Sarko should read Goldwater

(Lyon, France) Was I too uncompromising in last week's piece about the challenges facing Nicolas Sarkozy as he embarks on his first term as President of France? Some readers, drawing on their own experience of France and French people, may have thought so. However, today, as I perused material on the US presidential election of 1964 as part of my doctoral research, I came across something that makes me think not. It's an article written by Alan L. Otten and published in the Wall Street Journal on September 16, 1964, which quotes extensively from a statement Senator Barry Goldwater “prepared for a 1962 Encyclopaedia Britannica volume on ‘Great Ideas Today’.” There Goldwater gave his definition of the people whom he called “the Forgotten Americans” and whose concerns he endeavored to articulate in the 1964 campaign. He wrote:

“The forgotten American is that dragooned and ignored individual who is either outside the organized pressure groups or who finds himself represented by organizations with whose policies he disagrees either in whole or in part. Big power-blocs and lobbies, labor unions, farm organizations, racial groups, civil liberties groups, consumer groups, nationality groups, cooperatives, educational associations, and even cultural and artistic groups have used their pressures to obtain through Government large benefits for their members, or, at any rate, what the leaders of these groups say are benefits. But the average citizen of the United States, a member of the real majority, pays the price of such pressures, and often is adversely affected.”

Goldwater went on to point out that:

“Though most of [the forgotten Americans] are patient men and women, they are beginning to get their backs up, and no wonder. Every special interest or “minority” has powerful backing in Washington but the forgotten American, who pays the taxes and fights the battles and does the work of the nation, feels that he has been left out. Minorities have real rights which must be protected. But majorities also have rights, and the people outside the pressure groups actually constitute the American majority.”

And the senator said in conclusion:

“[The forgotten American] is annoyed at certain welfare measures that seem to put a premium upon indolence and fraud. He does not like being pushed around. He thinks he has some things worth conserving -church and family and home and constitutional government and property and freedom of opportunity.”

It is quite clear that parallels may legitimately be drawn between the situation described by Sen. Goldwater in America in the early 1960s and the state of affairs in France today, after decades of government expansion. The only exception may be that, at least prior to the 2007 Presidential election, “the Forgotten Frenchman” was assuredly in the minority. Be that as it may, what “the Forgotten Frenchman” now hopes for in the very near future is a conservative revolution of Goldwaterite proportions.

Somebody order a copy of The Conscience of a Conservative for Mr. Sarkozy, Elysee Palace, please.

Note: "Paoli" is the pen name, or should we say nom de plume, of our French correspondent, a close student of European politics and a good friend of America. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.

Foreseeably, diversity stalls out

Ideal diversity, the quest for a prescribed rainbow of race and ethnicity, is making little headway at CU, the Denver Post reported on Aug. 17. Who's surprised? You can't make water run uphill. Despite President Hank Brown's diversity task force, a new vice-chancellor dedicated to the issue, and 80-plus diversity programs at a cost of $22 million, people are going to do what they're going to do about higher education (and many other life choices). Nor is that a bad thing. No less an acute social observer than Harvard's Robert Putnam -- hardly a conservative -- reports data that highlight the downside of diversity-by-design, according to a column last week by Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal.

When that downside is pushed to an extreme by well-intended schemes that ignore groups' aversion to mixing, mass bloodshed can result, as military historian Ralph Peters bluntly reminds us in a not-for-the-squeamish National Review piece, "Better than Genocide: Ethnic Cleansing in Human Affairs." (See print edition 8/13/07, or this link; subscription required.)

The keynotes for a free and good society, all history teaches us, are individual liberty and individual responsibility, not engineered social mixing. America has largely lost sight of that truth, however. Our state and nation need leaders with the moral courage to say it and the political skills to enact it as policy.

We the people can take one step by petitioning to the 2008 ballot, and then adopting, the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative.

[Cross-posted at the Gang of Four blog on PoliticsWest.com]

Flip-flops should hearten conservatives

With summer drawing to a close, flip-flops can still come in handy as philosophical accessories, even if no longer preferred as footwear. Judging by the number of ideological somersaults currently being performed by some of the major contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, summer may well extend beyond its seasonal boundaries this year. Who are the acrobats and what are the verbal gyrations about? Take them in alphabetical order: Rudy Giuliani was recently heard on the O’Reilly Factor advocating a tough enforcement-first immigration policy in response to charges that he was the mayor of a “sanctuary city”.

Mike Huckabee, the former Governor of Arkansas who came second in a truncated straw poll in Ames, Iowa, last week, is embracing the Fair Tax, a plan to replace the income tax with a national sales tax, amid accusations from the Cato Institute and the Club for Growth that he actually increased taxes and oversaw rising government spending in his State when he was Governor.

Last but not least, Mitt Romney, the winner of the aforementioned poll, finds himself relentlessly rebutting recurring denunciations that he is basically a hypocrite for expressing pro-life views now when in reality he explicitly championed pro-choice positions when he ran for office in Massachusetts back in 1994 and 2002.

Yet on the basis of the evidence, my question is: So what?

After all, prominent conservatives like Richard Weaver, one of the early intellectual founders of the modern conservative movement, explained in an article published in the Fall 1960 issue of Modern Age that back in 1932, he “joined the American Socialist Party”. Frank Meyer, another influential conservative intellectual, was a former Communist. And we all know the identity of that FDR fan from Hollywood who was a registered Democrat until the 1950s and ended up being elected President of the United States twice, proudly wearing a Republican button on his lapel on both occasions.

Granted, flip-flops do raise doubts about the authenticity of a candidate’s views on important issues. Granted, electoral expediency may well account, to some varying degree, for some of the latest changes of heart. However what conservatives should bear in mind and rejoice at is the supposedly final direction of the retractions: theirs!

Indeed the substance of the statements now being made by the contenders is decidedly conservative: a fairer tax code, lower taxes, preserving life and protecting the country’s borders. What all this proves is that seven years after President Bush was first elected, conservatism is still the philosophical driving force behind the set of policies that the Republican Party, at least at the grassroots level, feels very comfortable with.

Some will rightly point out that there is nothing particularly unusual about primary contenders “pandering” to the base. Once the nomination is sewn up, the eventual winner -- it is feared -- will tack to the center to appeal to supposedly more moderate voters nationwide, in effect promising to oppose the Fair Tax, to argue for a guest-worker program or to support abortion once again as the case may be. So what again? Even if that prediction turns out to be true, conservatism will still paradoxically eventually come out on top.

Indeed two scenarios may well be expected to be played out successfully for conservatives in the next twelve months, regardless of the likelihood of an even more conservative candidate taking the plunge. The first script goes something like this: the Republican nominee wins the nomination on a consistently conservative platform and decides to run away from the center in the general election. If he wins, then America will prove to be a center-right nation and he will have to govern accordingly. Even if he loses, conservatism is not likely to take the same kind of electoral beating that it did back in 1964 -- and even then, history has shown that one major electoral setback was not enough to destroy its resilience.

The second scenario is more familiar but no less favorable to conservatives: the winning contender sounds conservative enough to his base in the primaries but, hearing ghostly echoes of the old liberal adage that “a conservative can’t win”, resolves to steer to the center until November. Conservatives could then either (a) sit on their hands in the general election and hand the Presidency over to the Democrats, in which case they would have to be taken even more seriously next time round.

Or they could (b) finally decide to heed Frank Meyer’s call in National Review in 1960 urging conservatives “to be fully prepared to walk out and (…) fulfill their duty of presenting to the country a meaningful choice”, sowing the seeds of a doggedly chimerical but potentially auspicious realignment in the process.

Wishful thinking? I wish you a pleasant Indian summer…

Note: "Paoli" is the pen name, or should we say nom de plume, of our French correspondent, a close student of European politics and a good friend of America. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.

Post wrong on Rove

The verdict on President Bush, his departing strategist Karl Rove, and Republican political hopes is hardly as settled or as negative as one would gather from the purple prose of last Wednesday's Denver Post editorial, "Rove's departure testifies to a weak administration." What's weak is the pun on White House staffers' proper refusal to testify (get it?) about their confidential advice to the chief executive, under oath to a fishing expedition of the legislative branch. Rove hasn't given and won't give an inch on that principle; sorry, Democrats.

As for the editorial's line of argument, if you can call it that, who says failure will be Bush's legacy? A strong economy, six years without another 9/11 attack, and 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan liberated from tyranny and given a fighting chance at self-government, add up to a pretty respectable term of stewardship over the nation's highest office. Karl Rove helped Bush achieve all that, after helping him become the first presidential son ever to win the White House twice, after helping him become Texas governor in a stunning upset over Ann Richards, darling of the liberal media.

Not bad for a pudgy, bespectacled wonk of humble Denver origins. The other Colorado-born guy who figured prominently in Election 2004 was Sen. John Kerry, last seen windsurfing off the Cape; sorry again, Democrats.

Much of this long-winded piece reads less like political analysis than like Dennis Kucinich revving up the Netroots. Count the bromides: (1) Bush isn't low in the polls because his "failed policies... are legion," he's low because of Iraq, period. (2) The war wasn't "politicized" by Rove; war is inescapably political in a democracy like ours. He merely pointed out the obvious in noting that the American people don't want a repeat of our humiliating "cut and run" Vietnam defeat.

(3) Despite the editorial's gibe that those words now sound ironic, the irony really goes the other way as Congress has time and again recoiled from mandating an Iraq pullout. Rove didn't script the recent spectacle of top Democrats worrying aloud that US gains on the battlefield will hurt their party politically. And (4) it's untrue that "the situation in Iraq has never been more grim." Under Petraeus it's getting less grim by the day, hence those nervous Dems.

Post editors even harrumph at the sinister Rove for (5) "controlling the message as always, and placing it in [the Wall Street Journal's] friendly hands." What was he supposed to do: announce his resignation on Air America? Or maybe give Keith Olberman an exclusive? Come on.

(6) With a closing flourish of unconscious irony at their own expense, the editors --who saw Rove's candidate beat the one they favored in 2000 -- laugh off his prediction that George W. Bush will rebound in public approval and that the GOP will elect his successor next year. Har har, what does that dolt Karl Rove know about politics?

Final bromide (7): The absurdity of his forecast, you see, is demonstrated by Bush and the Republicans having lost both houses of Congress last year. Case closed, Dems win, don't even bother holding the election. But there is the little matter of history. FDR lost big in both houses in 1938, then won big for a third term in 1940. Harry Truman lost Congress in 1946 and was reelected in 1948. Eisenhower lost Congress in 1954 and was reelected in 1956. Reagan lost the Senate in 1986, then saw Bush the elder, his VP, win handily in 1988.

So that's four contrary cases in 70 years, two D and two R, for the editors' allegedly clinching indicator of a sure Republican loss in 2008. But never mind, these guys ignore troublesome data with the aplomb of the IPCC global warming claque.

My bottom line from all this is that, first, the Post shouldn't bother submitting this particular editorial for a Pulitzer, and second, Americans should thank and congratulate Karl Rove for selfless service to his country.

Mr. Rove, like his friend and boss Mr. Bush, exemplifies the best tradition of the Man in the Arena, about whom Theodore Roosevelt spoke so memorably. Indeed, something tells me TR will get along splendidly with both W and Karl when they all meet some day, up at the big Bully Pulpit in the sky.

Lamborn's rivals & Reagan's example

"As the last journey of this faithful pilgrim [has taken] him beyond the sunset... we here still move in twilight, but we have one beacon to guide us that Ronald Reagan never had: we have his example.” So said Margaret Thatcher in eulogizing the 40th president in June 2004. But three short years later, his example clearly matters less to some Republicans than others; and to most Democrats, not at all. The response in political circles to a coherent and specific apologia for courageous and wise Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-CD5) against his critics among Colorado’s chattering classes might have been predicted.

If what I claimed last week in Lamborn’s defense about the natural tendency of loquacious politicos – that, with a few noble exceptions, they tend to forget the meaning of words like virtue, honor, courage, and wisdom in favor of the who-whom of the cocktail party circuit and the respectable middle-of-the-road opinion editorial – then a clear defense of Reaganite conservatism and men like Mr. Lamborn who stand unapologetically for it is likely to draw a strong reaction.

Cara DeGette (linked above) and others on the left who love to observe and magnify any division within the GOP, and who love nothing better than to see any Reaganite tarred and feathered by his own party, can be expected to phone GOP opponents of Mr. Lamborn and ask them what they think of such mud-slinging? And – outrage of outrages – when the county GOP leadership had so recently issued a call for peace!

Mr. Lamborn’s opponents can be expected to respond as they did in 2006: “Alas, these are the kinds of tactics we were talking about.”

If the incumbent were not such a man as Mr. Lamborn, if he were one who could be expected to produce the respectable middle-of-the-road op-ed with more frequency, party leadership could have been counted on to have taken a clear stand in defense of the incumbent. After all, primaries are messy and energy-sapping and divisive. Why challenge a sitting Republican when there are so many Democrats to focus on? How much more Republicans could accomplish if we would only stop bickering and unite!

When the incumbent, however, is a Reaganite conservative, primaries take a miraculous turn: they either become healthy, party-building affairs, as then-chairman of the state GOP Ted Halaby confidently stated in 2004 when the state hierarchy and then-Gov. Bill Owens united to betray then-candidate and conservative hero Bob Schaffer by backing the moderate and respectable Pete Coors in a primary against him. Or, as now-Chairman of the state GOP Dick Wadhams has said of the impending Fifth District contest between Mr. Crank and Mr. Lamborn, primaries are merely a “family squabble” that do not cause us much concern up here in Denver.

El Paso GOP officials, when confronted with hearty and true defenses of Lamborn throughout this coming campaign season, will be faced with a choice: follow the earnest chattering crowd, presume against Mr. Lamborn and his supporters, and promise to investigate their mudslinging, with nary a word about any attention to the regular and visceral stream of mud that has come from GOP ranks for over a year against their own Republican incumbent.

Or, alternatively, recognize that what lies at the root of intra-party disputes is not just competing personalities and ambitions, but a clash between a political philosophy that believes truth and virtue are worth contending for, even when they are unpopular, and a philosophy that believes what the chattering classes judge to be likeability, electability, and respectability is the only just arbiter of campaign justice and electoral rewards.

What is so pernicious about the latter anti-philosophy is that it makes truth a tool to be wielded rather than a standard to be followed – something to be shaped, molded, interpreted to fit the story we want to tell and the candidate we want to win rather than something to shape, mold, and interpret the story we ought to tell and decide the candidate who ought to win. In the end, when this philosophy has been lived for any length of time, others telling the plain and simple truth becomes a “tactic”; virtue becomes a vice; wisdom becomes an error; and a hero becomes an outright villain.

Where this kind of confusion prevails, every faithful pilgrim must protest, but none should despair. All the greatest in our midst have borne this cross, and we have what they never had: their example to guide and inspire us now and forward.