WAKE UP
Thunder on the Right
David Frum - NRO
“A Concerned Bloc of Republicans Wonders Whether Bush is Conservative Enough.” That was the headline on the New York Times’ report on this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference – and the story that followed was an acute piece of journalism. I’m in the middle of my second book tour in the space of twelve months. I’ve been traveling from one talk-radio station to another, listening both to the callers and the hosts, when the mikes are on and when the mikes are off. Twelve months ago, the support for President Bush among conservatives was rock-solid: I mean, Reagan 1984 solid. Today, that support is still more solid than not – but just enough softer that if I were a Bush political adviser, I’d be concerned.
Conservatives dislike the prescription drug bill and the spending boom. But the policy that they most passionately dislike is the Bush immigration plan. It arises everywhere – California of course, but throughout the rest of the country too.
Is immigration enough to stop conservatives from supporting George Bush? Probably not. But it is enough to make the ground under his feet just slightly less solid than it was or should be. And there may be odd things ahead in this election year. The Democrats seem, wisely, to have decided that Howard Dean offered them a one-way ticket to disaster. On the other hand, Dean proved that there is a large and dedicated block of voters in this country militantly opposed to the terror war and wide open to passionate anti-Bush appeals. Where will they go if the Democrats nominate a conventional liberal like John Edwards or John Kerry?
Here’s one thought: If Dean is forced out of the race, it is looking increasingly likely that Ralph Nader will run. And one of the striking things about Nader’s personal evolution over the past four years is that he has shifted from being a dogmatic sort of leftist to an increasingly ruthless and unprincipled demagogue. On Bill Maher’s program Friday, I heard Nader denounce George Bush for deficit spending. Ralph Nader! Is it conceivable that Nader could attempt to use the immigration issue? It seems unlikely – and yet … and yet I think George Bush would be wise to pay very careful attention to the discontents of his conservative base over the next 11 months.
New Hampshire
Of course the Dems have much more severe problems than Republicans do. Those problems are concealed somewhat by the passionate swoon into which John Edwards has sent the national press. Suddenly everybody loves this handsome, eloquent, and supposedly moderate North Carolina senator – and is convinced that he has acquired that magic property, “electability.”
If he comes second in New Hampshire, as he very well might, I find it hard to imagine how he will fail ultimately to win the nomination. But sometime between now and the South Carolina primary, all those feverish journalists in the Edwards entourage might wish to remind themselves of some elementary facts:
He is a first-term senator. “The American people,” Sam Rayburn is supposed to have said, “will elect anybody to Congress – once.” For that reason, it is customary for governors and senators to run for president only after they have won re-election. Democratic voters are telling themselves that Edwards can win votes in the south. But they don’t know that – they just assume it because Edwards succeeded in wresting a Senate seat away from an inattentive Lauch Faircloth in 1998. But is it seriously to be believed that Edwards would beat Bush anywhere in the South – even North Carolina? I know I don’t believe it. Isn’t there too something fatally unready about John Edwards? Commentators keep calling him “young.” Edwards will be 50 in November. Ten other US presidents (Polk, Fillmore, Pierce, Grant, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton) were Edwards’s age or younger on coming into office. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the most politically adept of them all, was only one year older. What the critics mean is not that Edwards is too young, but that he seems too callow. Finally, isn’t there a very real possibility that the centrist-seeming Edwards might actually be the Democrat most vulnerable to an opportunistic campaign by Ralph Nader?
Review of Reviews Cont’d
In the next New Yorker, Joshua Micah Marshall criticizes Richard Perle and myself for being poor imperialists:
“For Perle and Frum, America is the revisionist power in the midst of its own imperium.
“In this latest turn of neoconservative thought, the trappings of optimism and the hopeful talk of a liberal-democratic domino effect have been abandoned. … Perle and Frum are fire and foreboding. Theirs are not policies that would lead to the end of evil; they might well, in the long run, lead to the end of empire.”
We repeatedly say in An End to Evil that America isn’t and should not be an imperial power. But what we do recognize is that the end of the Cold War has changed the world - that European states no longer need American protection as they once did – and that this colossal change in Europe’s strategic situation has had large consequences for European behavior.
It’s very odd. People on the left-hand side of the political world are always urging us to remember that other countries have their own motives, values and interests. Yet whenever there is a Republican president, those same people on the left-hand side suddenly tell us that anything untoward that happens anywhere in the world is a reaction to that Republican president … forgetting all about their own lessons about the independent motives, values, and interests of those other countries.
The Europeans are not inert entities who merely react to American initiatives. They act for their own reasons. And if we dislike their behavior, we should not be so narcissistic as to assume that it is always about us. Sometimes it is about them and their own problems, to which we must react as best we can.
It may suit some political interests to blame George W. Bush for every difficulty the United States encounters in international affairs. In Europe, however, anti-Bush sentiment has become a very convenient excuse for European governments to do what they wish to do - which is, orient themselves away from an American superpower whose protection they no longer feel they need. It's hard to believe that Joshua Marshall, normally a very astute guy, is deceived by these excuses. In fact, I'm quite sure that if a Democrat had won the 2000 election, he would see right through them.
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