A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

The Problem With Newt

Disclaimer: I think Newt Gingrich is the smartest, most articulate defender of free-market conservatism in politics today. 

With that out of the way, I completely recognize the many faults and flaws of the former Speaker of the House.  Last week Newt threw his hat into the GOP race for the party's 2012 nomination.  Much will be said of Gingrich's marital infidelity, his "eventful" time in Congress, and his outspoken positions on cultural issues.  And that's just from fellow Republicans.  The liberal mainstream media will have the proverbial field day in picking apart Newt's entire public (and private) career.

I read two interesting takes from conservative thinkers/writers yesterday and thought them worth sharing.

The first comes from Jonah Goldberg at The Corner blog.  An excerpt from that:

One major source of Newt’s problems is that he is almost always the smartest guy in the room. Compounding this problem is an ability and compulsion to defend any position he takes. For a politician this can be an enormous problem because it creates a climate where he can’t take unwelcome advice from his staff. I don’t mean because he’s a bullying boss — I know many people who have worked for Newt, including my wife, and by all accounts he’s a very generous and decent employer and a surprisingly good listener. The problem is that he can always “win” the arguments about whether he made a mistake. It would be interesting to know if after his Meet the Press interview anybody on Newt’s staff told him, “Uh, sir, that stuff about Paul Ryan’s budget and the individual mandate is going to create huge problems.” If no one said something like that, it’s a bad sign, either because they couldn’t see the obvious either, or because they were afraid to tell the boss the truth.

You can’t run for president of the United States with a staff of advisers who think everything you do is a homerun. Well, you can, but you can’t possibly win.

And the other comes from National Review editor Rich Lowry.  An excerpt:

It’s Newt’s misfortune to want a high-pressure executive job with monarchical trappings where steadfastness and dignity matter. When he was Speaker of the House, he alienated his colleagues (some of whom roll their eyes at the mere mention of his name) and dragged himself, his family, and his party through a psychodrama. If he were to replicate that performance in the White House, it’d be a formula for a LBJ- or Nixon-style meltdown.

“One of my great weaknesses is that part of me is a teacher analyst,” Gingrich said on Meet the Press. “And part of me is a political leader.” That shows a self-awareness his campaign for president otherwise lacks.

I think a lot of Center-Right pundits are panicking prematurely over the current crop of GOP candidates.  We have a long way to go and don't even yet know who all will be legitimate contenders by the time the actual primaries begin.  Newt should not be counted out before the dance even commences.  My advice to potential Republican voters: investigate Newt before you pass judgment.  Visit his various websites.  Watch some YouTube speeches.  If by the time the primaries end we on the Right collectively decide he isn't the man for the job - so be it.

But don't let other people make the decision for you.  And don't make the decision for yourself without looking into all of the candidates.

Obama’s first crack at Election 2012

Well done, people on YouTube!

Looking Ahead To 2012

I know it may be the last thing some of you want to think about, but the presidential election of 2012 will soon become front-page news again.  For some thoughtful commentary on the challenges President Obama may indeed face between now and November 2012, check out the latest column from John Podhoretz at Commentary Magazine.

Podhoretz's basic point is that when one looks at the history of presidential bids for a second term in the last 50 years, one finds pertinent examples of challengers who cost the sitting president his office.

The scale of the Democratic Party’s defeat this year and the parlous condition of the country’s finances inevitably raise the specter of a challenge to a first-term president from within his own party. Such challenges have been part of the political landscape for the past half-century. Eight presidents since 1960 have run for re-election. Four of them have had to fight off a significant primary opponent whose key message was that the president had betrayed his party’s core principles. In each case, the challenge preceded the president’s eventual ouster in the general election.

He then goes on to give some concrete examples of what he's referring to.

In 1968, Eugene McCarthy came at Lyndon Johnson from the anti-war left and, in losing in the New Hampshire primary by a mere seven points, convinced the man who had won the biggest landslide in American history three years earlier that he could not secure a second full term. Ronald Reagan went at Gerald Ford in 1976 in part on the grounds that Ford was capitulating to the Soviet Union; Reagan went on to win several major states, galvanized the Republican Convention far more than its actual nominee, and left Ford to close a 30-point gap in the polls with Jimmy Carter (which Ford almost did).

With stagflation at home and chaos abroad, Edward Kennedy confronted Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. Kennedy went on to win 10 primaries, upstage Carter at the Democratic Convention just as Reagan had upstaged Ford, and in general, presage Carter’s doom. Twelve years later, George H. W. Bush began his re-election campaign in the economic doldrums and came under unexpected pressure in New Hampshire from the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan, who got a stunning 38 percent. Ross Perot saw this and designed an independent bid against Bush on the single issue of the budget deficit, which Bush had actually taken aggressive measures to confront; Perot’s bid got Bill Clinton elected.¹

There is great ideological irony here. McCarthy and Kennedy ran to their presidents’ left at the beginning of an election cycle that concluded with the victory of a hated conservative—Nixon in 1968, Reagan in 1980. Reagan ran to Ford’s right in an election that went to Carter. And by running to Bush’s right, Buchanan helped establish the conditions under which Clinton would achieve victory in 1992. Both Carter and Clinton ran as Southern moderates but began governing as aggressive liberals. Feingold, or any other Democrat who considers a challenge to Barack Obama, will have to contend with the knowledge that the better he does, the more likely it will be that a conservative Republican will occupy the White House come 2013.

Given this history, what conceivable justification can there be for a primary challenge to Obama for an ideologically driven politician who would not wish his worst enemies to achieve power? The only principled justification is, precisely, principle: you do so because you think the president of your party has acted in ways that are especially injurious to the things you believe in most deeply by suborning those beliefs to his political ambitions. Pat Buchanan’s quixotic effort against George H. W. Bush was driven by this; he opposed the Gulf War, had become a Bryanesque economic populist, and wanted to fight for his (repugnant) vision of what the Republican Party ought to be.

In the case of McCarthy and Reagan and Kennedy, something rather more layered was at play. Kennedy’s 1980 bid was clearly opportunistic, so much so that he himself found it literally inexplicable when CBS’s Roger Mudd asked him why he wanted to be president. The plain fact is that he and his pseudo– royal court had seen an opening for him a decade after Chappaquiddick, but they couldn’t close the deal, and in the process did significant damage to the incumbent.²

Reagan certainly did believe that the policy of détente undertaken by Richard Nixon and continued by Ford was a moral and geopolitical abomination. But he also knew that Ford had not been elected to anything other than the Michigan House seat from which Ford had been elevated to the vice presidency only 10 months before Nixon slunk from office. For Ford to skate into the 1976 Republican nomination without having ever received a single vote as part of a presidential ticket seemed anti-democratic; the logic of the American political system dictated a challenge by someone.

It was the logic of the 1960s that dictated a challenge to Lyndon Johnson in 1968 from within his own party—notwithstanding the fact that he had received 61 percent and 486 electoral votes in November 1964 and had ushered in a new era of activist government with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the initiation of Medicare in 1966.

Indeed, one might say that Eugene McCarthy’s entry into the 1968 presidential primaries against Johnson was less a matter of his own choosing than it was a willed manifestation of the anti-war movement, which had turned out hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across the country in 1967. Members of the movement over 21 (then the voting age) were natural Democratic voters, but the policies they were protesting were being enacted by a Democratic administration. Their negative electoral energy had to go somewhere, and it was channeled into McCarthy in New Hampshire. But it did not belong to him; after McCarthy knocked off Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy entered the fray to steal McCarthy’s voters away. After Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, secured his party’s nomination— which was, to many on the left, no different from having nominated Johnson again. The Democratic Convention in Chicago at the end of August became the epicenter of a guerrilla war launched by leftists against traditional FDR Democrats (in the persons of Humphrey and Chicago mayor Richard Daley), with rioters setting upon Chicago cops, getting savagely beaten in response, and being placed under arrest by the thousands.

The carnage in the streets of Chicago figured prominently in the explanations for the electoral triumph of Richard Nixon in the 1968 general election. And the enduring memory of the way in which a policy disagreement within the Democratic Party had resulted in blood and panic in Grant Park may have contributed inchoately to Nixon’s own 20-point win in 1972.

It is tempting to look at this brief history and say that primary challenges are purely destructive. But that may overrate them. They may not have altered the political atmosphere against incumbents so much as they reflected a change that had already taken place within the body politic. For there is another reason these primary challenges arise, other than a principle or opportunism—a reason that is inchoate, hard to capture, and hard to define. They happen because the president has begun to look like a loser.

Very interesting stuff!  You can read the rest of the column here, and don't be surprised if we see a further-Left challenger to Barack Obama in the next two years.