Tuesday, February 06, 2007

One of Us Vs. One Who Owes Us   [Jonah Goldberg]

I predict we're going to hear a growing conversation on the right about whether it's better for America, conservatism, etc to have a president who feels he has to placate the conservative base versus having a president who claims to be a member of it. President Bush won enormous good faith — no pun intended — from evangelicals and other social conservatives by saying, in effect, "I'm one of you." A case could be made that some of Bush's problems stem from the fact that the White House was internally confused about whether conservatives were simply another constituency or if they were more like a loyal army. I don't think the distinctions are clean and neat, since there isn't a monolithic conservative base and the Bush White House has been itself divided between Nixonians (i.e. the Poppa Bush crowd) and Reaganites. But I think we'll see the conversation emerge as candidates like Giuliani and McCain make "transactional" overtures to the conservative base, saying something like "Support me and I'll support what you care about" rather than "support me because I am one of you."

National Review had a similar conversation over Richard Nixon. That didn't turn out great.  

02/06 04:15 PMShare