American Enterprise Institute
January 7, 2008
[Edited transcript from audio tapes]
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5:15 p.m. |
Registration |
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5:30 |
Presenter: |
David Frum, AEI |
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Moderator: |
Karlyn Bowman, AEI |
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Proceedings:
Karlyn Bowman: Good afternoon. My name is Karlyn Bowman and I’m a senior fellow here at AEI and I’m delighted to be able to moderate this book forum this afternoon to celebrate the publication of David Frum’s new book, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again. David is going to speak for about half an hour about the book, and then Michael will respond for 10 to 15 minutes, and then we will turn to your questions.
I’m going to begin first by introducing Michael Barone, who joined AEI last year. Michael published the first edition of the Almanac of American Politics in 1972, and thus, began a long tradition of psephological inquiry that continues to this day. The almanac is now in its 19th edition and it is an indispensable guide to the lay of the political land, and I think that makes Michael the perfect person to discuss David’s book.
Michael’s most recent book, Our First Revolution: the Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers, was published this year. He is now working on a book on internal migration patterns.
David Frum joined AEI in 2003. His first book, Dead Right, was published in 1995 on the 100th day of the New Republican Congress. He looked more deeply at the Conservative movement in his 1997 book, What’s Right, and in 2003, provided the first insider’s account of the Bush presidency with The Right Man. Along the way, he managed to write a wonderful history of the 1970s and to co-author a book with AEI resident fellow, Richard Perle, on Winning the War on Terror.
The Wall Street Journal has called David Frum “one of the leading political commentators of his generation,” a judgment that this new book, Comeback, will surely cement. Comeback offers a fresh and bold diagnosis of the Republican Party’s problems. “The issues have changed,” David says, “and the country is changing in ways deeply inhospitable to the Republican Party.”
The party is at one of its lowest points in terms of public opinion. In the most recent question that asked people whether they would vote for a Republican or Democrat for president this November, there was a striking 13 percentage point gap in the Democrat’s favor. Young people, who frequently lead change, prefer the Democratic Party over the GOP by an even larger margin. Americans now trust the Democrats to handle almost every issue including issues such as terrorism and taxes that had been traditional Republican strengths.
How should Conservatives respond? Conservatives came to power, and here I’m quoting David, “by out-researching, out-thinking, out-arguing, and out-smarting their opponents.” In one of the many striking analogies in the book, David says, “Conservatives in the world of ideas were like special forces. What they lacked in mass and numbers, they more than compensated with fire power and élan.” The book is a veritable ammunition cache for Conservatives who want to regain that lost ground in the battle of ideas.
David argues that Conservatives need to offer voters something fresh to answer today’s problems and not the problems of an era, and in another fabulous Frum formulation, “when disco ruled.” “What ails Conservatism will not be fixed by Reagan era tax cuts,” he says, “Conservatives need to address the anxieties of middle class life by promising a better deal for our schools, our health care system, retirement, and for the accountability of our politicians.
On health care, David urges the modern equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Trust-Busters” to identify obstacles to competition and dismantle them one by one. He embraces Green Conservatism, rejecting utopian notions of energy independence. Sensibly, David says that our energy problems are a series of interlocking practical problems that we need to sort out and solve one by one. He argues that we must respond to legitimate public concerns about increased legal and illegal immigration. He argues for justice with gentleness and suggests that Conservatives take up the cause of prison reform. He also advocates new efforts to support marriage including a Department of Marriage and Children in the Public Health Service.
On foreign policy, David says that Republicans must wage war and peace more effectively and urges setting up and also [sounds like] peacekeeping that can institutionalize the kind of knowledge that the U.S. scrambled to assemble after the fall of Baghdad.
On direct talks with Iran, David says provocatively, “Why not? Why not offer to establish diplomatic relations?” He doubts that Iran will accept the offer. “Still,” he says, “we must speak in a more conciliatory way and act in a more decisive way.” Finally, David discusses the Conservative movement’s evolution from outsiders battling liberalism to insiders lobbying for political favors and neglecting the business of ideas.
David marshals an amazing array of statistics in this book, and I thought that I read a lot of polls. And as usual, his range of references, both historical and contemporary, is impressive. I doubt there are many books about modern Conservatism that quote Trollope or Tennyson, but you will find both of them in Comeback.
In discussing Republican’s weak commitment to the idea of personal retirement accounts, he quotes from Trollope’s Phineas Finn. Here is the quote, “Many who regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time, it will come to be looked on as among the things possible than among the things probable; and so, at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way public opinion is made.”
David’s step-by-step guide shows us how public opinion can be made and how Conservatism can come back. David.
David Frum: Karlyn, thank you. I’m so honored to be here with two people who have provided not just inspiration but actually, in the case of both Karlyn and Michael, with their amazing collections of data that we all use, much more help than I think they will ever know, perhaps, should ever know to the completion of this book. I thank you both and I'm delighted to be here and to be here also with so many friends. Chris DeMuth, who has been such a generous supporter through the long process of writing this very short book; in fact, many friends have looked at this volume and wondered, “How in the world did you manage to spend so much time writing such a short book?” One answer is that inside every fat book, there is a thin book screaming to get out. And in this case, I spent about a year on the surgery; call it the Mike Huckabee approach to authorship.
More seriously, I began work on this book in early 2005, shortly after the 2004 election. It was a time of giddy optimism among Republicans. The long awaited realignment had arrived. Well, that is not how it looked to me and through most of the writing process, this book carried the working title, “The Next Republican President” which I would more and more grimly joke was becoming more and more of a long-term project. I soon found myself, as the polls deteriorated, in the position of a financial writer trying to cover the great crash of 1929.
I begin with a prediction or a warning but by the time I got to the bottom of the page, reality had long overtaken my worst fears. In fact, the experience of writing this book reminded me of quip of Evelyn Waugh to a leftist friend during the socialist 1940s. “How miserable it is,” he said, “to be able to foresee the future. You have to suffer through everything twice, once in anticipation, then again, in reality.” Whereas, for his unmindful friend, Waugh said, “The future was just a series of lovely surprises.”
As it is, I fear that the Republican Party and the Conservative movement are headed toward a series of nasty surprises indeed. In fact, I fear we may be headed toward an epochal defeat, a 1980 in reverse that will leave some very destructive people with their hands on all the instrumentalities of power in this capital.
The latest polls report that 61 percent of Americans think that the Iraq war was a mistake. More than 70 percent of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track - an astonishingly bad number for a non-recession year. Historically, Democrats have been perceived as the more caring and compassion party, Republicans as the more honest and effective party.
Yet today, Democrats enjoy a five-to-three advantage over the Republicans on the question, “Which party can manage government better?” They hold a two to one advantage on integrity and ethics. They even outpolled the Republicans on national security for the first time since the Johnson-Goldwater race of 1964.
A majority of Americans expressed a favorable view of the Democratic Party. A majority expressed an unfavorable view of the Republican Party. On the question, “Which party cares more about people like you?” Democrats currently hold a two-to-one lead over the Republican Party. Ditto on the question, “Which party can be described as the party of change?” Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job George W. Bush is doing as president.
All the gains in party affiliation that Republicans have achieved since 1980 have been wiped out in the past six years, and today’s 20 somethings tilt Democratic by the widest margin ever recorded for any age cohort. As of year end, the Democratic presidential candidates have collectively raised twice as much money as the Republican presidential candidates. Now, I recite this litany of woe, not just to beat you into senseless submission with a parade of statistics, but because so many Republicans and Conservatives refuse to accept the evidence all around them. We need to understand how massive this evidence is.
What Conservatives and Republicans tend to do when we take on board the bad news is to react to these dismal numbers by blaming the Bush administration for abandoning Conservative principles. I have done a number of radio shows. Just today -- starting the book tour today and that is the dominant theme among the calls I have been getting, “if only we went back to the sound principles that served us well in the past.”
Sometimes, as I listen to some of these callers or some of these hosts, I began to feel like a young Republican in about 1900 listening to people saying, “We saved the Union in 1865 and we stand ready to do it again anytime the American people want us to.” We are working on the theory that if Americans have rejected the ham and eggs we are offering them, it is because they want double ham and double eggs. And unfortunately, much as I would like to believe that theory, I would dearly like to believe that theory; in fact, I have written it. But sometimes, I almost talk myself into it, but the evidence does not support it.
Conservatives worry that Bush spent too much and cut taxes too little, yet by margins of five-to-four, Americans say the Bush tax cuts were not worth it. When offered a clear choice in a public opinion poll between tax cutting and budget balancing, Americans opt for budget balancing two-to-one. Support for George Bush’s prescription drug benefit, intensely and deservedly disliked by Conservatives, ranges between 80 percent and 90 percent.
Consistent majorities opposed the president’s position on stem cells. Between 2002 and 2006, the proportion of Americans who thought military force could stem terrorist attacks dropped 16 points from 48 percent to 32 percent. Not only are Americans moving away from the Republican Party ideologically, but the social base of the Republican coalition is corroding.
The Nixon-Reagan majority that dominated politics from 1970 to 1994 rested upon the votes of the great American Middle. It was not for nothing that Richard Nixon invoked his wife’s good Republican cloth coat in the Checkers Speech. When you saw a white, married church-going family whose ancestors arrived before World War II, living in a medium-sized city more than 50 miles from an ocean, with between two and four years of college and between $75,000 and $125,000 in income, there you saw Republican voters.
But this great American Middle is shrinking in relative, and in some cases, even absolute terms. America is becoming less white, less married, and less church-going. Republican prosperity has increased the ranks of the wealthy and highly educated. Some five percent of American households now earn more than $200,000 while open immigration has increased the proportion of the poor and the ill-educated. Both the growing top and the growing bottom of American society vote more Democratic than the middle and upper middle. This is a very controversial point and Paul Krugman writes op-ed after op-ed denouncing it and it is a difficult point to research, but I think the evidence clearly bears it out.
In the exit polls of 2000, Americans were offered a chance to identify themselves by a subjective class description, not just how much money did you make, that only went up to a 100,000, but they were also offered a chance to say, “I regard myself as a working class, middle class, upper-middle class, or upper class.” About four percent identified themselves as upper class. Now, that may be the same as the people who, and we do not know those are the same people who earned more than 200,000 but it is a suggestive comparison, it is about the same proportion who accept that designation and earned that amount of money. That group of self-described upper-class voters went for Gore in 2000.
In 2004, and again, this is a little bit hard to calculate because we have to make a decision about what exactly constitutes wealth and the zip codes do not exactly always overlap with voting precincts, but I think it is pretty clear that in 2004, John Kerry carried a majority of the country’s 25 wealthiest zip codes.
In Comeback, I do some close work with data gathered by the state of Missouri that they try to identify in that most Middle American states so valuable, so indispensable to putting together winning presidential coalitions - the census tracks that had the greatest equality and the census tracks that had the greatest inequality. In the areas Missouri designated as equality zones, the Republican Party was overwhelmingly dominant; those were the most Republican areas of the state.
In those states that were designated as inequality zones, places like the wealthy west end of the city of St. Louis; those were the areas where the Democrats were strongest. And when I say “strong,” I mean 70 plus percent of the votes. They are not just winning the votes of the losers in these rich areas; they are winning the votes of everybody. And indeed, that is a conclusion that is endorsed by James K. Galbraith, son of the great liberal economist, John Galbraith, who did a similar kind of study, a similar census work and he concluded that the Democrats have become the masters of speaking to the top and the bottom of the society, while Republicans have developed a rhetoric that appeals to the middle.
So there was a reason that George W. Bush positioned himself as a compassionate Conservative rather than a principled Conservative in 2000. Had he run in 2000, the campaign his father ran in 1988, he would surely have lost to Al Gore and not just the popular vote but the whole shebang. As I said, this is not easy for any of us to accept, me, very much included. And yet, it is essential that we accept it if we are to make progress.
The Conservative movement, in which I learned my politics and to so many of the people in this room, this building, and this city have contributed so much, won political power by offering specific, useful, tangible solutions to the urgent and grave national problems of the moment. Dial back to the middle 1970s: Inflation, crime, social turmoil, rising tax burdens, family breakdown, economic slow down, military defeat, corruption in government, Soviet aggression. In the year 1974, one of the worst American years economically, with one of the most severe recessions since, at least 1958, maybe since the Great Depression: Oil queues, skyrocketing inflation, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War.
When you asked Americans what was the number one problem, they overwhelmingly said, “crime.” There was a very good reason for that. In that year, one in three American households was victimized by a violent crime. It was something that just absolutely preyed on people. In fact, the numbers were so enormous that in 1973, we had to convert to a new way of counting because the pre-‘73 statistics, they would call the local police department and say, “Have you had much crime?” And the chief would put his hand over the phone and say to the mayor, “How much crime are we having?” And the mayor would say, “Same as last year,” and the police chief would report that to the FBI. So in ’74, they began relying on statistical sampling to generate more accurate numbers and produce this astonishing, astonishing number. So crime was number one. Well, we solved that problem.
Inflation, I can remember and many of the people in this room could remember intense arguments over whether wage and price controls would work to stop inflation or whether monetary measurements were necessary to do the job. We won that argument.
Welfare, did welfare encourage dependency and caused family breakdown? We proved that it did, and we proved that Conservative remedies would solve the problem.
How should we deal with the Soviet Union? Should we negotiate or should we build? How fragile was the Soviet state? Well, liberal Sovietologist said Soviet state was enduring and powerful. Conservatives like Richard Pipes predicted that it was fragile and vulnerable and ready to collapse. Again and again and again, we were right.
Our ideas worked and we made America a better place and that is a legacy to be tremendously proud of. But along the way, we did something that our old adversaries in the Trade Union Movement could have predicted as a result of working too hard, which is we work ourselves right out of our own jobs. Americans do not worry about crime much anymore or the Soviets or the underclass or inflation; although, that one may return. They have new worries and yet we keep offering them old answers. We told them we are going to cut their income taxes. Well, that was a great policy in the 1970s when the tax burden on the middle class family doubled in simply a decade. But today, 80 percent Americans pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. Twenty-nine million income-earning Americans pay no income taxes at all. We wonder why Americans do not seem to appreciate George Bush’s tax cuts more.
Well, what did George do for people in the middle? He raised their per child tax credit from $500 to $1,000, very nice. Yet that $1,000 is only creditable against your income tax obligations, and then, only if you do not pay alternative minimum tax. If you have less, if you do not have enough income tax obligation to use all of that credit, it falls on the floor, and that is true for increasing, increasing numbers of Americans. Three decades of Conservatives demanded tax reform had made the U.S. income tax code incredibly progressive. The top one percent pay more than one-third of all income taxes. The top five percent pay more than half, which means that the bottom 95 percent look at their tax rate and say, “Seems about right.”
I repeat in Comeback an anecdote. The details here do not really matter, just the punch line. A grizzled ex-communist telling a young man in the early 1960s who had just discover Marxism and was burbling with enthusiasm about it, “Young man, your answers are so old that I have forgotten the questions.” I’m afraid that is the way we, Conservatives, often sound to the voting population. If Conservatism is to remain relevant, we have to rediscover the difference in permanent principles - limited government, the rule of law, national sovereignty and transient policies.
We must emancipate ourselves from our natural desire to see the world as we wish it was. Let us, instead, look at the world from the point of view of an American at the center of the society, an American precisely at the middle of the income distribution - $44,000 a year in individual income, family income of $70,000 a year. This person today is no better off than he was or she was in the year 2000 and that is not because his rapacious employer is grinding the boot in his face. In fact, compensation costs have risen handsomely since 2000 by about $5 an hour on average.
None of that extra money has made it to the pockets of median workers. Every dime has been intercepted by rising health care cost. The cost of a health insurance policy for a family of four has doubled in the past six years from about $6,000 to about $12,000, and that is where your raise went, Mr. and Mrs. America. And it gets worse.
Remember, employees pay about one-quarter of their health cost out of their own pockets. I mean, they pay all of it but they are aware, conscious of paying a quarter out of their own pockets. So out of their stagnant wages, they are paying a thousand dollars a year in extra out-of-pocket health care cost. Plus, their energy bill has gone up. The typical family now pays more to drive its cars and heat and cool its dwelling than it pays for clothing and entertainment combined.
Yes, they received a nice little tax cut from the federal government but their state and local taxes have surged, pushed up in considerable part by the surge in legal and illegal immigration. Some eight million people migrated to the United States between 2000 and 2006, at least half of them illegally. Immigrants qualify from a very limited range of federal services especially illegal immigrants, but they use schools - that is guaranteed by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the constitution - roads obviously, prisons if they commit a crime, hospitals, all of which fall on state treasuries supported by sales and property taxes rather than the highly progressive income tax. The state of North Carolina, for example, spent $10 million in 1995 to educate the children of illegals. In 2005, it spent $210 million, a 2,100 percent increase in a single decade.
Our middle-class Americans feel great anxiety about the future and reasonably so. The data are not conclusive, certainly not dispositive but it seems to be the case. Upward mobility has sharply slowed in America since 1970, and that an American child’s chances of rising to a higher social class than his parents are inferior to those of a German, French, or Swedish child.
Americans invest heavily on education to boost their children’s life chances, but employers are getting more skeptical of paper credentials and returns on education seemed to be dropping. These median Americans have not managed to save as much as they should have. They will depend heavily on Social Security and Medicare in their retirement years, yet these programs are radically physically unsound. Social Security will start spending more than it collects within the next 10 years. As for the cost of Medicare, the current big idea in Washington seems to be that if we do not think about them, they will go away.
This is just one example of the gathering force of new problems facing us. Here is another from the field of international relations. Democrats have slagged President Bush for alienating our European allies. If only he had been more multilateral, they say, the Europeans would have helped us more in the war on terror. While I am for being nice to the allies and certainly, there were too many times when the Bush administration fell foul of the marvelous British definition of a gentleman, someone who never gives offense unintentionally. But the most important geopolitical fact that the next president will face is the gathering and accelerating decline in the power of traditional allies.
In 1985, the United States plus the NATO allies of Europe and Canada, plus Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and the other Asian allies produced about 50 percent of the world economic output. If current trends continue - a big “if” - that same group of countries, now reinforced by the new NATO members in Central Europe and a new NAFTA trade partner, Mexico, that same group of countries that once produced, in 1985, half the planet’s output, will in 2025, produce one-third of the planet’s output. That is a huge swing in global economic power, almost all of it caused by the economic slowdown in Japan and Western Europe. This is the common denominator of the great security challenges we face from Islamic terrorism and the rise of China.
Many Republicans hope that the United States can offset these trends by building alliance with India. Certainly, I hope so. Otto von Bismarck remarked at the close of the 19th century that the most important geopolitical fact of the soon-to-be 20th century would be that the United States and Great Britain spoke the same language.
Perhaps, it may matter in the 21st, but so do Americans and the Indian governing elite, but we should have no illusions on this score. The relationship with India is based on a convergence of interest much more than a sharing of values. It will never be as close or as comfortable as the relationship of Europe, and increasingly the United States will be alone on this planet.
In Comeback, I try to offer a series of specific recommendations to meet these challenges. We need a Conservative commitment to universal health care provided by private firms through competitive markets who volunteered us to take the bullet for every crummy HMO and every overpaid CEO. Ninety percent of Americans say they want to see either substantial or radical reform in the health care system. If we do not deliver it through private markets, the Democrats stand ready to deliver it through a government health care monopoly. And in fact, the majority of the Democrats in Congress, almost all of the Democratic candidates for president report unions have made it clear that government monopoly is their preferred solution to the health care problem. All of these fancy ideas that you hear on the hustings [sounds like] are all simply ways of disguising or postponing what they really want to do.
At the same time, we have to accelerate American economic growth. On this, I’m not a populist. My recommendations for accelerating economic growth are as orthodox as orthodox can be. I want to lower corporate income taxes so as to accelerate U.S. economic growth. I want to reform toward abuses. I want to reduce all other forms of set taxes on savings and investments.
I point out in the book that if the United States can sustain three percent economic growth, the United States economy will remain larger than China’s for the lifetime of the youngest person in this room, even assuming China continues to grow as rapidly as it now says it does.
And I would like to see reductions in the payroll tax and the alternative minimum tax for parents because we have discovered through European studies that the payroll tax bears unusually heavily on the decision to have children and plays an important role in suppressing natality to rates in Europe that are truly alarming, and even in the United States, are well below replacement. But if we are to do these things in the face of these huge commitments that have been made to the baby boomers and that it is now too late to retract, and that no Republican made any serious effort to retract when we had the chance to do the retracting -- if we want to make these kinds of tax reforms, we have to accept that we are going to need new sources of government revenue.
It is orthodoxy in this party that there must never be any new taxes. But to my way of thinking, the slogan “No new taxes” translates into “No new thinking” which means we must forever be stuck with the same old crummy taxes. We need to think anew and the two taxes I proposed in the book as ways of thinking anew are taxes on carbon or energy consumption. As I joked in the book, you do not have to believe that global warming is a problem to believe that the carbon tax could be a solution - and taxes on upper income tax consumption.
I want to pay tribute here to a late AEI colleague of mine, David Bradford, whose work, I think, pioneered what a tax of upper income consumption could look like. If we simply remove all the limits on individual retirement accounts, individual savings account, and say you can put as much as you want into a tax protected savings account and leave it there as long as you want, $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, $1 million, whatever you want, by definition, anything that is not put into that account, anything that is not saved is consumed. And if you then leave the existing income tax system to more or less in place - we will need a few little tinkers - you can actually have progressive rates. You could even have quite steeply progressive rates and tax only consumption by a class of wealthy people becoming incredibly wealthier for the past decade without damaging the society’s productive investment.
Those are the kinds of serious ideas that I would like to advocate for this party in this Conservative world. But I do want to say that the days of unfinanced tax reforms must end. Wisely or foolishly, the United States is committed to a huge increase in federal expenditure. This money is spent; it cannot be unspent and our responsibility is to finance the spending in the least destructive possible way.
We need to stop wishing away the evidence of gathering income inequality and slowing economic mobility. Conservatives do not see equality as automatically a good thing. It can be very destructive to economic dynamism but extreme economic inequality in the kind you see in Latin American and the Middle East is clearly a bad thing. The Conservative long-term response in equality should emphasize not redistribution but improvements in human capital, and in that regard, the United States is not doing very well.
It is striking that American third graders score in about middle of the pack when tested against their international peers. It takes nine years of highly costly education to knock them into last place. And it does not help that United States is importing tens of millions of very low-skilled workers whose descendants, on the evidence, do not catch up to the native born even after three generations in this country.
We need a Conservative environmental policy that accepts that this issue now ranks at the top of the concerns of voters in all advanced societies. And we should be of good cheer because this is an issue that can really help Conservatives. If voters become convinced that greenhouse gases are a problem and they want something done about it, who are they going to turn to? The fanatics who have been itching for a chance to ban the private motor car and outlaw the suburbs for the past 50 years with whatever evidence they can lay hands on, or people who are committed to doing the absolute minimum essential to prevent global cataclysm?
The voters want people who will go slowly, who are driven by practicality not by ideology on this issue, and that is us. And we need to fuse bioethics into our healthcare decision making. It is a bitter irony indeed that Conservatives have succeeded in swaying American opinion on the abortion issue only just in time to be knocked back to zero by new promises that human beings can achieve longer and fuller life by ignoring or manipulating the humanity of the generations to come.
Well, there are a lot of ideas here and there are many more that I did not get to. Some of these ideas are novel or any way a departure from past Republican practice. But they keep faith with what I believe are the highest traditions of the Conservative movement; above all, its supreme commitment to the greatness and endurance of the American nation.
In many ways, this issue of the nation is becoming the fundamental dividing line between the left and the right throughout the developed world. As the poll show us, one of the best predictors of Republican versus Democrat partisan identification is the simple question, “Are you proud to be an American?” Three-quarters of all Republicans answered this question, “Very proud.” Barely half of Democrats do so. Whatever you think of the ideas presented in Comeback, I would ask at least this, our party rededicate itself to the spirit of pragmatic problem solving to which Comeback aspires.
Over the past eight years, the Republican Party of George W. Bush has concerned itself above all with the task of winning elections by any means necessary. What is compassionate conservatism but the political equivalent of a low-fat potato chip, a focus group creation by cunning marketers. Our Conservatism, a politics of ideas, a politics carefully grounded in the study of the way the world works, has been reduced to grand slogans, to pretty words divorced from reality.
My generation - I was born in 1960 -- my generation turned away from liberalism because of the collapse of liberal governments during the crisis of 1970s. We were drawn to Conservatism because of the force and allure of conservative ideas. Milton Friedman offered better answers on inflation than James Tobin. George Stigler described the modern economy more astutely than John Kenneth Galbraith. James Q. Wilson’s idea responded more effectively to crime than those in the Kerner Commission. Richard Pipe explained Soviet behavior more accurately than Jerry Hough. Thomas Sowell offered a better route to racial reconciliation than Jesse Jackson. And William Buckley outwitted and out-argued Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Where are our Friedmans now? Where are our Buckleys now? We Conservatives have neglected the ideas business for too long. A new generation hungers for answers and solutions and too often they hear only polemics, wisecracks, accusations, and talking points. The smash mouth Conservatism, often heard on radio and television can sometimes be good fun, but it does not change minds. It does not even seek to change minds. Tabloid media beget tabloid talk politics and when you campaign stupid, you win stupid, and when you win stupid, you govern stupid.
It is time now to rediscover the power of ideas and to rededicate ourselves the mission epitomized by the institution under whose auspices we meet today. That is how we will make our comeback and that is how we deserve it. Thank you.
Michael Barone: Well, thank you very much, David, for your presentation and I do not know if I can top that. As many of us know, you were born in Canada. The best I can say is that I was born north of Canada, grew up in Detroit, Michigan which is directly north of Windsor, Ontario. So we see how long-term trends go. When I was a child, Detroit was a progressive growing edge of the future city, and Toronto where David grew up was an old fuddy-duddy of a place that had not seemed to change very much in very many years; and now, of course, the image is the cities are quite different.
One point the book, David says from Lincoln to Churchill to Reagan, the greatest Conservatives have recognized that sometimes the only way to conserve is to change. And of course, that is the theme of his book. He omits one great Conservative who counts from one of my ancestral lands of Sicily and that is the fictional prince of Salina, “The Leopard” of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel, who tells his rebellious nephew that everything is going to have to change in order to keep everything the same.
I think David is not advocating a Sicilian form of society here but there is a lesson there. And one of the lessons that David teaches in this book is that when times change, people who have principles have to change the ways they approach public policies and choose what they emphasize, or they will be out of order with the times and will be dismissed as irrelevant. And I think that is true. I gathered that on the talk shows today, the theme you get is that we have got to go back to Reagan. I hear this all the time, Republican rhetoric, “Let’s do what Reagan did.”
Well, Reagan was born in 1911 and he came to office at a time when things, as David points out, were very different. Today, tax rates are no longer at 70 percent, we do not have double digit inflation, crime is not raging at an all time high striking one-third of households, welfare rolls are no longer metastasizing with results that are destroying our central cities. Conservatives mostly solved those problems at the federal level in the 1980s, the state and local level in the 1990s.
As a result, as David points out, they are no longer political issues. Voters may ask, “What have you done for me lately?” or “What are you going to do for me next year?” They do not ask, “Gee, we are going to reward you for what you did a decade or two ago.” The past successes of Conservatives are no stronger a political argument for Conservatives and Republicans than the successes or claimed successes of the New Deal were and are for Liberals and Democrats. They are history, as the saying goes.
It is somewhat different society as society changes. I think David is absolutely right when he points out that the top and bottom of the income scale and particularly the top and bottom of the education scale are heavily Democratic, at least outside the South. If you look at the exit polls of 2000 and 2004 elections, you go to states like New York and basically, the Democrats are carrying people who did not graduate from high school and they are carrying people with graduate school degrees. The difference is in New York, there are now more voters with graduate school degrees than those who did not graduate from high school. It is not clear that this people have more common sense than the latter but those are the two Democratic groups, over 60 percent Democratic. The rest of the electorate when stratified by education runs roughly equal between the parties even in a heavily Democratic state like New York.
I’m not sure I agree with David that the middle is shrinking and we could have perhaps a demographic argument about that. We do see some move on the income scale from middle distributions to upper distributions which despite the tendency of the very rich to vote Democratic, I think we cannot really mourn it too much.
And David made some interesting points about upward mobility. I'm more inclined to think that upward mobility is relatively constant but I do add that it seems to me that over the long run, upward mobility will tend to be reduced, tend to lessen to the extent society becomes fairer. Because a society that allows people to find their appropriate place in the income/job/education level, given the fact that people tend to marry people and have children with people pretty much like what they are, means that children tend to be born into families with levels of achievement which they will tend to achieve. They will not necessarily be upward. The historic picture was the factory floor intellectual, Valentine Ruther of Wheeling, West Virginia, who gives birth to Walter Ruther and his brothers who were tremendously talented people. There is upward mobility there.
We do not have as many shop floor intellectuals, at least not those conversing in the English language anymore. And we have had a turnover in voters when we were going from the question of public policy and what public policy should be in trying to translate that into the political arena. We have to remember that voters are no longer the same people as they used to be.
In 1992 - going back 16 years - was the beginning of the Clinton era in national politics which may be coming to a close in New Hampshire tomorrow. In 1992, the memories of the liberal policy failures of the 1970s and the Conservative policy successes of the 1980s were still fresh. In that year, the median voter was born about 1947, the birth year of Dan Quayle and Hilary Clinton, one year after Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, one year before Al Gore. That voter remembered waiting in gas lines in the 1970s. Here, she remembered trying to pay bills, which were going up with inflation with the paycheck that was shrinking because of bracket creep.
That voter remembered the days when America was in retreat around the world from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Nicaragua. He also or she remembered, as well, America’s successes: The low inflation economic growth which began in 1983 and has persisted for about 95 percent of the time since, a record unequaled in American and, I think, in human history; the lowered tax rates and the bountiest prosperity and creativity beginning at a time when the liberal economist - I remember, around about 1980, several liberal economists wrote books saying that we needed to become grownups and adults and realize that the days of low inflation economic growth were over. It was impossible to have that anymore and the proper adult attitude was just to make do in an era of limits, and get along as best you could, and so forth.
Well, as German-born contracts professor at law school would sometimes admonish students who came up with a bad answer, he would say, “You could not beat longer.” The median voter of 1992 remembered very vividly the rollback of communism, the victory in the Cold War, the victory in the Gulf War of just the year before.
And Bill Clinton running for president in 1992 recognized all these. He campaigned as a new kind of Democrat, one who respected market economics and recognized the importance of American primacy in the world. And when he did not govern that way for the first couple of years - or when she did not govern that way - he was brought up short by the voters and once he was taken to the woodshed, he ended up signing and he cites some of these things as some of his signal achievements - signing federal welfare reform, agreeing to balance the budget after some initial reluctance. He was even poised on the brink of adding investment accounts to Social Security when he was stopped evidently by liberals who stuck with him during the Monica Lewinsky affair; thus, proving that the personal does affect the political in our system.
Today’s electorate is not the same as 1992; there has been a lot of turnovers in 16 years. The median age voter of 2008 was born around 1963. Here, she never waited behind the steering wheel in a gas line. Here, she did not try to pay bills or finance a house during the stagflation in the 1970s. By the time this person was an adult, the low inflation economic growth produced by the Reagan policies and by America’s creativity by deregulation which began in the Ford administration, went forward to some extent in the Carter administration, accelerated in the Reagan administration and was advocated by many people in this organization. That low inflation economic growth was well underway.
For them, I think, this is the default mode; something to be taken for granted, certainly, not something to reward politicians for. This is just the baseline and the slightest economic irritation warrants great agitation and decisions that the declarations that the country is moving in the wrong direction. I think, also, one of the things we see when we look at public opinion is that increasingly voters expressed opinions about the direction or state of the economy are less a function of their observations and more a function of their political party loyalties.
In the last Clinton years when the economy was growing robustly, you ask voters how the economy was doing; the Republican voters seemed to say it was pretty terrible. The last several years, when the economy has been growing robustly - below inflation - you ask voters how it was doing and the Democratic voters have all said, “It is terrible; the economy is just rotten.” Their own personal economy is great in most cases, but the overall economy is rotten. So we have a different set of expectations, a different means of judgment than those of us who have been following politics, have been accustomed to deal with.
At one point, David writes the following, “Younger voters are radically more ignorant than older voters.” He is not on the stump in Iowa and New Hampshire, as you can see, and I would like to see him on one campus appearance making that statement. Even though I was not a supporter of his, at that time, the late Senator Henry Jackson once enchanted me by appearing at a campus during, I believe, the 1972 generation and saying to the assembled students, “You are not the greatest generation of all time,” when the feeling was that they were on the cover of Time Magazine as the national heroes and so forth. Having lived with and been part of that generation, I felt that he was on the right track.
The younger voters are ignorant. They are ignorant for a number of reasons. They are taught nonsense by teacher union members in public schools; they are taught nonsense by a mainstream media which longs to return to the days when it destroyed America's chances to win in Vietnam and drove a president from office in Watergate; by college professors, the guys with gray-haired ponytails in the world’s last redoubts of Marxism.
I think the kids know that the Marxism is nuts, but they seem to absorb from this as sort of default position that if you got two choices of political position, the left position is default correct; unless, you have heard otherwise. And I think that has been the malign influence of the leftist faculty on our body politic. And they are ignorant for a more benign reason, which is simply that they have not lived through the history David and I and most of you in the audience have.
David shared his birth year with you; I think I will pass on that. And certainly, I’m not going to try and establish the median of the audience. But in any case, that is true of every generation and its turn. I can remember when I was starting off in sort of a political activist and these people, “You do not remember the ‘30s. You do not know what the --” and I said, “What are these gasbags talking about the ‘30s, ‘40s? I have read some history about that. I have some idea of what it is like.” But the fact is, the ‘30s just made more difference on my mother’s and father’s voting behavior than it has made on mine; even though, I studied it and written about it and so forth at great length.
We have a different set of life experiences. And one reason why the generalizations of political science professors tend to be wrong after a while is that people do not behave just as universal people. They reflect the times in which they lived, the things they have experienced, and the things they have observed over the years. And the different age cohorts, different generations behave in different ways, and we are a long way from a generation that remembers the 1970s.
I mean, the American petroleum industry has been running some radio ads that I have heard and, I think, TV ads - I do not watch enough TV - “Remember the 1970s and the gas lines.” Well, they are actually pretty good ads because they kind of convey to people what those were like. Half the voters never were in a gas line. They have not had that experience of sitting there for an hour waiting to get gasoline. And I think that makes a big difference in their public policy.
So I think this is a year in which Conservatives, in order to win, are going to have to teach people, especially, young people some things, and I think they are going to have to learn some things from them. I salute David for presenting in Comeback a brilliant foundation for such teaching and such learning. Even as I disagree with this or that bit of it, I think he set us on a highly useful course of rethinking what he calls the principles of Conservatism.
My own view of the eternal principles of American Conservatism, I have tried to sum them up in just 11 words, which of course, it would not even get Joe Biden started. But my formulation is markets work, morals matter; America must be strong in the world. And I think the proposals that David brings forward, which superficially seem to go against the recent Conservative positions are well in line with these principles. When he calls for a carbon tax, he is calling for a way to let markets find solutions for environmental problems rather than have central bureaucracies.
When he is calling for a market-based health care, I would disagree with him in that I would give President Bush and some members of Congress, including a few Democrats, credit for making some moves in the direction of market-based health care. And I have a more benign view of the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Bill than David does, but I think he is on the right track. Government is not going to be absent from this. You need to set up arenas in which market forces can work and also, arenas in which moral choices are rewarded.
I think that on the moral issues, he is in line with what I think is, to a greater extent than he sets out in the book, a trend in American society. I mean, Peter Weiner [phonetic] at [indiscernible] 11 recently wrote a paper on this and it seems to me the evidence is that young Americans seem to be learning that adhering to something like conventional morals leads to more fulfilling and prosperous lives. They seemed to be divorcing less often; mothers of young children seem to be staying at home with their children more than they were; they seem to be using less in the way of drugs and that sort of thing.
I think that we are seeing some benign trends in personal behavior. They have seen these children grow up, not seeking to liberate themselves from the restraints that their parents and the society seemed to be imposing on them. They grew up living with the result of people who evaded those restraints. And it seems to me that the children of divorce seldom vote for divorce. If children were represented by advocates in divorce courts, there would be far fewer divorces than there are and have been. And so we are seeing movement in the right direction.
David tries to point to some public policies to support marriage, to do other things in that direction. Interestingly, women with higher degrees of education or men with higher degrees of education, divorce rates are very low. Divorce and having children without marriage tend to be from the downscale parts of society, the less educated part of society. By and large, the educated have learned these lessons from observation in their personal lives, or in viewing society. We can hope that others will.
I think there is a suitable modesty in David’s book that he does not proclaim that we can totally influence these things. I mean, we have had these presentations here, what can encourage people to have more children. Well, it is not clear that public policy can do a whole lot here. It can affect these things, perhaps, on the margin.
Finally, let me just hammer home one point that David did also at the end of his presentation. He argues that only the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party, can be a truly nationalist party. The Democratic Party elite and perhaps half its constituency has, what I would call and what Professor Samuel Huntington called “transnational attitudes.” We are not loyal to this country; we are loyal to any country. All countries, all societies are morally equal except, of course, ours, which is worse.
And this is an attitude that of course permeates higher education in this country and is an attitude that is shared by many people that consider themselves to be particularly enlightened and you can see some of it in polling data. Back in ’04, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked two questions on this subject. One was, “Would the world be better off if more countries were more like America?” The other was, “Is America basically a fair and decent society?” And to both questions, about two-thirds of respondents answered “Yes” and about one-quarter answered “No.” Among Republican voters, 90 percent answered “Yes” to both questions. Among Democratic voters, the numbers were something like 47 to 39 percent.
It is not a ringing endorsement, it is sort of like the teamster union business agent who was in the hospital and received a bouquet of flowers with a note attached that said, “and the executive board wishes you a speedy recovery by a vote of nine to six.” This is a handicap in the long run for the Democratic Party. I believe it was a handicap for them in 2000 and 2004. I think that when you go back to Bill Clinton’s presidency, you will note that even though Bill Clinton spent a considerable time apologizing for America's past misdeeds, or indeed for what he said were his own. But with respect to Rwanda, he also came forward with an awful lot of traditional, patriotic rhetoric emphasizing America’s special goodness and that was part of his political shrewdness. Other Democratic politicians tend not to do so particularly in the primary period.
Some time ago, I wrote an article for The Public Interest, the late and lamented, in which I argued that there were four kinds of political parties in advanced democracies: Nationalist, socialist, liberal - 19th century sense of liberal, and religious. And I argued that only a nationalist party could succeed because socialism does not work. Liberalism finds it hard to summon up the courage to defend itself, and religious parties cannot succeed or be majorities in a multi-religious society.
I think David takes a similar view and that is a potential big advantage. I would just close by saying that I take a somewhat less pessimistic view of the current political scene than David does. I think we are in a period of what I call open field politics where an awful lot of possibilities are open. If you ask which party people want for the presidency, yes, the Democrats win, 49-46.
If you ask them, “Who would they prefer between Barack Obama and John McCain,” it is 45-45 today. If you ask them, “Which of two candidates would do a better job of protecting the country,” they picked some months ago, Rudy Giuliani, 50; Hilary Clinton, 36. The wide range of those numbers suggest to me that there is a wide range of outcomes and that ideas which have been largely absent from this political campaign can make an awful lot of difference. He who frames the issue tends to determine the outcome of the election.
We are talking about an issue environment where voters know very little and have thought very little about what these candidates are going to do as president of the United States and when they get in office. I think there is a room for a lot more content. Just as when you have an unknown candidate enter the political arena, opinions about them can shift very substantially. If you start off with three bits of information about them, the fourth bit can leverage that opinion a great deal. We are starting with about three bits of information on issue content on where the public policy, on where the country should go in this campaign. There is room for a lot more and David Frum has provided a lot of it. Thank you.
Karlyn Bowman: Thank you very much, Michael, and thank you, David, for just a terrific synopsis of the book. I should point out to all of you who are here today; you can buy copies of this wonderful book outside after this session is over. And to our C-SPAN viewers, it is now available in your local bookstores.
I'm sure many of you have questions and if you could wait for the microphone and please identify yourselves. We will take questions for about 15 minutes. Let’s start right here in the front. Excuse me, do you have a question? Okay, good. You could identify yourself.
Ilya Shapiro: Ilya Shapiro from the Cato Institute and also an exiled Torontonian. What do you make of this disturbing trend towards populism, both of the Jim Webb and the Mike Huckabee variety? The secular and religious left as Mark Steyn calls it. And what effect would try to implement your policy, dare I say, reality-based prescriptions face in the sort of environment?
David Frum: Thank you. It is a big concern in this year. You see a rapid decline in support for free trade, Democratic candidates moving away from it. I’m not sure the Republican candidates are so tremendous on that issue either. But I think we have to begin by saying that the basic rule of democracy is that the foot knows where the shoe pinches. If people are expressing dissatisfaction, discomfort, trouble, then, it is the job of policy intellectuals to try to come up with intelligent responses. If we tell them they are mistaken about their problems, that the economy is the greatest story never told, then, they will respond by following some huckster.
Christopher Holleman: Hi. Christopher Holleman. What do you make of the potential split in the party between religious Conservatives and the rest of the party? Today, Bill Kristol took a very, very benign view of Governor Huckabee’s rise, but I see amongst the great middle of the country, there seems to be a lot of hostility growing to religious-based social Conservatism on issues like abortion, stem cells, end of life. I hear people again saying again and again, these ministers “are becoming oppressive to us.” How does the Republican Party handle that when religious Conservatives have been such an important part of the coalition?
David Frum: I think Michael will have better answers to that question than I will, but let me offer just one probationary thought. One of the great questions confronting our party, our Republican Party, I guess, that AEI is a non-partisan institution but some people’s Republican Party. Is the question whether we are going to learn things the hard way or the easy way? And I think for many of our friends and allies in the social Conservative world, that choice is now open to them. I mean, that you can try to nominate a party candidate on this word of only the social Conservatives. You could probably just do that, and then you can try to run them, and then you can see what happens.
But you can also do a little preparation in advance and see this is probably not going to work, and that you need to build a broader-based coalition. But I blame the regular and the orthodox part of the party as much or more for not responding to the problems in the sense of urgency that I think a lot of the religious Conservatives are capitalizing on.
One of the points I talked about in the book is the impact - and Michael talked about this a great deal - how important personal choices are to a family’s economic survival. I mean, divorce is a much more cataclysmic event for a family than a layoff. And although Michael pointed to a lot of positive social trends - and those were all true - one of the things I pointed out in the book is they are all true only for the college educated. We are developing a situation almost of -- I think Kahan [phonetic] wants to call it a caste society where the top third is becoming ever more socially stable and the bottom third ever more socially turbulent. And that bottom third -- I think we should look at a lot of the social Conservative voting as aspirational voting. They are voting because they want things to be better; whereas, the top third for whom these issues are pretty abstract and ignore them.
Michael Barone: Yeah, I would just say, how should they handle Huckabee? I suppose deftly. I mean, his appeal is sometimes a little more sectarian, I think, than we ought to be comfortable with. The good news about Huckabee is that he presents a face of the Evangelical Christian Movement which is quite attractive and which seems to be widespread and spreading fast around the country. And, that is, instead of being angry and telling people they should not be able to do certain things and that they are bad for doing them, he appears happy and trying to say I want to solve people’s problems and extend love and benefits to people in all sorts of ways, some of which economic Conservatives consider inappropriate, but it is a much more attractive point of view for the average voter.
I think his differences with most Republicans and I think including David’s prescriptions on economic and foreign policy issues are going to tend to make him unnominatable. In Iowa, among the 40 percent of caucus attenders who did not classify themselves as born-again Christians, he got 14 percent of the vote. He is going to have to do better with that category, however you define it. If he is going to be nominated, if he cannot spread that appeal farther, I think he cannot win.
Joe Merrier [phonetic]: David, I want you to just briefly go back and just -- stand up? Oh, Joe Merrier. I'm no one. I just want you to go back into speech writer mode for just one second and talk about exactly how you would frame the kind of policies and the kind of politics that you advocate to particularly the young people, but in general, how would you phrase what it is. You had one phrase in your book where you said “every man a millionaire” which is sort of Huey Long, but in any case, how would you do that?
David Frum: Because it was just math, that is, the retirement age is now 67. If you say that you - workers - can put your payroll tax of 15 percent into a social security account and will top off for people who earn below a certain amount stealing idea that Bill Clinton discarded that Mike referred to of topping it up with an additional $300 a year. That program, if you assume an eight percent rate of return, is enough to make a minimum wage worker who is consistently in the workforce can retire with $1 million. A $10-an-hour worker I think can do almost with no subsidy whatsoever. So that is a feasible goal - and thank you for reminding me of it - I think we need to talk about economic mobility, the great American middle, and the American nation.
I think, in many ways, this coming election may frame that because if Barack Obama is the nominee, a big part of his appeal is his appeal to transcend all kinds of barriers. And not just barriers of race that we would like to see transcended but also barriers of nationality. He is, in many ways, a post-national figure and he is running, in many ways, on a post-national platform. And one of the things is a very -- I was struck, Hilary Clinton was on The Today Show a couple of days ago and was interviewed and she was asked why she is running for president and she said, “As a girl, I wanted to be an astronaut. All my life, I felt like an American, I thought like an American.” Gee, that is interesting as compared to whom, I wonder. It was too subtle a point; I think it was lost. But that issue of nation, that issue of civility, the middle class, that issue of opportunity, those are the enduring Republican issues and have been so since 1861.
Michael Barone: I would just add to what David has been saying about the economic issues that I think we need to see the economic issue, not as an income issue but as a wealth issue. Not as a one year “Am I laid off?” issue New Deal program but how to aid, assist, encourage, and honor people in their lifelong accumulation of wealth. Most Americans will accumulate mid-six figure wealth or most people in the 55 to 64 age group have done so. But keeping doing so and encouraging that, honoring that is important. And, also, as David says - and I say this every time I talk to college students - I say, “You all will be millionaires unless you get divorced.”
Abderrahim Foukara: Thank you. My name is Abderrahim Foukara from Al Jazeera. David Frum, just for the benefit of people following this outside the United States, how do you define now Conservatism in the American context as opposed to the European, let’s say, British context or indeed, the Middle East, Iranian context let’s say?
And if I may just ask a follow-up question to Michael Barone, what is it in your mind the fundamental difference between the way you export - if I may talk in terms of exporting - the values of Republican Conservatism to other persuasion realms within American society and the way you export those same values to, let’s say, other cultures outside the United States?
Michael Barone: Well, American exceptionalism is kind of a hard sell in the politics of other countries. If you go over to Britain and you will see that the British Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, is very much not an American exceptionalist, among other things. Different people in different countries, different movements have to develop what they are talking about. You bring up the example of Iran. It is the habit of much of our mainstream media to describe the Mullah regime as Conservatives. I do not think there is much relationship between them and between American Conservatives. I do not know any American Conservatives who want to wipe out Israel or execute people because they are homosexual.
David Frum: I would second that. I think that there is a problem in our political vocabulary that a lot of words have multiple meanings and sometimes people maliciously take advantage of that. My favorite example of that is when people say that somebody is to the right of Attila the Hun and I say, well, in what sense is Attila the Hun a right winger? He had no respect for private property and he is as much responsible as anybody for the disappearance of Latin from the curriculum.
Bonnie Wachtel [phonetic]: Bonnie Wachtel. I really enjoyed the presentation. As I look at the political theme today, it seems to me the dominant theme that is hurting the Republicans is a kind of revulsion with the Iraq war that then spills to every other part of the policy portfolio unfairly, but basically, that is what is happening.
As you look at the Democratic idea book, do you think it really has any vibrancy? Because part of me says, “Just let them get into power and see what they can do for a few years and then we will back soon enough.”
David Frum: Thank you. Obviously, Iraq does not help, but one of the things I argued with this book is that you can see this decline in the Republican Party, beginning much earlier than Iraq, much earlier than the Bush presidency. I tend to regard it as there has been kind of downhill, we have been on a downhill slope since 1994 with a couple of spikes. One of which was caused by 9/11 that added an artificial appeal to Conservative and Republican ideas. I mean the 2000 election was, I think, a good demonstration of what had happened to the old Nixon-Reagan Majority.
Many of the Democratic ideas are unworkable, obviously undesirable, but I cannot comfort myself that they will be so obviously undesirable that they will be defeated before they get a chance to be implemented. And in particular, I very much fear that if you offer Americans and especially two or three years out, a choice between the status quo in health care and the government health care monopoly, the government health care monopoly will win. We have a lot of really radical dissatisfaction with the American healthcare system.
I think there are some ideas in the old Clinton playbook that his party has discarded that are worth stealing. I think, of his $300 U.S.A. accounts, I do not know why he needed to create a separate account to deliver a $300 per year subsidy to the saving of lower income people, but it has really powerful effect and the Democrats do not want that idea anymore. So let’s take it.
Michael Barone: I would disagree with David on when the Republican decline began, but the Iraq thing you are discussing, the worst opinion was a year ago. People, though they still think it was a mistake, now, are recognizing that things are going better and the Democrats are having a hard time catching up with that.
Linwood Bragan: Linwood Bragan from up on the Hill. It is a popular construct within the traditional GOP that the religious Conservatives have no place to go when their nominees are not successful, and they just have to suck it up and vote for those who deride them. I was wondering, what about if the converse, if the social Conservatives are successful in gaining the nomination, will traditional GOP prefer to burn the party down rather than step into a social Conservative administration to operate the levels of power from within that administration as the technocrats, those with the ability, and while they are there, mentor their lesser social Conservative cousins.
David Frum: I hope you are not imputing those attitudes to me. I think we already have a very practical example of how this would work which is the election of 1998 where the Republican losses, as I read them - and Michael will know this better than I - seemed to be concentrated in the loss of votes of people earning more than $75,000 a year. So it was upper income suburbanites backed away from Tom DeLay and the impeachment and that cost the Republicans dearly in 1998. It is a huge country. It has got 300 million people, 200 million voters, only two political parties. So you are going to have to aggregate a lot of people into your party.
And one of the mistakes that I think we really need to be careful of and I’m going to quote a number here and I’m not sure that it is right. But I have a friend who collects ornamental barbwire and you get like one foot sections of it and he subscribes to a magazine that specializes in ornamental barbwire and you think this is a pretty recondite activity. Well, how many people are there do you think in United States who collect ornamental barbwire? And the answer is about 150,000. So you can fill, you can go to a stadium with 10,000 screaming barbwire fanatics night after night after night and say that people are absolutely behind on this barbwire question, and never understanding that 300 million minus 150,000 is 300 million, more or less.
Martin Roth: Hi. I’m Martin Roth. I’m generally in agreement with you, David, but I do not like your remedies this time. I think it has to do more with gaining power than keeping principles and I’m concerned that it could result in a fracture of the Conservative movement.
David Frum: There is no question that I have a pragmatic motive in all these. There is a war on. I think it is important not to lose. I think if the Democrats take power in 2008, 2009, I think the United States will lose, and I think that would be a calamity. So I would very dearly like to head off that defeat but it maybe, as you say, that that is to make change for the wrong reasons. And so one of the jokes that I sometimes think of is that this book, which is being released at the beginning of the primary season, maybe it should have been titled, “Will You Listen?” and we will release the paperback in January of 2009 over the title, “Okay, Will You Listen, Now?”
Karlyn Bowman: I want to thank all of you for coming tonight and I also want to congratulate David on an extraordinary accomplishment. Thank you.
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