Ted Kennedy, who was the President’s partner in crafting his landmark education bill; and the NAACP, whose annual convention the President attended and whose right to speak for Black America he seems to concede, despite that organization’s long record of naked partisanship, and the special venom it has directed at him personally during his Administration.

These are the President’s new friends, with whom he will work as he, as Noonan suspects, “will over the next two years do to Republicans what he did to Donald Rumsfeld: over the side, under the bus and off the sled.” These are the people from whom he will seek political survival, historical redemption, and Strange New Respect in the next Congress. And if the new Republican minorities in Congress fail to provide a strong enough counterweight and focus for disappointed loyal Republicans to rally around, the President could thereby set the table for a Democratic sweep in 2008. Which would be a fine start in expiating his own sins.

Oddly enough, it is all in character for this President. Demand loyalty from your friends; then punish them promptly if they don’t give it…or punish them all the same, only a little later, if they do. But embrace your enemies; and when you feel that blade slip between your ribs, hug them even tighter. Internalize the presumptions of the Left and govern accordingly; resent the Right and drag your feet in responding to their desires, as those people and their ideas are icky even when they are dead right.

It all adds up to what I call a reverse Goldwater: “In their hearts, they know they’re wrong.” This mistaken knowing is the font from which most of the Stupid Party’s idiocies flow. And the taps to this font are, I fear, about to be turned wide open.