David Frum has become something of an object of bemused and vaguely laudatory fascination over here in Liberal Blogland. And certainly, almost alone amongst his fellow right wing specimens, he seems to have detected that there is something rotten inside the petri dish. Which is good, I suppose. Like Ed says, it is nice to see that there exists a "conservative" who is able to gropingly discern consensus reality and doesn't then gleefully poop on it as a first response.
But let us not be misled! Let us bear in mind that David Frum is, well, David Frum. "Sane by the Glenn Beck yardstick" does not equal "sane," just as "not as far out there as Neptune" can still mean "unearthly."
For instance. Read this fairly vanilla account of how he came up with the "Axis of Hatred" idea, which later became famousized by the Preznit Bush as the "Axis of Evil." It's a perfectly batty story. Micheal Gerson, who later got hired by the Washington Post to spout ignorant pious bullshit because Fred Hiatt is an idiot, told Frum to come up with something quick and snappy to make an unprovoked war of choice with Iraq sound like the kind of thing the American Consumer would really go for, like it was Hot Pockets of Cheezy Pizza Death or something. And so he worked backwards and found some FDR stuff about the Nazis and Imperial Japan, and he reverse-engineered that sucker, and hot damn, we had a slogan!
It's Mad Men logic. Frum came up with something that would resonate, that would sell, like Utz potato chips or bras or whatever. And it sold! So, well done. But what he was trying to sell, specifically, was the utterly bizarre idea that Iran, Saddam Hussein, and Al Qaeda were in cahoots, and certain Americans should be sent to die because of this wholly imaginary phony "threat."
And then a lot of people got killed, and we're no safer from the made-up threat, because people like Frum just made it up, it was never a threat.
You really have to axe yourself, what is the Intellectually Sound form of "conservatism" Frum is telling us he adheres to? Supposedly it is this.
At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.
Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.
This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.
Yes, the GOP has lost its marbles. Very well. I would not disagree. But funny jokes aside, Frum has a weird thesis to defend. The GOP in the House and Senate should have worked with the Obama administration to achieve concessions on healthcare reform that would have made it more in line with Conservative Principles. Like what?
Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big.
No shit.
Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.
They are THE LAW. Well, they're also pretty small potatoes, policy wise. Honestly, "conservatives" got off pretty damn light, as far as most of us pinkos are concerned. But that is, you know, the point. Like Frum says, there never was that much difference between what Obama would have settled for and the "conservative" position. So, to be crude, what the fuck is Frum bitching about? Heatlhcare reform was going to happen, it did, it's pretty modest, and so there you go.
But then you have Frum saying:
We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.
On what, modest expansion of Medicare? Get a load of this:
No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?
I mean, please. "This is a defeat for the GOP because citizens will benefit from it, and like it. We should have been more reasonable in how we kept Americans from getting things they will vote for because they like them. This damages the Republican Brand! Republican Principles are also involved somehow!"
Frum is incoherent, unless you consider that his dispute with Fox is entirely over who controls "conservatism" or the "Republican Party" as a brand, or as a vehicle for the expression and exercise of power for its own sake. Frum has never been and is not now remotely interested in anything like, oh, dealing with actual problems facing the nation. He's just a genteel loonball ideologue.
And if Fox ate the GOP? Those are indeed Tough Noogies. I weep for Frum, in much the same way as I weep for the protagonist of a Lovecraft story who starts fucking around with the Great Old Ones, only to have them answer the fucking doorbell.