It isn’t hard to see why they lose.
The other day Arizona’s Republican Senator Jon Kyl sat down with
the Wall Street Journal for a discussion about all the
heat he’s taken for what the paper termed Kyl’s “efforts to forge
an immigration compromise.” Several days later, ex-CBS anchor Dan
Rather unloaded on his old network, weighing in on Katie Couric’s
dismal ratings in Rather’s old job.
What do these two seemingly disparate subjects have in common?
What could possibly connect Arizona’s junior Senator, Ms. Couric,
the losing immigration bill and tanking television ratings?
In two words: conservative principles, or more accurately, the
lack thereof.
Reading the Kyl interview is a vivid exercise in understanding
exactly what spending too much time in Washington can do to even
someone generally viewed as a conservative. Here is Mr. Kyl
attacking the concept that he and his fellow Senators (including
his Arizona seat mate, presidential candidate John McCain) actually
support an amnesty bill. “It’s impossible to make the existing
system work so we have to change the law, and changing the law
requires Democratic votes, so you have to make concessions to
Democrats.”
In a blink Kyl reveals the mindset for which Washington is so
notorious. He is not in the Senate to represent the conservative
principles which he presented to Arizona voters. No, he is in the
Senate to “make concessions to Democrats.” Kyl goes on to say that
“[t]here is only one reason to do what I am trying to here, and
that is to get a problem solved that has got to be solved.”
The thought that the way to solve the problem is to have
candidates go to the American people in the next elections, or the
next and the next and the next, to win a majority of votes to
secure the border — when in fact this authority and the money to
do it is already in place — simply is not considered to be dealing
with reality. Executing the law as it is now written and, failing
that, winning back control of the Senate in 2008 and electing the
next president to do precisely that, is automatically ruled
out.
We have been here before. When Ronald Reagan gave that famous
October, 1964 televised speech for GOP nominee Senator Barry
Goldwater, he outlined an entire conservative platform based on
conservative principles and the reality of what liberal New Deal
policies had already done to the country. Goldwater lost in a
landslide. Neither Reagan nor the gathering conservative movement
gave up. For years afterwards, in every successive election in
which his own name was on the ballot for Governor of California or
president, Reagan was attacked as an extremist who simply was
unwillingly to acknowledge reality. His response was to re-double
his efforts, to take his principles to the country and campaign for
like-minded candidates. He did not always win. But he in fact was
able to turn the debate from the automatic assumption that the
answer to all problems was to enlarge government, continually raise
taxes, appoint liberal judges, and accommodate the Soviet
Union.
The critical difference between Reagan and Establishment
Republicans who believed, just as Jon Kyl believes today, that
their job in Washington was to “make concessions to Democrats” was
that Reagan believed it was his job to represent America in
Washington. Kyl and his GOP colleagues clearly believe the reverse
—- that it is their job to represent Washington to America.
Representing America to Washington meant Reagan said and did things
that made Washington insiders cringe. From tax cuts to the military
build-up to the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court to
his speech demanding the Soviets tear down the Berlin Wall, Reagan
was consistently advised by those in the grip of the Washington
fevers that he was wrong, ill-advised, and that X,Y or Z Reagan
initiative was just not the way things were done.
By the time he left the presidency, and certainly by the time of
his death, millions of Americans had come to realize that Reagan’s
conservative principles did in fact work. They also understood that
the liberal subtext of the media and Washington insiders had been
exposed, that it could in fact be overcome. Reagan had become the
very embodiment of the American “can do” attitude that is such a
critical component of understanding the American people and
American culture. So it doesn’t take much for Americans to look at
the Kyl-supported immigration “compromise” to understand that it is
Kyl — and others including South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham — who
simply don’t “get it.” When Kyl says in a remarkable statement that
“Democrats won’t allow” a policy of “enforcement first,” he
epitomizes the idea that it is a Senator’s job to represent the
Senate and Washington to America instead of the reverse. It is no
wonder that conservatives’ instinctive response is to go out,
change the debate, and get votes to change Senators. They feel not
the slightest obligation to “work with” Ted Kennedy. To the
contrary, they believe their job is to get more votes in the Senate
to defeat Ted Kennedy. It is a fundamentally different approach to
the idea of leadership in Washington than that of Mr. Kyl.
LAST FALL, I WROTE A PIECE
in this space discussing Ronald Reagan’s view of losing elections,
mentioning in passing that while conservative principles were now
part of the bedrock of America they would never surface in that
citadel of elite American liberalism — The CBS Evening
News. “The philosophical presentation of the new CBS News
hasn’t changed a whit…” I said, pointing out what is now a
seriously hard-to-accept fact over at CBS that is truer now then
when I wrote it: the high point of Katie Couric’s ratings career at
CBS was the night she had Rush Limbaugh on-air for a brief segment
featuring Limbaugh delivering his own opinion. It was easy to see
that it would be all down hill from there for Katie — and it has
been. While Rush Limbaugh has a well-known buoyantly warm-and-fuzzy
on-air manner, it is a serious mistake to think that he spiked
Katie’s ratings because of his personality. This is akin to
thinking Reagan won two presidential landslides because he was
“genial” or had that ready smile. The success of both is tied
unmistakably to their clear understanding and articulation of
conservative principles.
Yet quite predictably, even now, floundering around in the
television ratings basement, CBS has not a clue about its problems.
Infighting among the troops has broken out. Hilariously, Dan Rather
pops up to charge CBS with “tarting” up the news, drawing instant
wrath from CBS executive Les Moonves and Katie’s boss, Clinton
friend, and veteran Mainstream Media honcho Rick Kaplan. In the
middle of the war of words Rather, unsurprisingly and doubtless
unconsciously, put the traditional liberal bias on display. “We
have enormous life-or-death issues and challenges facing us in this
country and the world today,” he told the Washington Post’s Tom Shales.
“Everything from the dismantling of civil rights enforcement within
the Justice Department to the war in Iraq to news of secret prisons
in Europe and, of course, the next presidential election.”
There isn’t enough space to deal with all of Rather’s liberal
assumptions, but let’s take his civil rights charge. Abigail
Thernstrom, a vice-chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and a
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, long ago asked another
question altogether about the behavior of Justice Department career
employees in this area, accusing them of rank liberal partisanship
in the making of civil rights policy. Would CBS ever dream of
following up on Ms. Thernstrom’s premise? Are you kidding? CBS, as
with other liberal institutions, is wedded to rigid liberal
doctrine that insists among other things that career Justice
lawyers (i.e., liberals) are always right, any American Southern
state in their sights is always wrong and racist to boot. They look
at George W. Bush (as they looked at Reagan and Goldwater) and see
Bull Connor. So intent are they on fulfilling their stereotypes
they see no contradiction (and certainly no bigotry!) in
simultaneously demanding civil rights for Mexican-Americans while
they insist on getting the political head of the first
Mexican-American Attorney General.
The problem for CBS is that in 2007 most Americans view the
1960s as ancient history. In a post-Reagan era, listening to Rush
Limbaugh and his conservative talk-radio compatriots, creating and
contributing conservative videos all over the Internet, Americans
understand the implicit story line of liberal news organizations.
They understand that exchanging Dan for Katie is a meaningless
exchange — the new boss same as the old boss, “tarted up” or
not.
And so — Americans don’t watch CBS. And they won’t accept the
idea of an immigration bill that is cobbled together because of a
felt need on the part of various Senators to appease Ted Kennedy.
They know instinctively that when they see lines of Americans whose
travel plans have been screwed up because they can’t get a U.S.
passport to travel to Mexico or Canada, when they realize 3 of the
Fort Dix plotters were not only illegal aliens but were stopped 75
times (!!!) by various police authorities and never once had their
status questioned, the very notion that a
Washingtonized-immigration bill is going to “solve the problem” of
immigration is hilarious nonsense.
So take your pick. The immigration bill or lousy ratings for CBS
News. Jon Kyl’s idea of what it means to be a Senator or
Katie/Dan’s idea of what it means to report the “news.” It’s the
same old, same old.
For different versions of the same reason, both the bill and the
newscast are in trouble. But don’t expect this to change either
Senator Kyl or Anchor Couric.
And don’t lay odds on a President McCain, either.
For the same reason.
