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September
4, 2003, 2:30 p.m.
The
Reaganite RNC
Conservatism and politics.
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two editorials earlier this week, the Manchester Union-Leader reported
that RNC chairman Ed Gillespie had kissed off small government and Reaganism
in a meeting with the paper's editors. According to the Union-Leader,
Gillespie "said in no uncertain terms that the days of Reaganesque
Republican railings against the expansion of federal government are over.
. . . No, today the Republican Party stands for giving the American people
whatever the latest polls say they want. . . . The party's unofficial
but clear message to conservatives is: Where else are you going to go?
To the Democrats? To the Libertarians? They don't think so." Rush
Limbaugh has referred to the Union-Leader's reports on the air.
Gillespie disputes
the Union-Leader's characterization of his views, maintaining that
the context has been omitted. "They never asked me about the Reagan
revolution," he told me yesterday. "I am a Reagan revolutionary.
Ronald Reagan brought me into this party." Gillespie says he wants
to shrink government as much as possible and, when it is not possible, to
bring conservatives principles to bear on government programs.
Gillespie defends
the prescription-drug plan on the merits. Medicare should be modernized,
he argues, both to cover medicines that play a larger role in health care
than they did when the program was invented and to incorporate market
forces. He thinks that a pro-market reform can be passed over Ted Kennedy's
objections.
Gillespie said that
while he participated in efforts to abolish the Department of Education
in the past, its continuation is now a settled issue. The Union-Leader
hits him for that. But what Gillespie said is the lamentable truth. The
GOP platform abandoned the fight against the department in 2000. That's
one reason Bush didn't get slaughtered on the education issue as Bob Dole
did in 1996 (who lost on the issue by about 60 points). Would it have
been worth losing the presidency in order to maintain the anti-department
position? Especially given that maintaining that position was extremely
unlikely to result in the actual abolition of the department? (None of
this is to say that Bush had to push for the No Child Left Behind Act.)
"I believe that
conservatives and millions of other Americans are Republicans because
they support our positive agenda and share our beliefs, not because they
have nowhere else to go," writes Gillespie in a letter to the newspaper
to be published tomorrow.
I'm glad Bush and
other Republicans are taking heat for their record of expanding the government
— a subject about which I plan to say more in the next issue of NR.
But conservative critics should not pretend that political leaders can
act on conservative principles without ever making any concessions to
political circumstances. Ronald Reagan was certainly willing to make such
concessions. If bashing Bush and company from the right helps to change
those political circumstances in a positive way, great. But to overstate
his perfidy is to understate the magnitude of the political task that
conservatives have before us.
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