WASHINGTON -- It is indicative of the bias that gusts through
our media that when the most successful political strategist in
memory, Karl Rove, retires from his powerful position in the Bush
White House, the press reports his departure tsk-tskingly. Somehow
Rove's departure must suggest his failure and disgrace. Or as some
nitwit anchoring the midday CNN news broadcast, "Your World Today,"
put it when I was walking past a television monitor, "Does that
mean the Bush Administration is essentially over?" And we are told
the Fox News is biased. What about stupid?
Well, who has been a finer political strategist than Rove was in
2000, 2002, 2004, and even in the defeat of 2006 -- James Carville
or the Clinton Administration's other machiavel, Paul Begala? While
they sweated to keep up with the arrant lies and other misbehavior
of their playboy president, the Democratic Party went into its
steepest decline since, roughly, the Civil War. Yet Carville and
Begala have gone on to become political sages within the media and
with no taint of discredit. Both are rude and vulgar and the
political sidekicks of the American presidency's closest
approximation to President Warren Harding, complete with
sweethearts in the Oval Office, a bossy wife, and a passion for
golf -- though Warren was never known as a golf cheat.
Actually there is a retiring Republican who does deserve
obloquy. This week it has been reported that former Speaker of the
House Dennis Hastert is quitting. He became Speaker in December
1998, after a dozen lackluster years in the House. He is always
introduced in the news stories as "a former small-town high school
wrestling coach," and when I met him in 1999 he looked like a
former high school wrestling coach to me. Wrestling is a very
demanding sport, and I wish Hastert had stayed in the gym. His
period as Speaker marked the Republican congressional delegation's
final decay from Reagan splendor to the provincial Republicanism of
an earlier era. The late Harding again comes to mind.
Hastert did preside over tax cuts and did help hammer out
legislative responses to the September 11 sneak attacks on New York
and Washington. Of course, both initiatives were pretty much
devised by the Bush White House. He also opened the floodgates to
Congressional spending. He also turned a blind eye to the petty
corruption that beset the House during his term. He encouraged
mediocrity and held back young principled Republicans of the
Reaganite variety. He allowed the Republican Party to return to the
era of pork barrel deal making.
The Reagan era began as a revolt against the welfare state and
appeasement of Soviet aggression. It was not simply a visceral
revolt by old-fashioned reactionaries but an advance by people who
had analyzed sclerotic liberalism and found it incapable of
responding to contemporary problems, for instance, cities that were
increasingly ungovernable, stagflation in the economy, Soviet
military growth and subversion in what was then called the Third
World. The most intellectually agile liberal Democrats were parting
company with the ritualistic liberal conformists. Intellectuals
such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and -- for a time --
Daniel Patrick Moynihan were joining with Bill Buckley and Milton
Friedman and suggesting new solutions to problems liberals dithered
over. Such liberals came to be called neoconservatives -- and
frankly only these skeptical liberals who eventually joined forces
with the Reaganites can accurately be called neoconservatives.
The result was the Reagan Administration, an amalgam of the best
of the rising right and the old liberal consensus developed at the
beginning of the Cold War. It was a politics of ideas. Irving
Kristol had pronounced modern politics the domain of ideas and he
was right. Hastert, the retired high school wrestling coach, had no
appetite for ideas. Until Republicans return to a politics of
Reaganite ideas, they will be as antiquated as the Democrats and
infinitely less interesting.
topics:
Television, Military
