Commentary: Bailout sparks a Republican street fight

Editor's note: Republican Leslie Sanchez was director of the Bush White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001 to 2003 and is the author of "Los Republicanos: Why Hispanics and Republicans Need Each Other." She is not a paid consultant to any current candidate. Sanchez is CEO of the Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics for its corporate and nonprofit clients.

(CNN) -- It's been said that the Republican coalition, when it wins, is a perfect intersection of four streets: Main Street (middle class America), Church Street (cultural conservatives), Wall Street, and Easy Street (high-net-worth, birthright Republicans).

The proposed $700 billion bailout of the nation's financial institutions forces Republicans at all levels to choose which street they want to live on for a long time to come.

On Main and Church, there's a growing unease over the direction of a Republican Party which they had believed was a conservative force for government's humility and restraint, both at home and abroad.

Cultural conservatives and Main Street Republicans alike have found it increasingly difficult to support a vast expansion of federal spending and a war in Iraq that is more deadly, costly and long than they had ever been led to expect.

However valid the justifications, regardless of how well-intentioned the purpose, they have seen their dream of absolute Republican dominance of all three branches of government result in a nightmarish expansion of government in the style of FDR and LBJ -- not what they'd hoped from GWB.

Now appears the Bush Administration, with the proposition that unless taxpayers commit almost $1 trillion to Wall Street, we're headed for bread lines. At best, the folks on Main Street and Church see it as the biggest government takeover of banking and real estate in the history of the Republic. At worst, they see it as the dawn of a new socialist era.

If the measure passes, they say, Washington -- not New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or even Redmond, Washington, or Silicon Valley -- will be the center of the American economic universe, and the despised Washington lobbyist will increase his influence exponentially. A massive new bureaucracy is in the wings, and they know it.

Over on Wall Street, however, the levees have burst, and Easy Street is directly in the path of the water.

From their vantage point at the axis of financial and political power, some of these descendants of the Rockefeller-Kissinger-Nixon wing of the Republican Party see no alternative but for Washington to step in and begin bailing out a marketplace fraught with greed and crony capitalism.

These are the Republican Party's most loyal and generous donors, whose influence is profoundly out of proportion to their numbers. They're restless, and they're working the phones, convincing much of the Congressional leadership that, in all likelihood, the government will actually break even on the deal, if not show an actual profit. These are salesmen on a grand scale.

In short, the Republican Party is on the brink of a street fight. Main Street and Church Street were very much in evidence on Wednesday when, at a closed-door meeting with Vice President Cheney, the House Republican Conference told him, in essence, that his administration had cried "Wolf" one too many times.

It was a showdown that would have been unthinkable until now and, in the eyes of some, it was long overdue.

For John McCain, the occasion presents an opportunity (his campaign may see it as a necessity) to establish his own relevance, outline measures to protect the taxpayers, and, perhaps, deliver Main Street and Church Street Republicans to the fold.

Instead of staying above the fray, he has characteristically thrown himself into it, at the risk of alienating one or more of the four neighborhoods -- and he needs every single one.

He'll get a debate with Barack Obama, all right, but it could be moved from an auditorium in Oxford, Mississippi, to the floor of the Senate instead -- and with a lot more riding on it.

For a party whose ticket, for the first time since 1964, includes names other than Nixon, Dole or Bush, this is a transformational issue that will lead to a long simmering realignment.

It will force every House and Senate Republican to choose between Main and Church or Wall and Easy streets. Which streets they choose could be decisive for their own careers -- and for the future of the GOP -- for a long, long time to come.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.

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