For Conservatives, It’s Back to Basics http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/weekinreview/12kirkpatrick.html
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and JASON DePARLE
WASHINGTON
THE morning after the Republican drubbing in the midterm elections, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the party, headed to the weekly coalition meeting where limited government conservatives, Christian traditionalists and gun-rights groups gathered to plot strategy. He brought a message they were only too eager to hear.
The election, he told the crowd at the headquarters of Americans for Tax Reform, was not a repudiation of conservatism. It was a mandate to “recommit ourselves to being reform conservatives,” he said, telling them that the president would not flinch from arguing for ideas like privatizing Social Security.
Recalling a line Woody Allen used to break up with a girlfriend in the movie “Annie Hall,” Mr. Mehlman said, “If a shark doesn’t keep moving he dies.” He added, “I think the same is true of political parties.”
Thirty years after the birth of the conservative movement, some stalwarts worry the shark may be heading into shallow waters. At the coalition meeting, one organizer after another complained that their Democratic opponents had staked out moderate to conservative stands on what had been the movement’s most potent issues — abortion, gun rights, religious expression, income taxes and the federal deficit.
Perhaps most of all, a movement once galvanized by a shared determination to end Soviet Communism now finds itself deeply divided over the Iraq war.
“Our successes are killing us,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform who convenes the weekly meeting. He compared Tuesday’s election to the story of the princess and the pea, with the pea being liberal governance.
“Whenever we solve a problem — like cutting taxes or destroying the Soviet Union — we are in effect adding another mattress,” he said. “We have to go back to the voters and convince them, ‘you still can’t sleep because the goddamn pea is killing you.’ ”
Assessing the Republican losses, liberals quickly pronounced the end of the 30-year rise of the conservative movement. Conservatives prefer to talk of a temporary crisis. Since the election, a chorus from the right has been noisily distinguishing between conservative and Republican, blaming deviation from conservative principles for the election losses. From George Will to Rush Limbaugh, conservatives cut loose with criticisms of the Republicans for spending too much at home and getting bogged down in Iraq.
“Apostasy,” Mr. Will declared.
But as conservatives vow to regroup and return, many acknowledged that the path ahead may be a tough slog. The combination of Democratic moderation and Republican governance has blunted many of the right’s sharpest attacks on the left. And some conservatives acknowledged that distancing themselves from the unpopular policies of their Republican allies might not be easy.
“What is being rejected is not conservatism,” said David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. “It’s something far different. The problem is we’re identified with it. If the wagon goes off the cliff, you’re likely to go with it.”
Liberals are writing the movement’s obituary. John Podesta, founder of the Center for American Progress and former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, called the midterms “the end of the grand conservative experiment.”
The pillars of the movement, Mr. Podesta said, had collapsed under the weight of conservative rule: “stewardship of the Iraq war” had undercut conservatives’ credibility on national security; budget deficits and stagnant wages had discredited tax cuts; and Congressional scandals had given the lie to the movement’s moral values. As a result, he said, the Reagan Democrats were returning.
Conservatives, though, say the midterm election was less about ideology than the result of the war in Iraq, which many now disavow as an un-conservative idea, wrongly associated with their movement by a faction of the right known as neoconservatives.
The intellectual heirs to a group of Democrats whose opposition to Communism pulled them to the right during the cold war, the neoconservatives believe that the United States should be willing to apply military force to fight terrorism and to promote democracy abroad. American conservatives have traditionally favored the use of force only for self-defense, broadly interpreted to include containing Communism during the cold war.
“There were no conservative grass-roots group saying, ‘Invade Iraq,’ ” Mr. Norquist said. “If Bush changed the policy, you’d have four neocons whine and the rest of the movement would be fine.”
Neoconservatives, in response, say others on the right were happy to support the war when it helped rally voters in 2002 and 2004. Gary J. Schmitt, a neoconservative foreign policy adviser in the Reagan administration, said some were “jumping ship when the going gets tough.”
And if they back away from the rationale for the war, said William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative magazine Weekly Standard, conservatives may give up their status as the forceful party on national defense, jeopardizing their long-term prospects for a governing majority. “As a political matter, conservatives should try to help Bush succeed because they are not going to get very far distancing themselves from him,” Mr. Kristol said.
Whatever their views on the war, though, conservatives agree on aspect of the midterms: Republicans may have lost, but their ideology did not. Among other things, they argue that the midterms turned both the Republican and Democratic caucuses further to the right. In the House, the Republicans who lost tended to be moderates from politically mixed districts, while the conservative caucus, the House Republican Study Committee, expects to have roughly the same number of members — about 110, making committed conservatives an even larger majority within the party. And as House Republicans begin campaigning for party leadership posts, all the candidates are framing their arguments around returning the party to its conservative roots.
Democrats, meanwhile, have arguably grown more conservative as well. After two decades of defeats, they have largely dropped their former calls for major defense spending cuts, talk of a Canadian-style national health insurance, or campaigns for gun control. They work hard to avoid getting tagged as tax raisers, and since 2004 they have tried to open their doors to opponents of abortion as well.
To be sure, many Democrats campaigned this fall for increasing the minimum wage, preserving the estate tax or a prompt withdrawal from Iraq. But the party made many of its gains in both the House and the Senate by recruiting candidates with conservative views on abortion and gun rights, most notably Bob Casey Jr., the senator-elect in Pennsylvania, and Heath Shuler, representative-elect from North Carolina.
Even the massacre of a school full of Amish children did not move the Democrats to renew their calls for gun control — a stark contrast to the party of 1990s. “The Democrats didn’t do anything,” Mr. Norquist marveled.
The election has expanded the ranks of the 47-member, centrist New Democrat Coalition by as much as a third, and the 37-member conservative Blue Dog Coalition says it expects nine new members.
If the Democrats have backed away on those fronts, what’s left for the conservative movement? Aside from the neoconservatives, conservatives have focused on a single theme: the steep growth of federal spending under Republican rule.
“The greatest scandal in Washington, D.C., is runaway federal spending,” Representative Mike Pence of Indiana declared in the opening statement of his campaign to become majority leader.
Morton Blackwell, who was President Reagan’s liaison to the conservative movement, said spending was in some ways the last frontier for conservative organizers. “On guns, on life, on the right to work” — that is, gun ownership, abortion rights, and opposition to organized labor — “the strongest supporters of the conservative cause have been identified,” he said. “Those who will write checks on those issues have been identified, and the people who are concerned most on those issues are already part of organizations and donor lists run by very effective people.”
But selling spending reductions may not be as easy as selling tax cuts, which first ignited the conservative grass roots. “It is the problem of concentrated benefits and diffused costs,” Mr. Blackwell said. “For the people who want a spending program, it is the most important thing in their lives. They want and need that spending. They will work day and night to get that spending. But the cost is so diffuse it is hard to find people who have similar opposition to it.”
ASSESSING the election, William F. Buckley Jr., who founded the National Review magazine and helped define the movement, said he was not optimistic about the immediate future. “The conservative movement is in a sense inanimate, compared to 20 or 30 years ago,” he said.
As for the spending habits of the Republican Congress, “there is a kind of ideological slovenliness which affects the morale,” Mr. Buckley said. “It is as if the American Civil Liberties Union were every couple of days to favor proscribing a particular book or a particular performance or something, causing people to look at the A.C.L.U. and wonder if it had a credible mission.”
He was not sure what might revive the movement, especially since the current combination of low taxes, high government spending and moderate inflation tends to create a sense of economic prosperity — at least in the short term.
“It will perhaps take something like a depreciation of the dollar, something electric,” he said. If countries “stop subsidizing our debt it will be terrible shock to a lot of people, and then I think conservative reservoirs of thought would be consulted.”
Republican Conservatives May Emerge Stronger From Party Defeat
By Brian Faler
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aMVTK5X2CXJ0&refer=politics
Nov. 13 (Bloomberg) -- The rout of Republicans in the midterm congressional elections may increase the influence of the party's self-styled conservatives at the expense of moderates, who bore the brunt of the voters' punishment.
Almost 40 percent of the approximately 200 Republicans in the next House will come from the South, the most conservative part of the country, compared with 35 percent at present. There may be only one Republican House member left from New England, depending on the outcome of a recount in Connecticut.
The elections make ``the Republican Party in Congress even more homogeneous and even more conservative than before,'' said David Rohde, a political scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Republicans lost at least 28 House seats, though final numbers won't be in until election officials finish tallying the results in a handful of disputed races.
Conservatives advocate paring the size of the government, favor fewer restrictions on guns and oppose abortion and gay marriage. Republican moderates often broke with their party on these issues.
The elections swept away as many as nine moderates, including Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, one of six House Republicans to vote against invading Iraq; Representative Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, who opposed her party's effort to ban same-sex marriage; and Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who said he didn't vote for President George W. Bush in 2004.
Leadership Races
The losses have already become an issue in the party's leadership elections, scheduled for Nov. 17. Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who heads an avowedly conservative faction of lawmakers called the Republican Study Committee, is challenging Ohio Representative John Boehner, 56, to become House minority leader. Arizona Republican John Shadegg, 57, another member of that group, is running for party whip.
Both contend Republicans lost the election because they abandoned the party's commitment to limited government. ``We didn't just lose our majority, I believe we lost our way,'' said Pence, 47. ``Only by making a dramatic turn in the direction of the agenda of the Republican revolution can we hope to attain the majority status again.''
Representative Mike Castle, a Delaware Republican who heads the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group of lawmakers dedicated to what they call ``centrist values,'' says that ``I think moderates are very cautious of anybody from the Republican Study Committee, and that obviously includes Pence and Shadegg.''
Trouble Ahead?
Representative Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican moderate who is retiring, said a shift to the conservatives would make it more difficult for his party to regain a majority.
Boehlert, 70, said that if his party's lawmakers ``march to the beat of the drum as played by some in the Republican conference, who say we have to retreat to the right, then I would suggest the minority will be a minority in perpetuity.''
The Main Street Partnership lost at least six House members on Nov. 7 and could lose two more in New Mexico and Connecticut, where the outcomes of races haven't been determined. Earlier this year, the group lost two additional members when Boehlert announced his retirement and Representative Joe Schwarz of Michigan was defeated in a primary.
Most of the group's losses last week came in the Northeast. Johnson lost to Democrat Chris Murphy. Both of New Hampshire's Republican congressmen, Charles Bass and Jeb Bradley, were defeated. Representative Rob Simmons, the Connecticut Republican awaiting the results of a recount, trails his opponent by 167 votes.
Lost Members
Representatives Sue Kelly of New York and Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who also belonged to the Main Street Partnership, were defeated. Another member, Representative Heather Wilson of New Mexico, claimed a narrow 1,600-vote lead; her opponent hasn't conceded. Representative Chris Shays of Connecticut survived.
The situation in the Senate is mixed. Of the six Republican incumbents who were defeated, one -- Chafee -- was a prominent moderate; two others, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and George Allen of Virginia, were identified with the party's conservative wing.
The winning Senate candidate in Tennessee, Republican Bob Corker, was endorsed by the Main Street Partnership, although his positions on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage and gun rights match up closely with the views of conservatives.
Some Republicans blamed their leaders for the losses, saying their focus on cultivating the party's base came at the expense of centrist candidates. Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, the partnership's executive director, said the party's decision to emphasize social issues such as same-sex marriage left many of her candidates struggling to compete.
No Compromise
Castle, 67, said the party's moderates were hurt by the Bush administration's unwillingness to compromise on issues such as funding for embryonic stem-cell research and the war in Iraq.
He pointed to a quote in the Wilmington News Journal from a Democratic voter who told the paper that if Bush had fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld before the election, she would have voted for Castle.
``The White House's unwillingness to show some flexibility was a problem,'' he said.
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