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I seldom get past the first page of most articles in Newsweek. It’s my wife’s subscription and while I do skim the magazine, I never scan it. Your article in this week’s issue held me from start to finish.
I am a Marine (left active duty the day before Bill Clinton took office), an entrepreneur, a family man, and a lifelong Republican. I am an Eagle Scout. I have eaten cookies baked by Barbara Bush, I idolized Oliver North, I worked for the campaigns of Ronald Reagan (I cried the day of his funeral, and gave up a friendship because someone had the nerve to laugh at the image of Nancy kissing his flag-draped coffin.), George H.W. Bush, James Inhofe, and have never regretted a single right-wing vote I have ever cast. My first misgiving about casting a Republican vote came when Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama. As one the men I most revere in modern times, Powell’s endorsement was very heady to me. I had to spend many more hours debating my own values before I could finally cast my lot with McCain.
As a side note, regarding the companion article about Orange County, my in-laws are long time OC residents, and I spend several weeks of every year there (this coming weekend, in fact), sailing on their boat, dining at their yacht club, and commiserating about everything from illegal immigration to impending socialism, over nickel-a-point cribbage.
“I mention all this not because I expect you to be fascinated with my life story, but to establish some bonafides.” I welcome your ‘unwelcome realities’ because I have long recognized them and I thank you for giving voice to them.
I have long since turned off rush (at this point his name shouldn’t even be capitalized), and I avoid Fox News as well as any Democrat alive. The extremism of most right-wing media is as much to blame for November as anything McCain did. If we as a party cannot get past the infighting and factions, we will be sidelined for eight years, not four. If we cannot get past the images projected by limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, we will be doomed to an even longer banishment from effectiveness, politically. People like Stephen Colbert actually portray a more believable ‘Republican’ in their satire than anything our current pundits are able to project.
So thank you for finally bringing a voice to the ‘quiet conservative’. Those of us who don’t have to insult our President to disagree with him, who don’t have to turn our back to those in need to show how ‘Republican’ we are, and those of us who realize that our party is much stronger with diversity, but much weaker with confrontation.
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I am one of those voters mentioned in your [NEWSweek] article who turned twenty between 2000 and 2005. I voted for G.W. Bush in two elections, supported the Iraq war, and was a college republican when I was doing my B.A. I am from a solidly middle class family from the mid west.
I voted for Barack Obama in the last election. The reasons were manifold, but the main cause was singled out in your article; a lack of policies that seemed to hold any benefit for the American middle class. The US middle class saw few gains in the last decade, and the Republican message of lower taxes for all seems deeply out of touch. Republicans need to work on solving problems that concern people of my generation, such as a lack of affordable health care, crushing debt from student loans, and a budget deficit that will not be paid off in my generation’s lifetime. President Obama offered solutions to these problems, imperfect as they may be, while the loudest voices in the Republican party seem to be busy shouting at the wind.
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Limbaugh is only part of the problem. I find him to be somewhat tame when compared to the likes a Mark Levin, with whom Mr. Frum had a recent unpleasant encounter. Even if I agreed with 100% of what Levin says, I’d still find his nasal, sneering, arrogant, and narcissistic diatribes downright repugnant. Such behavior represents the worst that humans have to offer one another.
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I wanted to write to SUPPORT your piece in Newsweek. I just read it online and felt myself nodding my head in agreement with you. A bit of background… I am a white, college educated, married female. I registered Republican in 1978 when I was 18, and remained a Republican until 2000 when I re-registered as an Independent because I couldn’t stand the idea of GWB leading the party (sorry, I know you worked for him but I think he’s a doofus). I was on my county’s Republican Central Committee at the time… Needless to say, I resigned from that position. While I don’t identify myself as a conservative (I’m a little too socially moderate) I feel the GOP has abandoned me. There is no room for me in a party that has morphed into an intolerant, “Stepford Wife”-esque, totalitarian regime that demands blind obedience to its precepts. The hate mail that you are receiving is evidence enough of that, and if a true conservative like you is getting thrown under the bus, imagine how the rest of us moderate folks feel.
Right now, I’m struggling through this financial downturn just like the majority of Americans Ñ I was laid off in June 2007, started a consulting business working on real estate development projects, and my clients have all stopped working on their projects because of the housing and financial market meltdowns. We have trimmed our budget, but still we are burning though our savings and our retirement accounts have been cut in half. I am scared, and I hear NOTHING from the GOP that indicates that it is developing or supporting policies that will help me or the millions like me in our country right now. It’s time for the party to start communicating what ideas it has to fix this mess, rather than just slamming the guy who’s doing what he thinks will fix it. At least Obama’s trying… and looking like he cares about ordinary Americans. The Republicans look like a bunch of self-serving, politically motivated spoil-sports.
You are right… The GOP will remain unattractive to the majority of Americans as long as it remains narrow-minded and ideologically stuck in the Reagan era. Please continue to spread your message so I can come back to a party that espouses small government, personal integrity and responsibility, respectful intellectual discourse, tolerance and policies that are good for the COUNTRY, not just good for Republicans. There is a long way to go, and as long as Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and their narrow-minded, anti-intellectual cohorts are the face and voice of the GOP, it will take a loooooong time to get there.
I’ve never felt compelled to write to a magazine contributor before… That’s how strongly I feel about this. Good luck…
midcon // Mar 14, 2009 at 6:59 am
sinz54: Absolutely correct. The deciding factor were the independents. I do not believe they were turned off by McCain, rather they were turned off by the GOP rhetoric. If the GOP had disowned Bush and the 8 years of his highly incompetent administration the GOP would have fared better. Yet, they could not bring themselves to do it. Instead they forced McCain to right in order for him to be acceptable to the base. A predictable consequence was the election of Obama w consistently stayed in the middle of the road. If Obama is successful or lucky the economy, our reputation and our spirit will recover and he will be re-elected. For the sake of the nation, I pe all that comes to pass. But if he is unsuccessful, we had better have answer ready and the answer had better not contain flag ammendments, mention Roe v Wade, or tax cuts. In Virginia the GOP has hisotrically been focused on three things: Guns, God, and Gays. Several years, ago they ammended the Virginia constitution to include the right to hunt an fish. The consequence of that narrow, short sightedness is the loss of the governership. Nationally, the GOP must change or die.
Chekote // Mar 14, 2009 at 8:45 am
I don’t see that what Frum is doing helps the party or the conservative movement. His taking on of Rush just revealed w little he knows about the content of Rush’s show. It just reinforces the belief that Frum takes what the opposition says as facts and made him look like a patsy of the Left. It was a dumb fight to pick. In reading comments of former Republican voters, the theme of the religious right taking over drove them away keeps coming up. Instead of inflaming people by taking on Reagan, Goldwater or talk show hosts, Frum should have concentrated his efforts to deal with the undue influence people like Dobson, Perkins and others have on the GOP. Specifically, Frum needs to take on the HLA in the party platform. If we are able to remove that stupid, stupid amendment, it would send a strong signal to the voters that the GOP is moving away from religious dogma and getting back to its invidual freedom roots.
larryo // Mar 14, 2009 at 8:51 am
“The facts have to penetrate their ideology.” Good luck with that, sinz, but I wouldn’t ld my breath if I were you. It appears that unless the Democrats do something really stupid, which is not at all out of the question, you will all be consigned to regional status (which is far better than you deserve) for a good, long time. Did you see the letter in Frum’s mailbag from the guy w “idolized Oliver North?” Oliver North is a m murderer, but no matter – he has “God” on his side!
EMW150 // Mar 14, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Midcon, there was a very muddy message of Conservatism connected to George W Bush. Why? Because he’s claimed to be Conservative but some of his policies were far from Conservative. Not sealing our borders, expansion of already failing programs, out of control spending, then the first bailout, and I could go on….. These are not derived from a Conservative ideology! We need a Principled conservative who’s policies are consistant with their ideology. That’s why Reagan won two landslide victories. His message was clear and his policies were in line with his core principles.
petty boozshwa // Mar 14, 2009 at 2:16 pm
The more I read the die hard socons and dittoheads on this thread, the more I’m reminded of the Sunni’s in Iraq or the Afrikaners in South Africa a generation ago. They just cannot accept a worldview that does not support their concepts of dominance, no matter how far from empirical fact or logic or proportion their worldview has divulged.
Canada Calling // Mar 14, 2009 at 4:48 pm
We need David Frum in the Senate.
Chekote // Mar 14, 2009 at 6:38 pm
petty. What dominance are you talking about? The liberals/progressives are the statists here who want an overreaching federal government that will dominate our lives. That will dictate everything we do. Conservatism is about freedom. It is about the people not the government. It is about the individual not the colletctive. You really need to think before you post.
larryo // Mar 14, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Chekote, we have seen what conservatism is about: It is about shifting as much of the burden for the cost of society as possible onto the poor; it is about brutal resource wars, it is about plundering the treasury and spending what’s left on military hardware while the bridges, highways and schools decay. It is about tax breaks for corporations that want to patent-protect seeds from which all food is grown and monopolize the water supply for private profit. It is about corporate evasion of even the smallest societal obligation, from befouling the biosphere to raping the economy, and it is about Babbits and toadies who bleat about “personal freedom” when anyone tries to stop the predators from plundering any more of what belongs, by rights, to all of us. Think about that!
petty boozshwa // Mar 15, 2009 at 10:28 am
chekote – dominance in the Republican Party, pushing out moderates as RINOs, and dominance of the political system, with Rove’s madcap vision of grateful Mexican immigrants, evangelicals, stogy small town dentists and dittoheads making a permanent governing majority.
petty boozshwa // Mar 15, 2009 at 10:32 am
PS I believe my commitment to individual liberty and opposition to collectivist institutions, be they unions, bureaucrats, big business or the 700 Club, is as strong as anyone on this site. .
sinz54 // Mar 15, 2009 at 3:51 pm
larryo: I feel just as strongly about my political convictions as you do about yours: I grew up in New York City in the 1960s, and got to see how a succession of liberal mayors turned the Big Apple into a crime-ridden, graffiti-ridden, gang-ridden pesthole. (Go see the movie “Death Wish” to see what New York City was like.) I used to attend night class and ride the subway late at night every day, where I saw the beneficiaries of your liberalism terrorizing decent people. I also got to see how liberal policies nearly destroyed my life savings with double-digit inflation and nearly drove this nation under. I also got to see liberals wringing their hands about terrorism and totalitarianism abroad, while doing little except wallowing in self-doubt. I became a conservative in the 1970s, and I’ve never looked back. We saved America from YOU.
sinz54 // Mar 15, 2009 at 3:57 pm
EMW150: The argument that “Bush wasn’t ‘really’ a conservative” rings hollow, when it was hard to find any conservatives who had publicly broken with the Bush Administration during its first 6 years. Believe me, the level of support for Bush among the GOP base approached adulation, comparable to the blind adulation that Obama’s lefties have for him. Back in 2005, to have said anything critical of Bush on any conservative forum got you slammed as: A RINO, a liberal, a socialist, a terrorist sympathizer, or a traitor. The GOP base didn’t really break with Bush until 2007, over Bush’s immigration bill. There had been no prior revolt except over the Harriet Miers nomination, and that one was quickly defused when that nomination was withdrawn. As it is, you find plenty of support for Bush remaining on such staunchly conservative forums as PowerLine and RedState and TownHall. Criticism remains muted, of the form “Bush made some mistakes in domestic policy, BUT….”
Chekote // Mar 15, 2009 at 4:03 pm
petty. Frum is advocating the very policies pushed by Rove. You know, compassionate conservativsm. You know, the policies that were supposed to establish a governing Republican majority. When this site first appeared I was happy thinking that it would be a vehicle to push the Republican Party adopting federalism as envisioned in our founding documents. Instead, it seems to me that Frum – when not obsessing about Rush, Levin, Coulter – wants to enlarge the federal government as much as the Democrats only he wants to do it differently.
Chekote // Mar 15, 2009 at 4:05 pm
“we have seen what conservatism is about: It is about shifting as much of the burden for the cost of society as possible onto the poor;” How exactly have the conservatives done that when the poor pay no income taxes? Actually, they get money back from the IRS in the form of a EIC even though they don’t pay a penny of income taxes. So, again, I ask how are the poor picking up the tab as you say?
sinz54 // Mar 15, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Chekote: Again, I don’t think Frum would have taken on Limbaugh, if Limbaugh hadn’t said that he hopes that President Obama’s entire agenda fails. It was that specific statement that Frum pounced on. We’ve gone over that a hundred times already, and we’re just not going to agree on that–so let’s just agree to disagree. Before taking on the Human Life Amendment, I believe a simpler and easier symbolic move would be to take on the issue of embryonic stem-cell research. Unlike abortion, which splits the country down the middle, a clear majority is in favor of stem-cell research. Even conservatives like Nancy Reagan and Orrin Hatch are in favor. Unlike abortion, the SoCons lost that argument years ago, when in-vitro fertilization (IVF) became practical and widespread. It’s IVF that creates tens of thousands of frozen embryos that will never be implanted and eventually die anyway. That would be happening even if stem-cell research did not exist. So if these embryos are dying anyway, why not extract stem cells from them to preserve the lives of others? While simultaneously guaranteeing that no embryos will ever be created expressly for this purpose? On the issue of embryonic stem-cell research, the SoCons are more out of touch with a clear majority of Americans than any other. So let’s press them on it, and force them to compromise on it in the GOP platform.
Chekote // Mar 15, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Sinz. I want Obama to fail in implementing his agenda. I believe it will hurt the country if he succeeds. That was Rush’s point. Today, I have attended a meeting with a Republican club I am a member of. A few of us think that the Republican Party needs to push for a federalist approach when it comes to social issues. Let the states decide per the 10th Amendment. So now we are trying to figure out ways to push this approach. I just wish Frum would focus on this instead of global warming or some of the other non-issues he keeps pushing.
EMW150 // Mar 15, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Sinz54, there is a ton of critisism of Bush out there among Conservatives and there has been for some time. I’ve heard Mark Levin for example hammer away daily when Bush was out of line with Conservative principles. Where they may have not “broken” with him, they were very critical. Many backed him heavily on the war in Iraq rightfully so in my mind so maybe went easier on him on other fronts. The appalling aproval rating we saw toward the end of his administration showed though, he already had no Dem support and then he lost his base through acting away from his principles.
sinz54 // Mar 16, 2009 at 6:51 am
Chekote: I’ll keep saying it: Obama is doing a lot of things. The one thing of his that I do support, is his attempts to revive the U.S. economy. I do *not* agree with how he is doing it. But I have to hope he succeeds. Otherwise, the U.S. economy will remain mired in a deep recession, possibly a depression, for years to come. Perhaps you are looking forward to that, hoping that the public will become disgusted with the Obama administration and vote the GOP back into power? But I am not that cynical. I am an American first and a conservative second. If Obama can revive the U.S. economy, then I will cheer. We can have a debate on the rest of his agenda, much of which is dubious. But NO ONE should hope for America to suffer just to win elections. I didn’t like it when Moveon.org was playing that game with the Iraq War, and I don’t like it now that Republicans are playing that game with the economy.
sinz54 // Mar 16, 2009 at 6:57 am
Chekote: Rove’s plan for a permanent Republican majority might well have worked, if Bush hadn’t gotten us into an Iraq quagmire, and if the nativist loons in the GOP base hadn’t risen up against the idea of the GOP welcoming Hispanic immigrants to America. Rove’s plan depended on building upon Bush’s popularity with Hispanics (Bush was able to pull some 40% of the Hispanic vote). Dividing the Hispanic vote evenly with the Dems would have ensured a GOP lock on the Southwest. But when the immigration bill came up for a vote, Bush and Rove were stunned at the response from their own base. The GOP is now back to being the Older White Protestant Heterosexual Party. But that wasn’t Rove’s doing. It was the doing of Tancredo and Michelle Malkin. And this is why I say that the GOP doesn’t just have a problem with the agenda of the Religious Right. It also has a BIG problem with the agenda of the nativists: Tancredo, Malkin, Mark Krikorian, all of them. They are fighting a lost cause–the cause of White Protestant privilege.
Chekote // Mar 16, 2009 at 8:07 am
“But I am not that cynical. I am an American first and a conservative second.” You are an American but you are no conservative. Embracing liberal/progressive policies as long as they “work” does not make a conservative sir. Embracing the idea that government should be solving every problem is not conservative. You are a “we the government” guy and conservatives are “we the people”. Also, I did not support the Bush “immigration” bill. I am and Italian immigrant and my husband is an Hispanic immigrant. We came here legally and resent the heck out of people that show no respect for our country’s laws. I am sick and tired of people getting a pass on bad behavior just because is ‘too hard to enforce laws” or “we may lose elections” or “it is divisive”. Well, the rule of law is part of what made this country great. I may be divisive but others are being destructive. We cannot continue the practice of rewarding bad behavior and expect no consequences. Compassionate Conservatism was about expanding the federal government. THAT IS NOT A CONSEVATIVE POLICY.
sinz54 // Mar 16, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Chekote: The Bush immigration bill was a VERY tough bill–tougher than any bill you’re likely to see from Obama. The illegal aliens were NOT “getting a pass.” The Bush Administration insisted (over vehement liberal objections) on a “touchback” provision–heads of households had to *go back* to their home country (say Mexico) and apply for a green card from there. They would also have to pay back taxes owed, pay a $2,000 fine, and demonstrate proficiency in English. Yes, these illegal aliens committed a crime; but with all these hoops to jump through, they would have paid their debt to society. As for Obama, I thought I made it clear that I do not embrace Obama’s policies. But if Obama can end the recession and revive the U.S. economy, I will certainly embrace the end result.
ChristianMiller // Mar 17, 2009 at 5:28 am
sinz54, Hoping Obama’s plan will revive the economy is like hoping bloodletting will help a hemophiliac. As to your charge of nativism – I find it strange. How many folks from ONE other country can we admit before it is proper to object? And any strategy to gain Hispanic voters for the GOP is absurd. The ones who are citizens already and well assimilated (comparatively) vote only 35% R 65% D. The newer immigrants are not as educated and are economic refugees. These people tend to fall prey to demagoguery and racial arguments, victimhood propaganda and simplistic government give-away promises, all favoring Democrats. It won’t matter to them that Republicans signed the law granting them citizenship. Not one bit.