***Media Research Center CyberAlert Special***
5:10pm EDT, Monday March 10, 2008
Washington Post Op-Ed by MRC President Brent Bozell
Below is the text of an op-ed, which ran at the top of the Sunday
"Outlook" section of the Washington Post yesterday. It's about
conservatives and John McCain, written not by Bozell as a media
analyst but as an expert on the conservative movement.
To read the piece online, "From the Right, He Looks Too Blue:
Think real conservatives will vote for John McCain? Don't count on
it," go to:
washingtonpost.com
Now, a reprint of the piece in the March 9 Washington Post:
From the Right, He Looks Too Blue
Think real conservatives will vote for John McCain? Don't count on it
By L. Brent Bozell
Sunday, March 9, 2008; B01
The conservative talk-show community? Don't mind them -- they're irrelevant.
This message from John McCain surrogates and other members of the
political class is filling the airwaves and op-ed pages. In the Wall
Street Journal, Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes recently
wrote that McCain needn't worry that conservatives are uncomfortable
with his candidacy, because "while they love to grumble and grouse,
conservatives tend to be loyal Republicans who wind up voting for
their party's candidate."
In the same pages, novelist Mark Helprin, a former adviser to Robert
J. Dole's presidential campaign, savaged conservatives such as Rush
Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin for daring to speak out against
McCain. "Rather than playing recklessly with electoral politics by
sabotaging their own party," he wrote, "each of these compulsive
talkers might be a tad less self-righteous, look to the long run,
discipline himself, suck it up, and be a man."
I know the conservative movement. I've been in the trenches fighting
for an alphabet soup of conservative causes for 30 years. I've raised
hundreds of millions of dollars for it. And I earnestly hope that
McCain isn't listening to the advice he's getting from these folks.
Their thinking betrays a fundamental misreading of the conservative
pulse in America today.
Conservative leaders, particularly those in talk radio, cannot and
will not be silent. They will not betray their principles and their
audiences. Tens of millions of activists turn to them for guidance.
These activists could be, and need to be, McCain's ground troops, but
unless and until conservatives believe him -- and believe in him --
they will not work for his election. McCain may have the Beltway
crowd in his corner, but grass-roots conservatives aren't sold.
Yet through his surrogates, McCain is attacking these leaders. This
is beyond folly. It is political suicide.
For 20 years, the moderate establishment of the Republican Party has
told conservatives to sit down, shut up and do as we're told. History
shows that sometimes we bite the bullet. But not always. I absolutely
guarantee that this year we cannot be taken for granted. This is a
movement fed up with betrayals, and they've come one after the other.
Think back to 1988. Plenty of qualified conservatives -- Pete du
Pont, Rep. Jack Kemp and Sen. Paul Laxalt, Pat Robertson (for
evangelicals, anyway) -- were prepared to succeed President Ronald
Reagan, but the GOP establishment, along with the professional
political class, rallied around Vice President George H.W. Bush, an
unthinkable proposition for conservatives just eight years earlier.
After a listless campaign start, Bush finally energized the
conservative base with his "No new taxes!" pledge at the Republican
National Convention in New Orleans. We carried him to victory that November.
Within two years, he'd broken his promise and delivered one of the
largest tax increases in history. His 1991 nomination of Clarence
Thomas to the Supreme Court, which pleased conservatives, had been
preemptively neutralized by his selection of the liberal David H.
Souter in 1990. After brilliantly executing the 1991 Persian Gulf
War, he squandered a 91 percent approval rating. He did nothing to
advance the conservative cause. He did not cut taxes. He did not rein
in federal spending and regulation. He did nothing for social and
cultural issues.
By 1992, we who had dined at the table of Ronald Reagan had been
banished to the GOP kitchen. As the National Review editorialized at
the time, establishment Republicans "took conservative support for
granted, reasoning from the dogma of the two-party system that
disaffected conservatives had 'nowhere else to go.' " They were
wrong. Some of us turned to Pat Buchanan, who disrupted the primary
season. Others turned to independent candidate H. Ross Perot, who led
the field until he imploded. Still others simply stayed home, and
that November, Bush was soundly defeated by Bill Clinton.
Two years later, the "Contract With America" reversed the GOP's
fortunes. With a reignited conservative base, Republicans captured
both houses of Congress. But in the face of a liberal counterattack
led by the national news media -- Time magazine's cover on Dec. 19,
1994, portrayed a snarling Newt Gingrich as Uncle Scrooge, and the
cover of Newsweek's year-end double issue depicted a Dr. Seuss-esque
cartoon of the House speaker smiling devilishly beside the headline
"How the Gingrich Stole Christmas" -- Republican resistance crumbled.
The Contract was abandoned, and overnight the Gingrich revolution was
finished. We watched Republican "leaders" flee into the tall grass,
whence they've never emerged.
In 1996, a new crop of conservative leaders presented themselves as
presidential candidates, but again the party establishment would have
none of Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Phil Gramm or Dan Quayle. Instead,
they pooled their resources behind Dole, who offered nothing to
energize the conservative base while the professional class
confidently clucked that conservatives had "nowhere else to go."
Again we stayed home. There was no enthusiasm for volunteer action.
Again the moderate candidate was routed.
How disgruntled was the conservative base? Two years later, the GOP
lost five seats in the House, the first time since 1822 that a party
not in control of the White House had failed to gain seats in the
midterm election of a president's second term.
But after eight years of Clinton's corruption, and facing the
prospect of at least four more years with Al Gore at the helm,
conservatives threw our support behind George W. Bush in 2000. He
initially delivered by leading the charge in cutting taxes, and his
political stature further increased when the nation rallied behind
its commander in chief after Sept. 11, 2001. He won reelection in
2004 because conservatives stayed with him, delivering millions of
volunteers committed to the defeat of Sen. John F. Kerry.
But any hopes that Bush would deliver on a conservative agenda in his
second term evaporated almost immediately. We watched with growing
fury as he and the GOP leadership promoted one liberal initiative
after another. Finally, we openly rebelled, turning on the GOP over
the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, amnesty for illegal
immigrants and the Republicans' shameless abandonment of fiscal
discipline. What was once a powerful alliance between the Republican
Party and grass-roots conservatives had become a political bridge to
nowhere. With the GOP facing the loss of Congress in 2006, we
shrugged in indifference. The movement that had "nowhere else to go"
had gone.
And it has not returned.
How important are conservatives to the GOP? This year's Republican
primary debate was dominated by one question: Which candidate was
most qualified to carry the flag of Ronald Reagan?
Ironically, the man who survived this intramural scrum is the one who
arguably least qualifies as a Reagan conservative. He claims to be a
champion of freedom but gave us McCain-Feingold campaign finance
reform -- which, by limiting free speech during elections, is perhaps
the greatest infringement ever on the First Amendment. He claims to
be a champion of U.S. sovereignty but offered us the McCain-Kennedy
immigration reform bill that would give millions of illegal
immigrants the chance to become citizens; that's amnesty, no matter
how much he denies it. He claims to be a champion of the unborn but
has waffled in the past, supporting federal funding of embryonic stem-
cell research. This year, he won the endorsement of Republicans for
Choice. He claims to be a fiscal conservative who will make the Bush
tax cuts permanent, but he also voted against them. These are serious issues.
What should McCain do? Saying he's not Hillary Rodham Clinton or
Barack Obama will not be enough -- not this time. Repudiating
positions that are anathema to conservatism won't be enough, either.
The liberal base of the Democratic Party is on fire; he must bring an
equal passion to the table with his conservative base. It is time for
McCain to be Reagan.
This is what conservatives call on him to do:
McCain must present a strategy to defeat the threat of radical Islam.
He needs to call on the United States to rebuild its military
infrastructure, so devastated by the Clinton administration. He
should secure our borders by a date certain. In every great struggle,
the citizenry -- everyone, not just the country's military -- has
been challenged to participate. McCain could make this the clarion
call for volunteerism, for national service.
If McCain believes in freedom, he should promise to take the yoke off
the American taxpayer. He has embraced making the Bush tax cuts
permanent. Good. Now he should pledge to end the estate tax and lower
the corporate tax rate to 25 percent. In fact, he should call for an
overhaul of the tax system. The flat tax or the fair tax -- either is
preferable to the monstrosity that is the Internal Revenue Service.
The federal government is out of control. Conservatives don't want to
hear talk about "reining in the growth of government." Those are
empty words. McCain needs to call for the elimination of entire
sectors of the federal leviathan. He should pledge to turn back to
the states that which is their responsibility and which comes under
their authority. We want to see how he will deregulate the private
sector and how he will once again unleash the economic might of the
United States. He should champion private retirement accounts and
health savings accounts.
McCain should place the left on notice -- now -- that if elected, he
will not tolerate congressional obstructionism of his nominations to
the federal judiciary.
Our culture is decaying from within, and most Republicans have been
shamefully AWOL on this issue. McCain could begin a national
conversation about parents, not the state, taking responsibility for
their children and their communities. He should call on the
entertainment industry to stop polluting America's youth with its
videos and its music and on the Internet. We wait to hear him call
for the United States to honor the sanctity of life, the sanctity of
marriage and family, and to return God to the public square.
If McCain offers this kind of vision, Washington elitists will scoff.
But he should remember that they also scoffed and dismissed Ronald
Reagan, all the way to his election. And his reelection.
END of Reprint
- Brent Baker |
