Thursday, September 13, 2007

That Will Column   [Rich Lowry]

Allow me to revise and extend my remarks. On second thought, I shouldn't have called the column "absurdly disproportionate," but I do think it was disproportionate. Here's an e-mail from a friend, for what it's worth:

Hi Rich-

While Thompson has indeed tied himself in knots in his CFR explanations, Will’s ... piece isn’t exactly a model for logicians.

1)       Will derides Thompson’s “aw, shucks act.” Isn’t it possible to simultaneously be a good old boy and a Washington insider? See, e.g., Haley Barbour. ... Thompson doesn’t refer to himself as an “outsider,” he touts a lot of his DC experience (Watergate), and admits that he lives here. But for Will, this admission is evidence of a lack of authenticity!

2)       Will is in the midst of about a five year jeremiad about the banal Dobson/Falwell influence on the GOP and conservatism. Ordinarily, inquiries into personal piety with respect to political positions would unleash Will’s fury, starting with the observation that Reagan did fine on social issues without being much of a churchgoer. But here is Will trading on the trope that he would normally (and rightly) disdain. Again, Thompson’s church attendance admission should be evidence of authenticity, but Will somehow summons it as evidence for the opposite. Obviously, one can have positions attractive to the congregation of McLean Bible without attending there. But this would be evidence of Thompson’s comfort with his own policy positions in the political marketplace, which Will has earlier argued Thompson does not have.

3)       Isn’t it possible for a conservative of good faith to take a position on a contentious issue that departs from conservative orthodoxy, while acknowledging that the circumstances have evolved so that the tradeoffs inherent in the original position are now different and lead to a different position? As I read Thompson, he supported CFR primarily because of the sleazy pay-to-play culture of the Clinton years, and wasn’t wild about the issue ad restrictions though he of course voted for them as necessary to pass the CFR package. He now sees that the speech inhibiting aspects that so horrify Will are excessive and provide little positive trade offs for corruption deterrence, and he’s come to Will’s position on issue ads. He still defends the soft money limits. Isn’t this A) Exactly the past and current position of Will’s preferred candidate, and B) Quite similar to Giuliani’s immigration answer that “I had to tolerate some illegality as a tradeoff for full police cooperation, but the experience of the last decade leads me to a slightly higher ratio of enforcement-to-tolerance as a candidate today”? Will would likely endorse this evolution as nuanced maturity, and call the former explanation confused.

Thompson needs to do a better job of explaining his CFR evolution (I volunteer to write it!), but Will is making much out of the speck’s in Thompson’s eye while ignoring the beams in the eye of his preferred candidate.

09/13 05:37 PMShare