In this election cycle, we’ve long since gone past the point of preposterousness in the use of the word “change.” The people have gone mad for it. The political classes are obsessed with it. The presidential candidates bleat constantly about being the agent of it.
Indeed, however comical the White House aspirants must know they’re beginning to sound, the poor things daren’t stop invoking change for fear some rival will continue using it and thereby succeed in establishing him- or herself as “the” change-maker. Change: It’s the only rhetorical constant!
The change Democrats want most, of course, is to see the back of George W. Bush. So they’ll get some satisfaction no matter what the outcome in November.
But Republicans may be in for changes of a less palatable kind. “A series of nasty surprises” is how former Bush speechwriter David Frum sees GOP prospects — surprises so thorough and unpleasant he believes they could reverse all the electoral gains the right has made since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.
In a new book that seeks to grab right-wingers by the lapels and shake them into realizing their peril, Frum — full disclosure, he’s a friend of mine — argues that conservatives must change their issues or face political oblivion.
He begins “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again” by laying out polling that will sound dismayingly familiar. Two-thirds of Americans think the Iraq war was a mistake; almost three-quarters think the United States is “on the wrong track.” Americans generally now regard Republicans as less competent, less ethical and certainly less caring than Democrats. That young voters are increasingly aligned with Democrats in great numbers is, along with everything else, pushing the GOP “to the brink of disaster.”
“Conservatives were brought to power in the 1970s and 1980s by liberal failure,” Frum writes. “Now conservative failure threatens to inaugurate a new era of liberalism.”
Yikes! A lot of conservatives won’t want to believe this. I sure don’t. People will say — because I’ve been at those dinner parties, too — the real problem is that Republicans have strayed too far from the principles of the Reagan era. All the democracy-peddling overseas and excessive spending at home have exploded in our faces.
What Republicans need to do, many believe, is return to the basics. Michael Barone, the human political encyclopedia and Fox news commentator, boils these essentials down to 11 words: “Markets Work. Morals Matter. America Must Be Strong in the World.”
Many conservatives would want to add a few more words about shrinking the state and preventing any new taxes. Yet here is where David Frum believes conservatives must most speedily depart from tradition.
“No new taxes is like saying no new thinking,” he argues. Leviathan is here to stay in the form of gargantuan New Deal programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Rant all we might about these entitlement schemes, they’re a fact of life as inescapable as taxes themselves.
That being so, Frum believes Republicans need to get past their fastidiousness to find new ways to produce the tax revenue these behemoths require. Among other measures, he proposes both a carbon tax — appealing to an increasingly green-oriented populace — and taxes on upper-income consumption that could leave in place a steeply progressive income tax while raising the vast quantities of cash that must be raised.
These ideas may be indigestible to many on the right, and Frum has been doing lively battle with conservatives who dislike the notion that oak-solid conservative principles might need renovating.
“I’m confident that my ideas are not going to find much acceptance in the coming months,” Frum says, with the sigh of a prophet who knows his listeners might not like what he’s saying. After November, however, he believes Republicans may be forced to find new ways to appeal to the electorate.
Much as it’s most noisily the Democrats who are chanting about change, change, change, from an electoral point of view, it may be the Republicans who actually need it most.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
