The American Spectator

Political Hay

Victory, Not Bipartisanship

By Jeffrey Lord on 1.4.08 @ 12:08AM

To what end?

Defeating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John Edwards isn't a good enough reason for a conservative triumph in 2008. Getting back the House and Senate, a difficult task, isn't a good reason either. After all, once the Democrat's nominee is vanquished the winner has to do something the next four years. To replace Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader with (presumably) John Boehner and Mitch McConnell is worthless if the next GOP-controlled Congress picks up where the last one left off, whipping through thousands of earmarks while shrugging at budget deficits.

And bipartisanship?

The call has gone forth for those addicted to manners over substance. Come to the University of Oklahoma on January 7th to explore a potential independent movement based on America's alleged need for "bipartisanship." Ahhh bipartisanship. The holy grail of political moderates.

There are several questions conservatives should be asking of themselves as this election season begins in earnest. Simple questions.

Where are they going? What is it exactly they hope to accomplish once they get there? When (in alphabetical order for the front-running five) President Giuliani/Huckabee/McCain/Romney or Thompson leaves office to be followed by Chelsea Clinton, what will his being there have accomplished to advance the conservative cause? Is there, with apologies to Gertrude Stein, a "there" there at the end of his term? If so, what, exactly, is it?

While it's important in having this kind of conversation to have an understanding of where conservatives stood, say, 43 years ago this month as Lyndon Johnson prepared to be sworn in after his landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater, it is clearly more important to be looking ahead.

What should America look like after the next conservative president prepares to leave office?

Karl Rove has it right when he says that presidencies should be about big things. One of the more amusing aspects of the campaign thus far is the slow dawning by liberals debating Hillary Clinton's offerings that the Bill Clinton presidency was in fact, as Matt Bai notes in a recent New York Times magazine article, "oddly ephemeral." Ephemeral certainly. But not oddly. All the historical revisionism there is to be had will not erase the fact that after eight years in the White House the record of FDR-style liberal policy achievements in the Clinton-era were almost non-existent. A crime bill, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and so on do not a New Deal make. The one seriously substantive change Clinton won was welfare reform, the ultimate plan being forced on a reluctant Clinton by then Speaker Newt Gingrich and political consultant Dick Morris. Morris, brought in by Hillary after the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, made it plain that if Clinton failed to get welfare done he was in danger of losing his re-election. To the gnashing of liberal teeth, Clinton caved. Added to Hillary's famous health care debacle and his refusal to take the rise of Islamic fascism seriously even after five attacks against the U.S., Clinton cemented his own historical reputation as not much. Ever the tactician, he (and she) chose instead to obsess over mini-tasks, earning him pre-Monica the nickname "Governor of the United States." Decades hence the Clinton presidency and its devotion to politically saleable mini-tasks and tactical politics will have sunk to a level of historic ranking somewhere above Jimmy Carter but below William Howard Taft.

BUT IF THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY serves as a warning to future conservative presidents about the fate of those who refuse to think big, what is the next "big thing" that needs to be accomplished that only a conservative could do? Or perhaps the next three or four "big things"?

Is it winning the war in Iraq -- winning it period, beyond doubt and leaving a stable, vigorous democracy in the middle of the Arab world that is not just Israel? Or the crystal clear vision that ends with America -- and the rest of the world -- victorious over Islamic fascism? What about getting rid of the tax system as now structured? Extending the Bush tax cuts? Cutting the capital gains tax and eliminating the death tax? Adding more conservative justices to the Supreme Court and overturning Roe v. Wade? Passing a constitutional amendment banning abortion? Leaving the decision on abortion to the voters of each state? How about privatizing social security? Building The Fence while encouraging legal immigration? Is it something else?

These are the kind of items that would keep the next conservative presidency busy for two terms, let alone one. The point, however, is to decide -- and then make it happen. What cannot be ignored here -- what will not be ignored -- is the signal importance of the conservative base. While it may well be split five ways during primary season, it is folly indeed for the eventual winner to forget what in retrospect was a significant moment for conservatives during the Bush presidency. That moment was the nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to a key seat on the Supreme Court. A very big thing indeed.

The President and his new nominee had hardly vanished from the nation's early-morning television viewing when opposition to Miers began to surface from various corners of the conservative universe. Her cause was not helped, to say the least, when she received words of praise from Harry Reid, leader of the Senate Democrats. What followed was a serious display of collective conservative political clout as opposition began to mushroom from talk radio, the New Media, activists around the country and finally the Senate itself. The episode, which came and went quickly with Bush finally relenting and nominating the conservative Samuel Alito in Miers place, deserves more prominence than it usually receives as Bush's successor is weighed. Failing to do the conservative Big Thing, Bush found himself in the beginning stages of a battle royal with his own allies. There is a lesson in this.

There can be little doubt that if a GOP successor to Bush is perceived as having defiantly crossed the conservative base by raising taxes ala the first President Bush or nominating anything less than a clear conservative to the Court like the second President Bush, or, as happened in a more recent example, blatantly fighting the base on illegal immigration, that successor would immediately be dealing with a severely damaged presidency. Damage that would be self-inflicted.

But there is something else that needs to be said as 2008 begins, and it revolves around the nonsense of moderation about to be inflicted on Americans from the unlikely staging grounds of the University of Oklahoma.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Taxes, Health Care, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, John Boehner, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Television, Earmarks, Social Security, Islam, Abortion, Constitution, Supreme Court, Military, Iraq, Russia, Israel, NATO, Communism, Fascism, Conservatism, Immigration