Now Is the Time: We must do what we can to win this war.
Thursday, August 5, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Life should be fun. It should be satisfying and exciting. As much as possible one should do what one's heart dictates, as long as it is constructive and helpful. (If it is not, one should take one's heart to a minister, rabbi or therapist, and get one's heart in order.)
In this spirit, a slight swerve is announced here.
Everyone who reads me knows I am a political conservative, by which I mean I adhere to a particular philosophy, a way of viewing life and man and his time on earth. I do not think a lot of modern conservatives have taken on their philosophy because they were brought up in it, schooled in it, and swallowed it whole. And I don't think a lot of them became conservatives because they read a book by Hayek or Adam Smith and thought, "Ah ha, this seems sound!" I think a lot of people in our time who have become conservatives did it because they had a certain and particular kind of mind. To choose just one facet, they have a natural respect and even sometimes love toward human beings, while at the same time having no illusions--none--about who we are. Man is not perfect and is not perfectible, at least by other men. We are what we are; God made us and gave us freedom; we use it to ill and good; man best operates through certain arrangements and traditions, and those arrangements and traditions are best animated by respect for the individual and love of liberty.
You start out there, and then you find yourself hearing something or reading something that you find out is "conservative." You pick up National Review at the age of 17, or you read C.S. Lewis or bump into the autobiography of a man named Whittaker Chambers and you read and suddenly you think, "Oh my God, that's exactly what I think." That moment, for a young conservative, is a very happy one, a breakthrough.
In the leftist water in which we all swim, and have swum for half a century, left-liberalism reigns: in media, in academia, in the schools and the newsmagazines. It is a great relief to see there are actually a number of little fish like you, trying hard to swim upstream.
Because I am a conservative I support the party that best represents conservative views, the Republican Party. Sometimes I get mad at it; often it disappoints me. It is imperfect, and not perfectible. But to a greater degree than in the past I feel an urge to help it. Since peace was wrenched off the tracks on 9/11, deep in my heart I have pulled for President Bush, Vice President Cheney, members of the current administration, and Republicans in the Senate and the House. With the decline of the Democratic Party I have become convinced there is a greater chance we will win the war if the Republican Party wins the election.
In the past four years I have written about and given advice to both parties in this column. But a week ago, while watching the Democratic convention, I made a decision.
I am going to take three months' unpaid leave from The Wall Street Journal and attempt to support the Republican Party in the coming and crucial election. (Every four years everyone says "this is the most important election of my lifetime," but this year I believe it is true.) I'm going to give whatever advice and encouragement I have in terms of strategy, approach, message--I hate that word--and issues. No one has asked me to do this, and I do it as a volunteer, not for a salary but simply to give my time to help what I think is the more helpful side. This will take a bite out of my finances but I can do it. Actually most of us, when we die, wind up with a few thousand dollars in the bank. We should have spent it! I am going to spend mine now.
The White House does not need my help. They have the best political strategists, communications specialists and speechwriters since the Reagan era, which had the best of all these since the time of JFK. President Bush has his sound, and it's a good one. He's getting his sea legs on the stump--it's hard to go from being-president to being-president-and-running again-for-president, it's a bit of a shift and is always awkward. But he's got it together and they've got it together. |
