Jon Kyl is the sort of public servant who should have been
running for president this year. Instead, we’ll just have to
make do with some of his wisdom as the U.S. senator from
Arizona enters the seven-month closing stretch of 26 years in
Congress.
Kyl, the second ranking Republican in the Senate and always
among the most conservative, is one of those rare breeds who seem
to make no strong enemies even while holding firm to a consistent
philosophy. A leader on issues ranging from defense policy
(especially missile defense) to criminal justice to tax cuts, Kyl
is inevitably among the most knowledgeable people in the room on
any subject about which he speaks — but he often willingly pushes
others toward the spotlight if he thinks, tactically, that those
others can best advance his cause.
I sought Kyl out on Tuesday, therefore, as a voice of
conservative thoughtfulness who might have a good sense of where
things stand politically right now for cause and country. His
outlook wasn’t bearish, but it was decidedly sobering.
“As a general proposition I think right now the president and
the Senate are 50-50 propositions and the House is only slightly
better than that,” he said. “I think that, ironically, President
Obama has a firmer fix on what this election is going to be about
than a lot of Republicans do. He is clear that he wants to fight
for the fundamental progressive agenda to totally change the
direction of our country, and I don’t think Republicans yet
appreciate what a radical change that would be. But we are
beginning to figure that out.
“Obama is perfectly happy to litigate this question of the power
of government versus the power of freedom. He believes in the power
of government. That is all he has ever known. He doesn’t appreciate
the private economic market and he sees his role as president as
managing all of this rather than allowing the private sector to
manage itself. And I think Mitt Romney has to take up that
challenge because he is on the side of traditional America, the
system that made us great and can continue to keep us on top, but
he’s got to be able to articulate that kind of view against Obama’s
vision of a government-centered country.”
Well, then, I asked, are we on the Right making our case?
Kyl’s blunt answer: “No. We are not very good at it.”
Then, unbidden, Kyl continued: “One of the people best at it is
Arthur Brooks [president of the American Enterprise Institute]. He
says we tend to get mired down in statistics. We do. But [Brooks
says] we need to talk in terms of the concept of fairness because
that’s the concept the liberals like to talk about.”
As it happened, one day earlier I had attended a speech by
Brooks at the Heritage Foundation, explaining just this idea, which
he develops in full in his new book,
The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free
Enterprise. “We have to make the moral case for free
enterprise,” Brooks said. “The economic case is unambiguous, and
we’ve been getting all the words right about free enterprise — but
we’ve been missing the music…. We’ve talked about
efficiency, when most people care about a better
life.”
Case in point: welfare reform [of Aid to Families with Dependent
Children] in 1996. Conservatives yelled for years about how
expensive welfare was. But until conservatives started talking
about reform as actually being a better way to help the people who
needed it, they didn’t get very far. “The morality, not the
materialism, changed that policy,” Brooks said.
Anyway, Brooks went on from there to explain that the happiest
people in America are those who have experienced “earned success,”
which he called the opposite of “learned helplessness.” The
American people, he said, citing various studies, still believe
that “fairness” is a matter not just of equal results, but of
appropriately rewarding those who have earned it.
That’s exactly where Kyl picked up the thread, as thoroughly
conversant with the theme as if he had memorized the speech he
hadn’t even attended: “The Left, really, has a very materialistic
view. We need to do a much better job of articulating the whole
point about free enterprise…. Romney and the Republicans better be
prepared to defend the system on fairness grounds the very way
Brooks articulates it.”
He cited a Brooks story about a brother and a sister arguing
about the last of four cookies. The brother said he should get it
since the sister already had eaten two while he just had one.
“Yes, that’s true,” the sister said, quite reasonably, “but I
was the one who bought the ingredients and baked them.”
Said Kyl: “Shouldn’t there be some reward for effort,
achievement, creation, production, responsibility? Most people
innately understand the difference between makers and takers. When
you point out to them that over half of American people are
receiving some kind of government assistance — food stamps have
absolutely skyrocketed; half of all people don’t pay income taxes
— people can realize that this redistribution à la Obama
isn’t ‘fair.’ If you keep doing this, pretty soon, there’s
not enough for anybody.”
Kyl then made a coherent case for solving the nation’s economic
problems through private-sector growth, not government spending;
tax restraints rather than tax hikes; freedom rather than mandated
behavior. Then:
“At the end of the day, where Obama wants to go is a very bad
place from our perspective. People who haven’t thought a lot about
this can think, ‘wait a minute, it can’t be that bad.’ So we’ve got
to give real-life examples of things he has said and things he is
trying to do, to make the point that yes, it could be that bad,
things like rationing of health care under Medicare and Medicaid
for example. A perpetual reduction in our standard of living,
reflected in the fact that the government is taking so much out of
our private sector that we are in danger of becoming like the
European states. And he’s reducing our influence in the world, so
much that we are subject to the winds that blow rather than being
in some sort of control over events that can harm us.
“I think it all gets down to the difference between liberty and
opportunity on one side, and government power on the other side.
The people in the middle are not ‘moderates,’ they are
‘independents.’ They do not like government; they don’t like
politicians, they do not like the power structure, but they
do have core beliefs. I think Americans’ core beliefs
include a healthy dose of wanting to live their own lives the way
they want to live it, not having the government control everything,
I think we can appeal to that.”
Coming from a man whose entire demeanor exudes common sense,
competence and decency, the message is entirely believable and
saleable.
One other point Kyl made is that Republicans “need to be
prepared to talk a little more about foreign policy and defense
policy than we are doing right now.” If Israel attacks Iran; if
some other crisis emerges, he said, we must be ready to offer
leadership and show that we understand what’s happening. And while
defense savings can be achieved, he said, he warned strongly
against “Draconian cuts” to the military.
In another nice coincidence, backing for that position came
later that day from an unexpected source. In an otherwise
off-the-record, high-minded, roundtable discussion with freshman
U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Ayotte volunteered much
the same idea, and said that advocating a strong defense isn’t just
good policy but good politics, too, even in her own state without
major military bases. Mentioning Kyl’s name, unprompted, among
three senators she said who really understand these things, Ayotte
said:
“I raise this at every town meeting…. People generally
appreciate that the foremost issue of government is to keep the
people safe…. This is something that resonates with my
constituents: We are in a very real fiscal crisis, yet what are we
putting in jeopardy first? The very people who put their lives on
the line for us. My constituents understand that is not the best
choice we can make.”
Ayotte represents a decidedly “purple” or “swing” state, one
with a Democratic governor for 14 of the past 16 tears — yet she
won her Senate seat, in her first-ever run for public office, by
more than 22 points. Maybe she, and Kyl, is on to something.
But back to my interview with Kyl. “All that said,” Kyl hastened
to add after having brought up defense issues, “I still think we’re
talking about the economy first. The more people you have dependent
on government, the less likely you are to be able to appeal to
liberty and the more likely they [Liberals] are to win the
argument. There is a tipping point. That’s what you see in
Greece.”
Jon Kyl is a now 70 years old — but such a young 70 that three
years ago, in a small-group lunch that Vice President Dick Cheney
hosted for conservative columnists just before leaving office,
Cheney listed Kyl among four or five names (all the others were
three decades Kyl’s junior) he called “younger rising stars” of the
Republican Party.
Conservatives, taking heed of that youthfulness, should yearn
for Kyl not to leave the scene so quickly.
