TAS Publisher Al Regnery and editor in chief R. Emmett Tyrrell were on hand, along with leaders from policy groups and grassroots organizations representing each pillar of the conservative coalition, from Christian conservatives to libertarians, and everybody in between."As the afternoon went on, it didn't take long for attendees to become resolute in their resistance to moderates and to the opinion that the conservative movement will become the opposition to Obama," Tyrrell said.
One attendee said, "We're no longer going to support Republicans who want to 'improve' a bad bill. We're going to oppose all bad bills."
Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, pollster Kellyanne Conway, and direct mail guru Richard Viguerie were among those present.
The meeting began at 11 this morning and adjourned at around 4 p.m.
There's a strong feeling, Tyrrell said, that social conservatives, free market conservatives, and national security conservatives will all be able to work together.
He also said that "there's a sense that the Republicans on Capitol Hill are freer of wobbly-kneed Republicans than they were before the election."
Like John McCain of last week, it appears this bunch has got 'em just where they want 'em. Heh.
Honestly, this is the brain trust for the future of conservatism? The same folks that have been big players at the top of the movement food chain for lo, these many years? And they conclude that the problem with Republicans this year is that they weren't sufficiently Reaganist? And now they're slap-happy to be free of those pathetic RINOs that were holding the movement back?
Man. Somebody take a snapshot of this moment. It's kind of like Andrew Ridgeley exulting in his future career prospects now that he's shaken loose of that loser George Michael.
UPDATE: Daniel McCarthy's take here.
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I will add to RJohnson. One huge failure of the past administration is the fact that no one wants to take responsibility. We've had an administration that claimed it was conservative, supported by conservatives. We are now in 2 wars, with a huge national debt, having lost an Amercian city [New Orleans] and are in an economic meltdown. Has No Child Left Behind worked? If they are not Bush's problems, whose are they? Bush inherited a huge government surplus. I don't see much that we've gotten for the huge national debt we now have. Things are going to be a lot tougher for Obama than they were for Bush. If conservatism is going to be a force in the future, it has to be honest. Any policy, whether it is liberal or conservative, has to be judged by its results.
Looks like Nightstalker and his childish comments were sent to the funny farm...not that it matters since I put them on iggy a while back. LMAO!
Here's an interesting entry I found on David Frum's blog:
Monday, October 27, 2008
Rush's Blueprint
Last week, Tony Blankley published and Rush Limbaugh publicized what may prove one of the most important articles of 2008. I don't mean that the article was good - very much the contrary. But bad work can be even more important than good, if enough people can be got to believe it.
Here's Tony:
I suspect that the conservative movement we start rebuilding on the ashes of Nov. 4 (even if McCain wins) will have little use for overwritten, over-delicate commentary. The new movement will be plain-spoken and socially networked up from the Interneted streets, suburbs and small towns of America.
Here's Rush:
Since there is not a strong elected conservative anywhere, then conservatism right now is sort of like wandering in the distance with every conservative thinking that they're the smartest person in the room trying to show the way to the light. The way to the light is plainly visible. But everybody wants to be considered the smartest people in the room, so they come up with all these new things like "the era of Reagan is over."
And more Rush:
[T]here's a blueprint for winning it, 1980, there's a blueprint. McCain is not the blueprint for how Republicans win landslides. Going after moderates, independents, and all these yokels is not the blueprint. The blueprint's there, 1994, taking back the House, the blueprint's there. Why are these people ignoring it?
If I understand it correctly, the Blankley/Rush argument goes like this:
1) Reagan-style conservatism remains wildly popular with the American people. It was the "blueprint" for winning landslides between 1980 and 1994, and it remains the blueprint today.
2) Yet for some unaccountable mysterious reason, politicians are ignoring this blueprint! There is not a strong elected conservative voice in the country today.
3) So obviously what we need to do is return to the politics of the 1980s - and sit back and collect the rewards.
This argument raises one big question:
Could it be possible that the reason that we lack Reagan-style conservatives in elected office today is that they are having trouble getting elected?
Still more Rush, referring by name to people like Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, Kathleen Parker, and me:
These are the people who are embarrassed by Sarah Palin 'cause she's not an intellectual and she didn't go to Harvard or have a college degree from approved universities and she drops her g's from words like morning and says mornin'. She's embarrassing, and I think something else really bothering these people is that they believe that she may become one of the key leaders of the conservative movement beyond 2008 if she and McCain lose this.
OK, let's develop this a little.
1) Sarah Palin has the potential to become a key leader of the conservative movement beyond 2008.
2) If that happens, she will follow "the blueprint" and achieve another conservative landslide - and another successful presidency!
3) But snobs like Peggy, David, Christopher, Kathleen and me are embarrassed that she drops her Gs. Our motto: "Unless we can nominate a Harvard graduate, we'd rather lose."
I have to wonder:
Can even Rush himself believe this junk?
I think Rush is a great entertainer and has often been a force for good in the conservative movement. But right now, he is feeding his audience pleasing illusions that can only lead conservatives to even greater troubles in the days ahead.
Take a look at this poll from Stanley Greenberg. (Yes Greenberg's a Democrat - but he's long proven himself a realistic analyst of American politics. Greenberg is the guy who identified Macomb County, Michigan, as the heartland of the "Reagan Democrats" - and warned Democrats that they were losing both Macomb and the nation.)
While a sizeable majority of voters say Republicans have lost in 2006 and 2008 because they have been “too conservative,” a sizeable plurality of Republicans say, it is because they have “not been conservative enough.”
Over three-quarters of Republicans say Palin was good choice, while a majority of the electorate says the opposite.
Two-thirds of Republicans say McCain has not been aggressive enough, but a majority of voters think they have been too aggressive.
Looking to the future, a large majority of Republicans say the party needs to “move more to the right and back to conservative principles,” while an even larger majority of all voters say, it should move to the “center to win over moderate and independent voters.”
When Rush and Blankley tell us the blueprint is there, if only we would follow it, they are telling us something that is not true. They are offering flattering illusions when we need truth. They are leading us to disaster - and beyond disaster, to irrelevance.
10/27 07:19 AM
Here's another interesting post from Frum's blog about the future of the GOP...
David Frum: Republicans face fraught choice between two roads to revival
Posted: November 05, 2008, 7:45 AM by Kelly McParland
David Frum, Full Comment, U.S. Politics
In the wake of yesterday’s bruising result, the Republican party faces an excruciating and divisive choice between two very different futures.
The first choice is the choice on display at the excited rallies that cheered Sarah Palin all through the fall. This is a choice to fall back on the core base of the Republican party. The base is almost entirely white, almost entirely resident in the middle of the country, moderately affluent, middle-aged and older, more male than female, with some college education but not a college degree. Think of Joe the Plumber and you see the core of the Republican party.
Republicans have won a string of elections thanks to Joe.
Joe came through in 1994, delivering both houses of Congress to the Republicans. Joe was not enough to elect Bob Dole president, but thanks to him the Republicans kept a dwindling hold on Congress in 1996, 1998, and 2000.
Joe rallied to President Bush after 9/11. Republicans owed their gains in 2002 to Joe. And without Joe, George W. Bush would not have won in 2004.
Joe has not changed much over the past two decades or so. But the country has. The Hispanic population of the United States has almost doubled since 1990. The proportion of white Americans with a college degree has jumped from 22% in 1990 to almost 28 ½% .
In order to keep competitive, the GOP has had to win more and more of the Joe vote. Ruy Texeira, perhaps America’s leading expert on the voting behavior of the white working class, observes that George W. Bush won in 2004 by only 3 points – but won the white working class by 23 points.
This year, an economically squeezed Joe did not come through for the GOP. But once the dust settles, many Republican leaders will urge the party to return to the tried and true. They’ll say: 2008 was an unusual year! Iraq, Bush, Katrina, the financial meltdown, and a too-moderate candidate at the head of the ticket: No wonder we lost! But the messages that won for Reagan in 1980 and Newt Gingrich in 1994 and George Bush in 2002 will win for us again. Taxes – guns – right to
life – patriotism – the formula is all there. Stick to it.
If 60% of the Joe vote is no longer enough, nominate Palin – and win 65%. Or 70%. Whatever it takes.
As I said: that’s one path.
There’s another. It’s the path that begins by facing up to the arithmetic that says – Joe is no longer enough. God bless him, he’s
the GOP base, and no Republican wants to lose him. But he needs reinforcements.
George W. Bush tried to reinforce Joe by appealing to Hispanic voters. But that approach failed, and for predictable reasons: American Hispanics are poor – and they vote majority Democrat for the same reasons that poor people of all races vote Democratic. Bush hoped that he could win Hispanics by (1) granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, (2) expanding federal programs like Medicare and federal education aid, and (3) pressuring banks to relax lending standards to help lower-
income workers to buy homes.
But Bush could not get (1) through Congress – and anyway it alienated Joe, whom Republicans still needed. He did (2), but Democrats outbid him, as they always will. And (3) … well we all know how that ended. If Hispanics benefited disproportionately from the U.S. housing boom (as the early data suggest they did), they are suffering disproportionately from the U.S. housing bust.
There will not be an Hispanic future for the GOP for years and years.
But there is another way to reinforce Joe – and that’s the way so old and dusty as almost to feel new and unexplored.
A generation ago, Republicans dominated among college graduates. In 1984 and 1988, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won states like California, Pennsylvania and Connecticut – states that have been “blue” for a generation. (America’s least educated state, West Virginia, went for Michael Dukakis in 1988.)
Those days are long gone. Since 1988, Democrats have become more conservative on economics – and Republicans have become more conservative on social issues.
College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with Democrats – but that their values are under threat from Republicans. And there are more and more of these college-educated Americans all the time.
So the question for the GOP is: Will it pursue them? To do so will involve painful change, on issues ranging from the environment to abortion. And it will involve potentially even more painful changes of style and tone: toward a future that is less overtly religious, less negligent with policy, and less polarizing on social issues. That’s a future that leaves little room for Sarah Palin – but the only hope for a Republican recovery.
National Post
Rod wrote: If Bush isn't a conservative, then why did so many people who call themselves conservative (like, um, me) vote for him twice? I agree that he did some things that are rather unconservative...
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck .... Bush didn't and so many conservatives I knew of were repulsed by him. Alan Keyes presciently predicted that if W. was elected president, it would be the end of the Republican Party. In fact I was so disappointed with him as a the GOP pick that I de-registered for the first time in my life and became an independent.
I don't know why you didn't listen. Only you can answer that. Maybe it it had to do with W. selling himself as "the conservative". He certainly wasn't. Maybe it was simply because we were too quick to grab the next guy who wasn't Bill Clinton.
(I remember thinking that I could never despise anyone as much as I did Clinton -- but W eclipsed him a long time ago. Wrong again, I suppose.)
"We're eight years past Clinton, and yet the GOP still blames him for problems"
You might still get this from Rush and the Fox crowd, but most conservatives have moved beyond it. In fact, many say that Clinton turned out to be better than expected. No prize, by any stretch, but not the devil a lot of us thought he would be.
"Why shouldn't the Democrats use the last eight years of Bush as a cover for problems that arise in the coming Obama administration?"
Translation: "The GOP lies about its problems and refuses to accept responsibility. Why shouldn't the Democrats?" Nice.
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