Posted on 10/07/2009 11:44:28 AM PDT by rabscuttle385
David Brooks ruins a good argument with this:
Back in 2006, they [talk radio hosts] threatened to build a new majority on anti-immigration fervor. Republicans like J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, both of Arizona, built their House election campaigns under that banner. But these two didn’t march to glory. Both lost their campaigns.
This is at best misleading. It remains true that immigration restriction will never win elections on its own, and it is also true that candidates who present themselves as nothing other than restrictionists are not going to win in the absence of any other compelling message. Hayworth and Graf were primarily restrictionist candidates, and they lost during an incredibly bad year for their party. There were more than a few supporters of “comprehensive reform” that also lost that year, because voters repudiated the GOP mostly because of the war that almost all Republicans, including both restrictionists and pro-amnesty types, continued to support. This is the real weakness of the Republican Party that Brooks can never bring himself to acknowledge in his analysis. It does not help make his case against both popular and populist conservatism, because most mainstream conservatives of all stripes are implicated in this foreign policy failure, and few more so than Brooks himself.
What Brooks fails to mention is that McCain and Huckabee did as well as they did during the primaries partly by avoiding the issue of immigration or, in Huckabee’s case, by simply reversing his immigration stance. How many times did McCain claim that he had “learned his lesson” from backlash in 2007? Of course, he had learned only that he and his allies could not be as obvious in their contempt for rank-and-file conservatives. In any event, he ignored immigration throughout the primaries and the general election, because he knew that there were no votes to be won by talking about his record. One moment Huckabee was the media darling, a folksy “compassionate” conservative who spoke to the NEA and defended mass immigration, and the next he attempted to make himself a populist firebrand aligned with the Minutemen and Chuck Norris. Furthermore, the problems most mainstream conservatives claimed to have with Huckabee concerned his fiscal record and his flirtations with foreign policy realism. Penalizing that sort of “deviationism” would likely not trouble Brooks quite so much. Brooks also fails to mention that the candidate favored by many of Brooks’ reformist conservatives, Giuliani, flamed out even more spectacularly than Thompson. As out of touch and unrepresentative as Limbaugh et al. may be, the reformists are even more so.
That said, Brooks’ larger point concerning the last primary contest is valid. Conservative activists and talk radio hosts are not representative of Republican voters in many of their policy views and their candidate preferences. They tried to shove obviously flawed candidates down the throats of primary voters by applying inconsistent, changing standards of “purity” to different candidates. What made Huckabee’s fiscal record absolutely unacceptable was irrelevant when judging Romney, and McCain’s minimal compromises on life issues were far less important than Romney and Giuliani’s complete lack of credibility. Activists and radio hosts responded well to the candidates that paid homage to them and deferred to them, and they were deeply opposed to the candidates who usually paid them little attention and fed off of positive mainstream media coverage. What the primaries showed was not merely the illusory political power of the talk show hosts, but they also showed that movement leaders and institutions had remarkably limited influence over Republican primary voters.
Speaking of myths that are constantly re-woven, the myth that the GOP is dominated and directed by its most conventionally conservative members, which movement conservatives promote to exaggerate their own importance, is one that Brooks must find very useful. What the primaries showed was that those who are most self-consciously movement conservatives have limited power in a party they claim to define, and they are forced to settle for whatever opportunistic, accommodating moderate Republican politicians happen to come along. Once the latter start to use all the right buzzwords, movement conservatives will engage in any number of contortions to rationalize support for politicians who routinely play them for fools.
Keep believing Democrat propaganda and see where it gets YOU. Your Rove, Norquist, Bush statement is the dumbest of the day. Congrats.
To summarize the article: there is no coherent and compelling description of what “Conservative” means.
This is one tired article.
Graf won a 3 way primary in which the RINO had the support of the Congressman who was not seeking re-election, AND the NRCC.
The RINO sent out hit pieces which turned people off to Graf.
Thanks. I wasn’t watching that because I was watching Hayworth’s race so closely. Hayworth had been my Rep. but I was thrown into a ‘RAT district when they gerrymandered the area where I live in order to create another ‘RAT district for Congress. We held them off for a while with Renzi but had our butts handed to us during the Obamakreig last year.
legalization of drugs.
We aren’t consumed with “anti-immigration fever”. We are consumed with our support of the rule of law, the Constitution, and traditional American values.
So long as any potential immigrant is on board with those we welcome them.
People who show up waving flags of foreign countries and demanding stuff tend to get on our fighting side.
It’s a common practice for left-wing, out of state college students to engage in voter fraud by voting absentee in their home state and then registering to vote in the state their college is located.
Back in the 80’s my mother served on the grand jury of Santa Cruz county. They had just such a case involving students at UC Santa Cruz hijacking the local city election. The students saw nothing wrong with what they did, and had been encouraged by several of their professors.
Fortunately several students were indicted, but received slap on the hand punishments.
When Romeny dropped out and we knew it was going to be McStain was the moment I knew we had blew it.
That’s the problem with the “lawyer” garbage at the bottom of the registration forms. No one takes it very seriously. Five years and/or $50,000 fine my eye. It’s a joke. Any ACORN can tell you that.
Funny how the person with the most votes wins. Stupid majorities.
Don’t forget the illegal aliens who can vote.
No I did not not even close, you make that assumption based on what the other poster assumed that I had said, not based on ANTHING (which is slanderous to say I support “Obamacare” when I do not) that I said.
I believe that Terri’s right to life was taken away without true due process.
I did not agree with said poster’s assement that I believe in “positive rights” and therefore Obamacare as an inference.
No, I believe that the state COULD not take away her right to life which it did by denying the family the ability to feed her (and which they would have paid to do glady too- NOT the state).
No, my friend, you need to stop infering things that were not said!..
We need to get rid of open primaries. McCain won the majority of votes in some primaries only because a lot of Democrats came over and tried to "help" us select our "very best" candidate.
Under other circumstances, I think the GOP might have mounted a better challenger to Obama.
Simple.
Post the name of any Republican candidate here at FR and watch the attacks begin. And yet they all would have saved us from what the Democrats are doing to the country at this moment.
I think we still would have lost, but not as bad. The economy is the main reason we lost, imo. The burden of the economy always lies in the current admin, whether that’s entirely true or not.
You do realize that her husband was part of her family, right?
And as far as I know, he was her legal guardian, as a consequence of her fairly obvious incapacitation, with an effectively unlimited (except by the law) power of attorney right to make decisions on her behalf, absent a "living will."
Was his decision to cut off her feeding tube unlawful? I have no reason to believe that it to be, as it was within Mr. Schiavo's discretion to act in a manner that he believed to be in his wife's best interest. Was it a "d*ck" move on his part? Probably. That's certainly up for debate, but that moves beyond the realm of the legal status of Ms. Schiavo's case.
I believe the real problem isn't the war so much as the prosecution of the war.
People aren't dumb; they can see that whatever led to Iraq in the first place, it has morphed into a police action without no sign of ending. And I don't think most Americans really care a whit what kind of government the Iraqis or any of the other Muslims have. I think most Americans simply want them defeated to the point where they wouldn't even think of trying to attack us ever again.
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