The Wright Angle
Nov. 20, 2006

Maybe I am a conservative, after all

By Scott Wright

It was a “Texas-sized whuppin',” according to crooked ex-congressman Tom DeLay, in an interview on MSNBC the morning after. In a press conference later that day, President Bush admitted his party had received “a thumpin.'” Those were, perhaps, the first honest words to come out of George W. Bush's mouth in years. And it's been well over a decade since DeLay uttered anything even remotely believable.

Their admissions may seem strikingly honest and forthright, compared to the felonious fare they usually emit. Actually, Bush and DeLay may simply have failed to realize they were on TV, their voices being recorded. After all, it's not like those two are the wisest owls in the tree.

What the dodos were talking about, of course, was the Nov. 7 general election. I know, I know, the Democrats didn't win so much as the Republicans lost. That's accurate to some extent, because election year polls typically indicate that around 30 percent of the population identifies itself as Republican or Republican-leaning, with nearly the same number on the other end of the rope pulling for the Democrats. Those folks usually vote the same. It's the other 45 percent of the electorate in the middle who pick one side or the other and starts pulling in their direction.

Earlier this month, by a margin of 57 percent to 39 percent, millions and million of voters in the middle stood up and screamed what liberals have been exclaiming for years: “George W. Bush, you're a liar! You're incompetent! Your staff is incompetent! We've already passed this same tree four times! We're walking around in circles! That's not the North Star, Magellan! It's an airplane! You're lost and we want to try following someone else for a while!”

I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea.

Judging by Democratic gains (six Senate seats, 29 House seats) on Election Day, most of the nation felt that way and the minority party figured out how to exploit the electorate's sudden political awareness.

Conservative columnists across the country got that idea, too. And it must have scared them to death. Ever since the election, the conservative crowd has been busy screaming at anyone who will listen that their ideals are not dead, even if their chosen deliverymen in D.C. -- presidents and congressmen alike -- have been content to stumble around in the dark, whacking each other with their unopened packages (and making a mess of our democracy along the way).

In response to conservatives' cries, liberal columnists across the country began bickering back. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter claimed in an online column last week that conservatism is dead. In a New York Times column on Nov. 8, Robin Toner contended that voting in the wake of conservatism “as practiced by Bush and Karl Rove” finally “showed the limits of those politics.”

Last Thursday night, in a dining hall in Birmingham filled with concerned conservatives, former speaker Newt Gingrich re-retaliated by reassuring the Homewood hoi polloi that “Republicans lost, but conservatism didn't.” Maybe, maybe not.

For example, most of the country disapproves of homosexual unions. As National Review Editor Rich Lowry pointed out in an online column dated Nov. 14, “seven out of eight constitutional amendments banning gay marriage passed this year, outperforming Republican candidates.” Democrats, Lowry pointed out, “went out of their way not to antagonize social-conservative voters.”

By that measure, Gingrich is right and conservatism is not dead. So possibly, as the former speaker argued in his Birmingham address, it was the corruption of conservative ideals by power-hungry politicians that derailed his cause. On the other hand, Alter pointed to another stalwart whose time-of-death call on conservatism pretty much mirrors his own: the movement's current standard-bearer, Patrick J. Buchanan.

“The significance of Nov. 7 is huge and the consequences will be historic,” Buchanan wrote on his online blog Nov. 10. “Tuesday's rout is what happens to a hubristic party that leads a nation into an unnecessary and unwise war, and presents that nation with a congressional face of self-indulgence and corruption.”

The Nov. 9 issue of USA Today supports Pat's prognosis. According to the publication's nationwide exit poll, three issues that mattered most to voters were President Bush's policy in Iraq (or lack thereof), the inability of Congress to do ANYTHING about illegal immigration, and congressional corruption.

Since Dubya's ignorance is about as easy to spot as the space shuttle landing in your driveway, I'll cite only one recent example of his overt obtuseness. It's an illustration that I believe proves both Pat and the exit poll are on point.

As anyone who watches the evening news with regularity knows, the president's strategy in Iraq for months and months -- stated bluntly and plainly at every opportunity -- was “stay the course.” The day after the election, however, President Bush allowed this little nugget to fall out of his mouth: “Our policy has never been 'stay the course'.” The following evening on his show "Countdown,", MSNBC's Keith Olbermann showed a series of clips of Bush using the term “stay the course” in speeches and during news conferences at least two-dozen times in the past two years.

Perhaps the sort of conservatism that Gingrich and Buchanan preach is not dead. But it dies a little every time a “conservative” like President George W. Bush, a proven liar, tries to gut Social Security, or allows thousands of people to drown and starve in New Orleans while he vacations in Crawford, Texas, or flies 1,500 miles to intervene in the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo.

Seventy percent of the American people wanted the government to mind its own business regarding Schiavo and conservative sage William F. Buckley, Jr. was critical of Bush for his transparent attempt to intervene. In March 2005 Buckley wrote, “There are laws against force-feeding, and no one will know whether, if she had had the means ... she too would have said, Enough.”

By all those actions and dozens more, President Bush repeatedly performed the public relations equivalent of dousing Gingrich and Buchanan's conservative movement in gasoline then wrapping it in dynamite, strapping it onto a rocket and blasting it towards the sun.

There, I said it. The president of the United States is Wile E. Coyote.

Buchanan is certainly correct to say that Americans did not vote against conservatism. Rather, many smart conservatives cast a protest vote against their cartoonish commander in chief who, along with Karl Rove, bastardized their cause for partisan political gain.

Pat was right, too, when he wrote that the election “was no mandate for a progressive era.” But, as Buchanan also argued, the nation does agree with Democrats that it's time to raise the minimum wage and that GOP trade policies are “hollowing out American manufacturing and converting company towns into ghost towns.”

Case in point is Alabama Rep. Robert Aderholt, a "conservative" who abandoned his constituents by casting a vote in support of Bush's Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Last month, 220 of Aderholt's constituents in Fort Payne lost their jobs when the owners of their sock factory announced the entire operation was moving overseas.

Will Gingrich and Buchanan be able to save their cause from the next incarnation of Bush, Rove and other make-believe conservatives? Or will some future batch of political butchers bastardize their beloved movement again for political gain? Probably the latter if it survives long enough, though only time will tell.

I'm no conservative, but I don't have to agree with what people like Gingrich and Buchanan stand for to see that they mean what they say, and say what they mean. There's a sense of honor among the true conservatives I've met over the years that is conspicuously absent from the imposters who blindly follow the misguided polices of their failed “conservative” president and his ilk. You can hardly blame people like Pat Buchanan for vilifying the president and his posse as vehemently as the Democrats have. Hell, they've been betrayed, too.

Still, Buchanan and his bunch will have to save themselves and their cause without much help from the resurgent Democrats. Other than concern for middle-class workers, the party of Pelosi has little in common with conservatives (except that they all privately agree that George W. Bush is a total ignoramus).

I could go on for pages, but that's enough about the failings of conservatism under the misguided leadership of George W. Bush for now. As I mentally step over a blackened, coyote-shaped hole in the ground I find myself in political partnership with Pat Buchanan, for we are both comforted by the fact that George W. Bush will no longer have the freedom to run roughshod over the United States Constitution. Like Newt Gingrich, I am glad there will once again be oversight over an administration that has been more sneaky and secretive than any since Nixon's. And I, like Bill Buckley, am relieved that this president will now have to think twice before he hijacks the conservative (or any other) cause to push his own, narrow-minded agenda on the American people.

It seems that, at least in the early weeks after the 2006 election, I'm happy and excited for the same reasons as all three of those great conservative voices: After six long years, we're finally going to have a little democracy in our democracy.

Maybe I am a conservative, after all.

But don't bet on it.