WASHINGTON — What a wonderful morn! Campaign ‘08 is a corpse.
Step gently around it. Offer a gentle wave of the hand to those
poor wretches over in the corner looking forlorn and lost. Those
are the political junkies. They have awakened every day for
almost two years eager for the electioneering fray: first the
primaries, where Hillary was “inevitable” and Rudy the likely
Republican candidate. Then they heaved and sweated for Senator
Barack Obama or Senator John McCain. Now the election is over,
and they are in withdrawal.
Yet, most of the rest of us have reason to be relieved and
frankly a bit proud of our country. Yes, the campaign was a blare
of competing rhetorical sophistications. It was rare that either
candidate uttered an applause line that did not either begin with
a deceit or end with one. Senator Obama’s yawp about giving 95%
of us a tax cut is a comely example — after all some 40% of his
targeted audience pay no income taxes. And Senator McCain’s rant
against Wall Street for the financial crisis is another. The
crisis began with those subprime mortgages from Fannie and
Freddie and was exacerbated by cheap money and recklessly low
interest rates from the Department of the Treasury and from the
Fed.
Most of the rest of us can be proud of how this election has
concluded. The United States has elected an African American to
the presidency two generations after Jim Crow. There was no
violence and very little playing of the race card. Senator Obama
ran a deft campaign and his Chicago advisors created a formidable
machine — pardon the term. He is from Chicago, and so am I. We
know what a Chicago machine has been, and frankly I have not been
reassured when I have heard him sing that he is running against
“thirty years of broken politics in Washington.” Does he mean he
is bringing in “fixed politics”? We from Chicago know what “fixed
politics” has meant in Chicago, and there the fix has been in for
more than “thirty years.”
Yet beyond my little play on words, I, a Reagan conservative
through and through, join with so many of my fellow Americans in
taking pride in this election. Old Europe has disdained this
country for years as racially prejudiced, though for years some
of our most beloved popular figures have been African Americans.
At this point we have had black generals in our military, black
members of our presidential cabinets, black Supreme Court
justices, black political leaders throughout the states, and
black CEOs all over the lot. No European nation has shown such
tolerance to color, ethnic origins, or religious and political
disagreement. Spare us your canards about racial prejudice in the
Great Republic, and may I remind our European critics that 2009,
the year in which Senator Obama will be inaugurated to the
presidency, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham
Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.
Aside from the political junkies, there is another tiny coterie
of gloomy souls this week, the Clintonistas. Doubtless the
gloomiest among them is the downcast former Boy President. He is
actually, according to my sources, quite angry. With the election
of Senator Obama, Bill Clinton’s days of White House revelry are
finito. He has wanted to get back in the White House for years.
Relatively unreported, but nonetheless true, he wanted his wife
to run in 2004. We saw how passionately he campaigned for her in
2008. Yet a return of the Clintons was never to be. As I said as
early as the spring of 2007 in The Clinton Crack-Up (and in an
interview with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN), the “inevitable” Hillary
was “going to have real problems getting the nomination.” She
faced a serious challenge from a younger generation of Democrats
that found its candidate in the junior senator from Illinois.
As I also reported, her husband is a dreadful campaigner for
anyone but himself. When she turned to him in the primaries she
apparently knew nothing of his limitations. In 2004 of the 14
candidates he campaigned for 12 lost. In the closing days of this
campaign when the former president campaigned for Senator Obama,
we saw why he is so dreadful in campaigning for others. To
Senator Obama’s visible chagrin, Bill talked about himself first
then his White House advisors. When he finally referred to the
2008 Democratic candidate sitting nearby, he only diminished him.
Now Bill is a has-been and the historians are going to note his
failed presidency.
In the months ahead. we are going to be hearing that the Reagan
conservatives are has-beens too. Well, we shall see. Critics have
been writing obituaries for the conservative movement since 1964.
I recall their pessimistic reports with great clarity in 1987.
That was when the Reagan Revolution was supposedly finished off
by Iran-Contra and a stock market decline. In the years ahead,
the principles of Reagan conservatism came to be adopted even by
Democrats. The reason is clear. Those principles protect personal
liberty, encourage prosperity, and protect American national
security.
In the coming months, the conservative movement will regroup. It
will refine its principles for the present needs of the nation:
growth, personal liberty, and national security. It will find the
next generation of conservative political leaders. If President
Obama really makes good on his promise to return to the New Deal
of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s, a revitalized
conservative movement will be back on top sooner than one might
expect. Recall if you will that this happened two years after the
Clintons brought “change” to Washington in 1992.
