AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Both Obama's Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, the likely Republican nominee, have attacked Obama for saying it is not surprising that some people "get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy to people who are not like them."

And finally, how 'bitter' are you?

John McCain's temper is well documented. He's called opponents and colleagues "shitheads," "assholes" and in at least one case "a ffucking jerk."...

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you kunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

Personally, I rarely feel "bitter" about anything.

I "distrust" idealism... especially when taken to extremes.

Personally, I rarely feel "bitter" about anything. On the whole, my feelings about the nation, its people and its prospects are "optimistic". I "deplore" the shenanigans of radicals of all sorts, and I "distrust" idealism... especially when taken to extremes.

Go on, go on, Asherman, explain how you deplore the actions taken by the radicals in the current administration.

I "value" patriotism, honor, civility, courage, and above all the U.S. Constitution. The traditions of "The Enlightenment" in Western Civilization are, too me, a just and equitable world. the most fundamental change isn't easily legislated, but must occur within each person individually. Individuals, not society as a whole, are the real bedrock of liberty and self-realization. ...



People are flawed, and only a strong central government can harness and orchestrate the raw power of The People. Within constraint, liberty is maximized, while without constraints there is chaos and the self-interests of a few tyrannize the many. Politics is ultimately a balance between the conflicting needs and interests of society and the individual. As a general rule, if the scales go out of balance let it be in favor of the individual.

Ash, it's been my experience that responding to JTT is a completely frustrating experience given my mendacious nature.

... .

After the 2004 elections, Karl Rove began to talk with growing conviction about a permanent majority for the Republican Party. That majority lasted two more years. It would have been difficult then to imagine a more stunning reversal. [..] Cole maintains that the 2006 election was an event of equal scale and significance to the Republican victory in 1994 ?- "in many ways, it's a flip." Republican operatives now worry that the social conservatism that helped seal Rove's majorities might create for them a deficit that lasts a generation, that the party's position on social issues like gay marriage may permanently alienate younger, more moderate voters.

Yet Cole has been almost strangely sunny about his prospects. "This isn't an ideologically conservative country, and maybe some of us overreached in thinking that it was, and have been corrected for that," he told me in January. "But I believe that it is still a center-right country, and I think this election will show that."

In the summer of 2006, the Democratic pollster Joel Benenson was conducting surveys for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the Eighth Congressional District of Indiana, working-class, conservative towns around Evansville and Terre Haute. Brad Ellsworth, a conservative Democratic sheriff who took pains to distance himself from the antiwar camp, had just been picked as the party's nominee against a six-term Republican incumbent named John Hostettler, a former power-plant engineer.

As the survey returns came in, Benenson noticed that one group was far more receptive to the Democratic position than he had expected: working-class evangelical voters, the lower-to-middle-income whites in small cities and small towns who had defected to the Republican Party under Reagan and not returned. When Benenson ran focus groups, he found that they weren't voting because of the war or against corporate influence ?- Hostettler didn't take money from lobbyists. The opportunity lay in very basic economic issues, like Hostettler's votes against raising the minimum wage.

"Every election is different," Benenson told me. "There are elections where evangelicals will vote on social issues. The difference in 2006 was that we finally caught up on fiscal responsibility and taxes. Those were supposed to be big parts of the Republican brand, and they've surrendered them on multiple levels."

Ellsworth, running on those issues, would eventually win the race. Lower-middle-class evangelical voters are a small segment of the national electorate ?- less than 10 percent. But for Benenson they seemed to augur a broader recalculation, the Reagan Democrats subsuming social concerns to economic ones, the populist sentiment in the country sliding from the Republicans to the Democrats and even firmly conservative districts suddenly thrown open to competition. In 2006, the Democrats won in those kinds of blue-collar districts not just in Terre Haute but also in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina, in the old industrial towns in western Pennsylvania and in upstate New York. "The map," Benenson told me, "has already changed."

For Gersh, the modern political map has sustained two basic changes in the past 30 years. The first, beginning with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 but only culminating with the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich's insurgents, was the slow, top-down conversion of socially conservative blue-collar voters, in the South and elsewhere, from Democratic partisans to Republican ones. In 2006, Gersh saw the culmination of the second big shift. "The biggest thing that happened in 2006 was the final movement of upper-income, well-educated, largely suburban voters to the Democrats, which started in 1992," he says. The largest concentrations of districts that flipped were in the suburbs and the Northeast. This, Gersh says, was the equal and opposite reaction to the earlier movement toward the Republicans and to some degree a product of the social conservatism demanded by the Republican majority. When I spoke to Emanuel earlier this month, he told me: "I believe there's a suburban populism now. The Republican Party has abandoned any economic, cultural or social connection to those districts."

What has been startling is how thorough some of the shifts have begun to look. Cole had said his first targets would be areas that were long-term Republican districts that flipped to the Democrats in the 2006 election. But few of those districts now seem likely to flip back to Cole's party. In some districts that had been held by a Republican for more than a decade before 2006 ?- Ohio's 18th, New York's 19th ?- Republicans haven't even been able to find a credible challenger. In others with long-running Republican histories ?- Florida's 22nd, Iowa's First, North Carolina's 11th ?- Cole's committee acknowledged early on that these races were long shots. It is possible to interpret this as a recruiting failure by Cole's committee. But it's also possible to see the void in these districts as an acknowledgement by up-and-coming Republican politicians that something has changed, and that this land has been swallowed by the tide.

In their intimacy with the numbers, many Republican operatives now worry that crucial segments of the electorate are slipping away from them. Republicans had traditionally won the votes of independents; in 2006, they lost them by 18 percent. Hispanic voters, who gave the Democrats less than 60 percent of their votes in 2004, cast more than 70 percent of their votes for Democrats in 2006. Suburban voters, long a Republican constituency, favored Democrats in 2006 for the first time since 1992. And Democrats won their largest share of voters under 30 in the modern era, a number particularly troubling for some Republicans, since it seems to indicate the preferences of an entire generation.

"What is concerning is that we lost ground in every one of the highest-growth demographics," said Mehlman, the former R.N.C. chairman and Bush political adviser, who is now a lawyer at the lobbying firm Akin Gump.

For operatives like Cole, focused on expanding the party's appeal, the conservative movement had become too demanding: its aggressive rhetoric on some social issues alienated young voters, its swagger on immigration hardened Hispanic voters against Republicans and its emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy made it difficult for the party to appeal to populist voters. [..] "If there are Republicans out there who think that 2006 was a year that could be changed by a few votes in a few districts, they need to wake up," Mehlman told me. "It was a rejection."

The day that President Bush delivered the State of the Union in January, Cole met in his offices at the National Republican Congressional Committee with a favored Congressional challenger from a Midwestern swing district to be briefed on the progress of the campaign and to give what advice he could ?- on what consulting firms to hire, how to plan for the cadence of the campaign. [..] Cole began to talk through Republican figures who might be brought in to help raise cash. If McCain were the nominee, Cole and the candidate agreed, donors would turn out for a fund-raiser he headlined. Cole mentioned Bush, but everyone thought that would be a mistake. "I think this cycle he and the vice president are going to be doing a lot of fund-raisers in the South and the Plains," he said, and everyone guffawed in agreement.

Cole says that his task is to help the Republicans move from something that looks roughly like Bush's party to something that looks mostly like John McCain's. The places where Cole must hold the Republican line are largely moderate districts, where the president's conservatism is a divisive thing and where McCain's maverick reputation might permit the party to pull the trick of running against Washington even while controlling the White House. "I don't need the nominee to win; I just need him to be competitive enough that we can win behind him in the places that should be ours," Cole said. "I need him to be Gerald Ford."

"Let's break it down," he said. "Obviously in the Southwest, he's going to make us much stronger. In Arizona, we have a couple of opportunities where he'll help us, but also in New Mexico. Frankly, while some people have problems with his stand on immigration, he probably keeps Hispanics in play at the presidential level in a way no one else could. He really helps us in the Northeast and upper Midwest ?- Illinois and Pennsylvania. Then, anywhere where there's a veterans population or military bases. Think of Jim Marshall's seat in Georgia. That's a huge advantage for us. Florida, big military presence. We have a couple of opportunities in Texas. But I think the biggest thing is he's seen as an authentic American hero, someone who can take on and shake up Washington."

Cole's basic challenge is to try to flip the popular perception of the capital so that more voters identify Washington with the Democrats than with the Republicans. He says he wants to use his party's resources to define Nancy Pelosi as a national character, the face of a Democratic Congress that is once again too liberal for the country. ("Those three little words ?- ?'San Francisco liberal' ?- are just magic for fund-raising," one of Cole's staff members told me.) He has tried, when possible, to choose candidates whose biographies can reinforce the anti-Washington theme, even if they have no real political experience. And he is counting on McCain's emergence to permit the party to distance its image from that of Bush. [..]

Cole is not an ideologue. And with Rove and the party's other grand strategists having abandoned the field ?- five of the six members of the Republican Congressional leadership in 2006 have now retired ?- Cole is now turning to practical answers, to process, and deferring to the politically moderate geography of the battleground areas. "I still think most Americans want their government to be smaller, not bigger, and their taxes to be lower, not higher," Cole says. "And I still think most Democrats in office think that America is not a force for good in the world, and I think most voters have a different perspective."

You go back to the Reagan years, and even before that, and we always had a three-legged stool: anti-Communism, anti-abortion and tax and spend," Dan Mattoon, the Republican lobbyist and former deputy chairman of Cole's committee, told me. "The first leg dropped off when the Berlin Wall fell, and after 9/11 we've tried to do the same thing with terrorism, but it's not as strong. The second leg, tax and spend, was pretty strong until George Bush. Then we had just one leg of the stool, which was social issues, and I think that you look at the makeup of the younger generation and there's more of a libertarian view on social issues."

Cole says that the party's rhetoric on issues like gay marriage has cast Republicans as too reactionary for many suburban districts. "My problem on social issues is the tone ?- sometimes we have been too shrill, and that has alienated voters who might otherwise have joined us," he told me. The challenge, then, is finding a new generation of candidates who aren't.

at a moment when Boehner was trying to rebuild the party's reputation on small-government principles (Boehner told me that the matter of the Republican abuse of earmarks, in which congressmen secure funds for favored projects in their districts, is "the most poignant" reason voters rejected Republicans), Cole was openly skeptical of this approach. "Earmarks are not the reason that we lost the election," Cole told me. "I can't find a single seat we lost because of them."

Without the money, the party's power has begun to wane, and with it the usual ability to control the process. Early in the fall, the Club for Growth, the hyperaggressive low-tax lobbying group, chose to run ads attacking Bob Latta, a Republican state senator who was running for Congress in a special election in Ohio, on behalf of another Republican who was contesting the nomination, Steve Buehrer, whom the Club considered more conservative. Cole was damned if he could figure out the ideological difference between the two. "Bob Latta is a straight arrow," he told me. "Nice guy, conventional Republican. And they go dump a bunch of money into another guy who you can't tell the difference! Bob Latta's not going to raise taxes. He's with them on dividends. He's a free trader."

[..] Though Latta survived the primary, his Democratic competitor in the special election began to run ads mimicking the Club's line of attack. "The problem I have with the club is I think they're stupid," Cole said. "I think they're politically inept. They spend more money beating Republicans than Democrats." He shook his head. "I mean ?- Bob Latta! Give me a break!"

Cole's staff didn't know all that much about Greenberg ideologically, but then they don't make it their business to know. I once asked Cole about the positions his candidates were taking on immigration and the war. "I don't think I've ever asked a candidate what he believes," he said. "We're just looking for winning candidates." But one of the things they did know, and do make it their business to know, was geography. Greenberg was from one of the towns that tended to flip back and forth, the wealthy suburb of Long Grove. If he could simply prevail upon his neighbors to vote for him, Greenberg would have gone a long way toward winning back the seat. "There's a head start already," Morgan Sr. said.

I flew to Oklahoma to travel with Cole through the rougher end of his Congressional district. South-central Oklahoma is raw territory, poorly off. "You ever read Robert Caro's ?'Means of Ascent,' the L.B.J. book?" Cole asked. "The first chapter, where he's talking about the hill country where L.B.J. came from, how poor it is? That's this. We're still in the development business in Oklahoma."

All of the evident modernity and wealth in this part of Oklahoma ?- the occasional office buildings, the restored hot-springs resorts, the new hospitals and gyms ?- seems to have been built by the Chickasaw Nation, with money that began to accumulate after they won the right to operate casinos two decades ago. Cole remains extremely close to the leadership of his tribe. There's a hand-in-hand relationship here: Cole works to win government support for Chickasaw projects, and the entrepreneurial Chickasaw, like a shadow government, use their profits in part to build social-service projects that help Cole's constituents.

This is the territory ?- the poorer sectors of the red states; populist, patriotic and Christian ?- that operatives of Cole and Rove's generation have spent their careers turning from bedrocks of the permanent, post-New Deal Democratic majority in Congress to the soul of the rising Republican one. Cole has been in the politics business here for decades. [..] By 1994, he had [..] become the most influential Republican consultant in the state. He ran four campaigns for Congress that year, as well as Frank Keating's campaign for governor. All of his candidates won. "Oklahoma had been voting Republican for president since Goldwater. What we had to do was convince them that the Democrats in Washington were completely out of touch with Oklahoma values."

Nineteen ninety-four is the source of Cole's generation's war stories, its clutched box of poems. It was also the moment when the economically populist feeling that had lingered for decades began to change, converted into a Republican sensibility more amenable to business interests. [..] But that conversion was never perfect or complete.

When Cole has differed from the Republican Party in Congress, it has often been on the New Deal-legacy projects that he views as doing right by Oklahoma and that they view as pork. He has voted against the party's small-government wing on the farm bill, the water bill, most native issues and, maybe most significantly for him, on a bill that provides federal money for the first member of a family to attend college, a population that in his district is more than three times the national average. "I knew the moment we did that it'd be cast as, the president's heroic, you're pork-barrel spenders. Well, no, it's just the green-eyeshade guys are wrong about this," Cole said. "If it's a transcendent national question, then I'm a Burkean conservative, but I like to think I represent the interests of my district."

The danger is that these positions, held at the same time, can come to look like hypocrisy. In Ada, Okla., at a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, Cole gave a localized version of his national partisan pitch, that the Democrats were out of touch with the country on tax-and-spend issues, when a man raised his hand and asked how he could be expected to believe that line, given the excesses of the Republicans. Cole launched into a disquisition on why the contributions of earmarks to the federal deficit was overhyped but eventually conceded that the man, who turned out to be the publisher of an Oklahoma travel guide, had a "good point." When I talked to him afterward, the publisher, Bob Rubin, said he was "not very impressed. They are not accepting responsibility." It was hard not to conclude that Cole, and his party, were caught in something. And it was hard to see what else exactly he might have said.

It is a given that most American liberals didn't like President Bush to begin with and didn't vote for Republicans for Congress either. Therefore, it can be concluded that the GOP lost power when it violated those issues most important to their base generally imbedded in an ideology known as modern Conservatism.