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December 30, 2008
Exclusive: The Obama Administration – A Land of Opportunity for Conservatives?
The last 16 years of American politics have been a disgrace. For the past eight years, administration opponents have plumbed new depths of calumny, dishonesty and incivility. Conservatives have referred to the psychosis as “Bush Derangement Syndrome” and have properly been offended by some of the most sustained offensive and toxic conduct in history. The hostility to President Bush has been extraordinary; its ugliness remarkable in its scope. The spread of the syndrome can be measured by the hysteria of New York Times editorialists whose increasingly shrill pieces show the extent to which they have become completely unhinged. In doing so they have sacrificed what shred of credibility the paper still retained.
We can put aside the fact that the Times’ policy prescriptions have been wrong. That is a given as the last 60 years of its history more than adequately demonstrate. What is amazing is the tone it has adopted. In years past it could be depended upon to maintain a level of civility commensurate with its reputation as the “newspaper of record” and while it often removed skin with its withering criticism, it did not, until now, resort to cheap name-calling. Its editorials, dripping with sarcasm and disgust, have blamed the Bush Administration for everything from Arab hostility (something that predates Bush by some 40 years) to the current meltdown of financial markets (the roots of which are clearly in the Carter and Clinton Administrations and the reluctance of Democrats to rein in the excesses of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). Its coverage hangs over American discourse like a toxic cloud. Next up, I am sure: the common cold. Surely, Bush must bear some responsibility for failing to find a cure.
From withering attacks in the print media, to a nightly pounding from late-night simpletons like David Letterman to the most virulent, ugly and remarkably personal assaults on a sitting president imaginable by leftist bloggers, Bush has been condemned as the force for evil in the world, the lead conspirator in, as the Times put it, “the shredding of the Constitution,” the source of all foreign disdain; stupid, venal and lawless. Mainstream Democrats have also taken up the cudgel and enthusiastically participated in the vicious public flogging.
The attacks, say conservatives, have been unprecedented.
Except they haven’t.
Bush Derangement Syndrome was preceded by eight years of Clinton Derangement Syndrome during which conservatives, yielding to partisan impulse, accused President Clinton of being everything from a rapist to a murderer. Conspiracy theorists on the right darkly suggested that the Vince Foster suicide was really a hit carried out by the Clintons because Foster was going to go public with the truth about their unorthodox financial practices. Conservatives charged that Clinton was responsible for drug smuggling through Mena Airport and dredged through his financial records looking for some sort of smoking gun in the Whitewater affair. While no one ever accused him of stupidity, conservatives argued that Clinton was profoundly disturbed, perhaps even mentally incompetent.
Then came the Lewinsky affair and conservatives undertook a prosecution that was the beginning of the end of the conservative revolution so recently ushered in by Newt Gingrich. They elevated a petty scandal to a Constitutional crisis. For the first time in over 100 years, a sitting president was impeached and it was primarily because he lied during a deposition in a civil case that was, itself, part of conservatives’ attempt to discredit him and undermine his administration. The purely temporary partisan advantage gained was overwhelmed by public revulsion at its clear cynicism.
Clinton, for his part, gave conservatives plenty of ammunition in his undisciplined approach to life and governance. But, as the Senate rightly concluded, his tawdry personal life and the spiritual swamp that is his soul were insufficient to meet the “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard necessary to remove a president from office.
I hold no brief for Clinton. His character alone should have been disqualifying for election. But, having been elected, he did not deserve the ferocity and viciousness of the attack on him from the right and conservatives looked petty, mean, cynical and mean-spirited for having undertaken it. And, dare I say it, they squandered their opportunity to demonstrate that conservatism works by disqualifying themselves in the minds of the people through an excess of politics over principle.
It was as if, in both cases, the other side had concluded the president was not legitimate. In Clinton’s case, conservatives were so outraged at having lost what they hoped would be Reagan’s fourth term because Clinton won with less than 50% of the vote as a result of Ross Perot’s quixotic candidacy (putting aside the fact that Bush 41’s term was less like Reagan’s third term than Clinton’s first) that they concluded Clinton was not entitled to legitimacy. The left, on the other hand, concluded that since Bush lost the popular vote and, despite all evidence to the contrary, “stole” the election in Florida (a myth that survives to this day in the pages of the New York Times and mental wards across the nation), he did not really win and was, hence, not entitled to the legitimacy to which presidents are entitled.
Neither was correct, but, as a result, we have suffered through the ugliest time in American politics in recent memory. Its corrosive impact has been profound. It has diminished our civic discourse, coarsened our debate and debased our political institutions.
Conservatives must not repeat the mistake this time.
Barack Obama won. He won by a solid majority of the popular vote and a landslide in the Electoral College. He won votes from all races, all classes and all educational levels. No third party candidate siphoned off sufficient votes to have made a measurable difference in the outcome. The Republicans put up the candidate they thought necessary in the face of Democrat ascendancy and he ran a vigorous, if less than competent, campaign. Obama ran the greatest, most efficient, most focused, most effective presidential campaign in recent history and the American people supported him with their votes.
As I recently wrote in these pages, Obama’s election is a watershed moment and he takes office with enormous goodwill carrying the hopes of a nation both at war and at peril. This is not a time for petty political jockeying or the sort of poisonous attacks in which both sides have indulged for the last 16 years.
This truly is a time of tremendous, historical opportunity; unique in the modern age. It does not have to be a time of unanimity but, for perhaps the first time since the founding, it can be a time for honest discussion of competing ideas among equals. Conservatives, especially, have reason for great hope but they will see themselves marginalized if their reaction is not a good faith participation in the discussion but, rather, reflexive opposition for political advantage. It is an excess of partisanship that has brought conservatism to ruin, not an excess of principle. We can be part of the great future before us but only if we put principle above party and philosophy over politics.
The full impact of this election has yet to be felt, but one major benefit that has come from it is that conservatives are forced now to define themselves free of the weight of a Republican president and Congress. The great internecine debate has already started and its result will either be a movement that stands for principle or one that stands for politics. Politics, in our age, has become the enemy of principle and conservatives must transact their debate as if they do not care if they are ever elected in great numbers again. If they do not, conservatives may be elected, but they will have no governing mandate because they will have no governing principles.
Movements are about ideas. Conservatives ascended because they developed and articulated a philosophy that resonated with the American people. Conservatism has been a profoundly civilized movement relying on the force of its ideas rather than its numbers in the streets. Its modern founders did not mix it up in the gutter. They did not waste time and resources trying to find ways to discredit the representatives of the other side through sideshows like personal scandal.
But politics, dominated as it is by lawyers and, hence, the culture of the legal community, has recently adopted the modern means of litigation conduct. In years past, honorable lawyers understood that their cases should be carried by a resort to proof of facts and a correct articulation of law. In recent years young litigators, who have clearly watched too much television, have made fashionable the reprehensible policy of a sustained attack on the credibility of the other side unmindful, apparently, of the fact that at the end of the day they will still have to carry their burden of proof to win. The assumption seems to have become that if an opponent can be sufficiently sullied, the case can be won. So it has become in modern American politics which has descended to a level of nastiness unimagined in more civilized times. Long term, it works neither in litigation nor in politics. In the end, if voters are given no reason to vote for a candidate, it does not matter now much they hate his opponent.
Above all things, conservatives have stood for principle. Barry Goldwater thought his presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy would become the great discussion America deserved: a debate between liberalism and conservatism carefully articulated and argued by talented candidates symbolizing each philosophy. The two men even discussed the idea of making a series of joint appearances across the nation debating, with mutual respect, their competing ideas and letting the people decide which were entitled to support. With Kennedy’s assassination, that idea ended as President Johnson adopted the strategy of the unprincipled Bill Moyers and indulged in an orgy of dishonesty and vilification.
Reagan ran against Carter on the basis of American exceptionalism, our inherent goodness and the force of our founding ideas. He could probably have won that election by the weight of sheer ridicule as Carter, then as now, provided plenty of fodder for lampoon. But Reagan always ran as a candidate of ideas. It was the message that won the election as much as it was the attractiveness of the messenger.
Conservatives must untether themselves from the concerns of expediency and define a political philosophy that will serve as the basis for the development of a set of policies that can then be taken to the American people. President Obama will give them plenty to criticize on principle, but if they allow themselves to descend into the pit of political advantage by dwelling on scandal or personality, they will not succeed in advancing the ideas that define them.
For the first time in nearly 60 years, conservatives can press ideas on the merits without fear that the discussion will be shut down by ugly imputations of racism. The debate can proceed on principle rather than as a surrogate for tribalism or racial spoils. Federalism can be debated rationally rather than as a proxy for racial oppression. I suspect that current civil rights leaders will awaken January 21st with a hangover as they begin to realize that they have become irrelevant. The indisputable leader of the black community is the indisputable leader of the nation and has already demonstrated that he understands that his role is, among other things, that of national cheerleader. It will be impossible to wallow in historical injustice and shut down the open debate of ideas when the leader of the black community is the leader of the nation.
The politics of racial grievance that has so warped our discourse has lost its rationale. Conservatives must recognize that fact and embrace the unique opportunity to define and explain themselves.
Once defined, conservatives can lead the Republican Party to principle and back to a governing philosophy on which the party can develop a comprehensive set of policies designed to address American aspiration and challenge. Conservatives will rightly point out that what has brought the Republican Party to ruin is not that it has stood for too much but that it has stood for too little. If it is to survive, it needs to go back to first principles and conservatives can lead the way. But conservatives will not be able to lead the way until they sort out what it is they stand for.
If conservatives return to the conduct of the past 16 years and carry out their attack on the Obama Administration by means of venomous personal attack and by the assiduous search for scandal, they will discredit themselves and their movement and will not soon again command electoral majorities. If they oppose Administration policies on the basis of principle and ideas, they may yet regain the respect of the American people and demonstrate why their governing philosophy, upon which this nation was founded, is the way forward to a better day.
Besides, in spite of its overwhelming fealty to Obama and the left, the press is still about sensationalism and the rooting out of salacious stories. We can depend, therefore, on its exploiting whatever scandal may arise, as surely it will, from the Democrats. Democrats, for their part, can be depended upon to engage in the petty graft for which they have shown a peculiar historical predisposition and upon which their electoral dominance of large metropolitan areas depends. Conservatives need not add vigorous arm waving to the mix for the message to get through to the voters. They will see it and loud conservative voices inveighing against it will be perceived only as a bid for partisan advantage and, ironically, diminish the power of legitimate disqualifying failure in the minds of the public.
If conservatives stick to what they know best – ideas – then they can move the public to embrace them once again. But if they compromise their principles for partisanship as they have for the last eight years, their time in the wilderness will be long indeed.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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