AS REPUBLICANS LICK THEIR WOUNDS after the election just ended,
the person of whom I find myself thinking is Robert Bartley. He was
editor of the Wall Street Journal for something like 30
years. I admired a lot of things about him—his skill as an
editorial craftsman, his rectitude in his personal and professional
conduct, his pluck as a pugilist on policy, and his success as a
family man. But of all the things I admired about him, none was as
great as the esprit, the cheerfulness, the doughtiness he showed
during his years in the wilderness.
This strikes me as something for young conservatives today—and
others who aren’t so young—to remember after the defeat of Governor
Romney. Oh, it’s nice to be a winner. No doubt about it. But it’s
not as nice as sticking to one’s principles. Winning itself,
moreover, sometimes requires a long trek through the wilderness.
That’s where one can test not only one’s mettle but also one’s
theories. It has to be said that, while compromise may sometimes be
in order, a victory won by accommodation is rarely as sweet—or as
credible—as a victory won by perseverance.
This was the case in respect of Winston Churchill. One can read
about it in books or watch the wonderful BBC series The
Gathering Storm, which traces Churchill’s years at Chartwell,
when he was out of power and warning of the impending war. He
certainly had his frustrations and moments of moroseness. But he
sought solace in painting and family and plotted with aides to gain
intelligence from the government so as to inform his speeches in
Parliament. He was at odds with his own party during this period,
but he didn’t let it stop him. It was precisely his dissent that
qualified him for elevation to high command when war came.
How wonderful it would have been to interview him. But I did
meet Menachem Begin, who had one of the longest slogs through the
wilderness of any statesman of our time. After leading the revolt
against the British that led to the creation in 1948 of the Jewish
state, he went into the opposition rather than attempt a civil war
against the Labor Party led by David Ben-Gurion. The new premier
hated Begin so intensely that, in the Knesset, he refused to
address Begin by name. Begin would spend nearly 30 years in
opposition before the country turned to him for leadership and he
won his Nobel Prize for the peace, if that’s what it was, with
Egypt.
Ariel Sharon, too, had a long testing time. This was after he
was blamed for the massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee
camps. When he was in the wilderness, I used to visit him on his
farm. Once, when he called to say he wanted to talk, I met him at
the Hotel Dorchester at London. When we sat down, the only question
I asked was whether I could turn on a tape recorder. He talked
without interruption for two hours, an astonishing soliloquy that
filled an entire page of the Wall Street Journal and that
nearly everyone set down as marginal. It would be another decade
yet before the country handed him up to power.
One of the striking things about all of these leaders—and,
though I never met him, Reagan, too, after his failure to gain the
Republican nomination in 1976—was their cheerfulness, their lack of
embarrassment in their years out of power. None of them, so far as
I can tell, was in it for the jobs or the power or the standing or
even the glory. They were in it for the principles, the ideas, the
cause, the country. They were all happy warriors, and they spent
their years out of power reading and learning and writing.
IN MY CASE, it has been the Constitution. It is a joy to study.
The records of its writing and the debates over its ratification
just crackle with politics and personality and principle and
profound prose. So do the great Supreme Court opinions, which I
have called the Himalayas of legal precedent in whose foothills we
hoe the vines of liberty. We are ever more plainly at what I like
to call a constitutional moment, in which our politics are so
divided that we are getting down to the bedrock. The more one
studies it, the more one sees guidelines for the long game.
Those of us who are being set down today as extreme or marginal
will find in it much solace. The gold standard? For company in the
cause of sound money we have Washington, Hamilton, Madison,
Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, Cleveland, McKinley, Wilson, and
Coolidge, to name but a few. They can’t all be flakes. In
Obamacare, we won a significant victory in blocking its
justification under the Commerce Clause, a position that was widely
mocked before the Court ruled. We lost on the taxing power. Time to
study just what the Founders figured on when they laid down the
famous words about how “[n]o capitation, or other direct, Tax shall
be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census.”
It is being said that Governor Romney fell into a gender gap.
This trap was laid in the debate in which he was repeatedly asked
by a former aide* to one of President Obama’s surrogates whether
states could outlaw birth control. The governor dodged the question
by saying no one wanted to outlaw birth control. I thought it was a
mistake, that he would have done better confronting what I called,
in a column here, “Mrs. Griswold’s Ghost.” The governor dodged all
the other constitutional questions, too, and in one debate even
turned a tough question over to “our constitutionalist here,” Ron
Paul.
If the Hispanic vote, another treasure Romney is said to have
lost, turns in part on the immigration question, the Constitution
is full of guidance. Parts of Arizona’s law may, or may not, be
constitutional. What is unambiguous is that the Constitution grants
to Congress the power to establish a “uniform rule of
naturalization.” Feature that word “uniform.” Why is this a power
that is given to the Congress rather than reserved for the states?
The Republicans had a leader, in George W. Bush, who understood the
power the Constitution enumerates. He won enough of the Hispanic
vote to get himself twice elected president.
How far into the wilderness the Republicans actually are at the
moment is not so clear. They have, after all, the House, and
relative conservatives hold a slim majority on the Supreme Court.
That’s about half of the constitutional structures. But if it turns
out that we’re going to be in the wilderness for a while, I’ve
stuffed my rucksack full of books. The Constitution is one of them,
and so is a copy of Bob Bartley’s The Seven Fat Years,
which turned out to be his masterpiece. And he wrote it, by the
way, in a cubbyhole in his basement after the candidate he
supported for president lost the election and while his nemesis was
in power.
Photo: Konrad Fiedler/New York Sun
