President in 2008: What Should Conservatives Do?

A lot of conservatives are unenthusiastic about the choices for President this year. Obama is obviously a big government kind of guy. He is a Democrat, and in 2007 he had the most liberal voting record in the Senate.

Many conservatives don’t like McCain any better. They point to the McCain-Feingold law limiting free speech in political campaigns (as they see the issue). McCain rails against "obscene" profits in the oil industry, which conservatives see as economic nonsense. McCain originally opposed the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and even though he supports their continuation now, some conservatives wonder where his heart is. There is global warming – and lots more. The choice makes so little difference, they say, that it is not worth worrying about.

But as conservatives complain about McCain, I wonder how many times in the last 40 years conservatives had a candidate they didn’t complain about. Sure, they liked Goldwater, but he didn’t win, and I don’t think they liked the Great Society that came after that election.

Reagan was a conservative, but Nixon and Ford weren’t. George H.W. Bush wasn’t a real conservative. Bob Dole may have been conservative, but he came across like a root canal conservative, not an optimistic one. And then there is George W. Bush. He claims to be conservative, but it is not a conservatism most conservatives would recognize, let alone agree with.

However, even though we have seldom had a real conservative as President, conservatism has had a fair amount of success over the last 30 years. I can think of at least three reasons for this. First, of course, is the obvious failure of communism, socialism, and big government liberalism. But it was also because of the intellectual and philosophic resurgence of conservatism over the last 50 years. William F. Buckley, Jr., and National Review were part of this, as were Milton Friedman, the rediscovery of people like Friedrich von Hayek, and more. In Great Britain there was the Institute of Economic Affairs, Keith Joseph, etc. People talked about conservatism and wrote about conservatism, even when it seemed hopeless.

Another reason for conservatism’s success has been the election of real conservatives to Congress and state offices. These people pushed conservative ideas. They were able to get conservative policies implemented even without a conservative president. Think about welfare reform, passed over Bill Clinton’s objection.

So what has happened to conservatism recently? To some extent, as the failures of communism and socialism have faded in memory, the promises of big government philosophies (as opposed to the reality of what they actually do) have begun to sound good again. But mostly conservatism’s downfall has been conservatives’ and Republicans’ own fault. As Republicans and conservatives started to try to spend and earmark their way to re-election, they abandoned the principles on which they were elected in the first place. "Big government conservatism" is more about big government than conservatism. In the end, you can’t achieve conservative ideas through big government policies because limited government is one of the basic conservative ideas.

So what should conservatives do in 2008? First, the fact conservatives may not like John McCain is no reason to sit out this election. We still need to get conservatives elected to Congress and in the states. We have some good conservatives in Congress, but we need more of them, and we need to keep the ones we already have. Some of them need help if they are going to stay, like Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire. If conservatives sit out the presidential race, it will hurt conservatives like John Sununu.

Second, we need to keep talking and writing and promoting real conservative principles. Limited government. The freedom to live your life as you want to, not the way some know-it-all wants you to live it. The right to keep your own money unless the government has a good purpose for it. We need to continue to fight for these principles.

But we also need to address of failings of conservatism (and Republicans) over the last 15 years. We need to be able to convince people, and reassure ourselves, that when conservatives go to Washington, they will stay conservative. No more earmarking of useless projects. No more trying to win elections through spending (i.e., trying to bribe the voters with their own money).

We need to stop thinking Washington has to solve every problem with new laws and more spending. Many problems are best solved by state or even local governments. Schools aren’t a problem for Washington to solve. They are for local school districts, with direction from the states. Other problems don’t need government solutions at all. Many times people can deal with their own problems better than government can.

We also need to tell people how conservatism can deal with things like the housing crisis, market bubbles, etc. There is a perception among many people that the free market has failed and that we need more government rules and control. In some cases, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it is actually the opposite. The problems with Fannie and Freddie were not a result of free market economics; they were the result of people buying government support and favorable government regulation (or lack of appropriate government regulation) through influence, lobbying and contributions. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are more a failure of government than of the free market.

In other cases, though, the free market has not worked well. There is no sense trying to claim the free market is always right. It isn’t. But then no system gets it right all the time. We need to be able to suggest tweaks to the free market system while defending the system in the main. Even Adam Smith understood the need for government regulations in some cases. We also need to be able to explain how the failures of the free market are fewer and less harmful than the failures of any other system and how government solutions often wind up being worse than the problems they were supposed to solve.

So, finally, what are conservatives to do in the race for president in 2008? We need to work for the candidate who, even if he is not a real conservative, is most likely to accommodate and be agreeable to conservative policies and principles. We need to support the candidate who supports continuation of the Bush tax cuts and who has promised to appoint judges like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. We need to support John McCain.

Comments

[Frank Ray]

There was a true conservative elected in Utah during the recent primnary with the help of a group that is focused on getting representatives elected who don't buy into earmarks. Check them out and see what you think...they really do a great job of explaining the problems in 9 to 12 minute segments and it names names and exposes how the special interested work hand in hand with Incumbents to misuse the earmarking process.

Their website is at www.ourcaucus.com

[Steve]

Things will get worse with McCain.

Things will get much worse with Obama. And that is why I am voting for Obama. For things will only get worse with McCain but they need to get much worse for us to survive as a nation.

Of course a statement like that needs an explanation. And I will do so in the form of an analogy. Do you know how to cook a frog? Well, if you put it in a pot of boiling water the frog will quickly jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of water that is warm and turn up the heat gradually up to boiling the frog will just sit there not even realizing it is being boiled alive.

Obama is the one who puts the frog into the hot water and McCain is the one who turns up the heat gradually. With Obama his extremism will cause a backlash so great that America will start electing good leaders to oppose him. It happened in 1980 and it happened in 1994. And it will happen again.

But McCain he will really be the death of the Republican Party. As I said above things will get worse with McCain and therefore he and his party will get the blame. And then America will elect a Democrat in 2012. And if history has shown us anything it has shown that the Democratic Candidate has been getting increasingly extreme. So I can’t tell you who the Democrats will put up that year but I can tell you that person will be as extreme if not more extreme than Obama. So, how long are we putting off having an Obama-like candidate? Four Years?

And meanwhile McCain has shown that he wants to drive conservatives and conservatism away from the Republican Party. For those of us who believes that conservatism is the only solution to our country’s problems, it is unacceptable that neither of the two major parties represents conservative values.

So, I am left with the ultimate act of “tough love”. Not to say there aren’t hard times ahead for there is but that is true with McCain as well. But at least with Obama there is hope that things will get better after him. With McCain all hope is lost.

[Pat Allen]

I understand where Steve is coming from, and if I knew for sure what was going to happen in the next four years, maybe I could agree him. But I don't know what is going to happen, and that is why I support John McCain.

McCain with a Democratic Congress (and there will be more Democrats in the next Congress than we have in this one) won't be good. Obama with the next Congress would be a lot worse.

Maybe the Obama/Democratic Congress combination would be so bad that the Republicans could come back in 2012, but you can't count on a four-year presidency.

But even scarier is what we really don't know, which is what will happen in the rest of the world in the next four years. Who would have predicted 9/11? Bush's response, especially in Iraq, was not nearly as good as it could have been, but the wrong Democrat could have been so much worse.

I do not want to have another summit like John F. Kennedy had with Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. That summit probably led to the Cuban missile crisis and maybe to how we entered Vietnam. And I certainly do not want another presidency like Jimmy Carter's. We are still dealing with some of the consequences of what happened in Iran and Afghanistan during his time in office.

While we cannot be sure what John McCain would do, we have a pretty good idea from his 20+ years in public life. All we have from Barack Obama is a bunch of feel-good speeches about how we are the change we have been waiting for – or something like that. I don't even know it means. Obama could be fine or he could be terrible. We have no idea. And it is not worth the risk.

As for the Republican Party, its problems and the solutions to those problems lie within itself. Getting rid of earmarks and controlling spending and believing in federalism do not require a Barack Obama presidency. We have to do that ourselves.