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October 5, 2009 4:00 A.M.
The Right’s Civil War
The Republican leadership has sold conservatives short.
We all see it: Bush forces are squabbling with Cheney sympathizers; a conservative governor in Texas is fighting a less conservative Republican senator trying to unseat him; high-priced GOP consultants are working hard to blow governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey with their shopworn advice; and, fresh from losing 28 states and 365 electoral votes to Barack Obama, everyone’s favorite right-left-centrist-then-right-again senator, John McCain, is promising to “redefine” the Republican party. This only a year after George W. Bush told me in the Oval Office that he already had redefined it.
What on earth is going on in the Republican party?
It’s not news to anyone that the party is in the midst of one of its periodic civil wars. The outcome will determine success or continued failure in 2010 and 2012.
As it happens, my book Speech-Less has found itself caught in the middle of this. A small number of former Bush officials have taken issue with what is a rather mild conservative critique of the final years of the Bush administration. (The book is about a lot more than that, including a close-up look at Capitol Hill and the Pentagon that will make conservatives laugh, applaud, and sometimes cringe.)
On NRO this past Friday, for example, former Bush counselor Ed Gillespie charged, among other things, that my book trashes everyone I’ve ever worked with, except Donald Rumsfeld. No doubt he and his allies would like people to believe that, since it encourages people to ignore the central message of my book: the damage done to the conservative movement by folks like Gillespie, who guided us to two colossal defeats in a row. It’s true that my book does play favorites. I have a somewhat sympathetic view of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Senators Kyl, Coburn, DeMint, and others. The reason is simple. They stuck to their principles in a city where the usual course is to place power and privilege ahead of what you believe.
Conservatives have much to admire in the Bush administration. It placed two superb justices on the Supreme Court, offered a vigorous response to 9/11, and enacted tax relief for the American people. But it is no secret that the administration started to drift toward the end — in favor of cap-and-trade policies, in favor of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, in favor of an unwise deal with North Korea, and with a spending record that would make LBJ think twice.
As a result, conservatives turned away from the party in 2006 and 2008. We need to heed those lessons if we hope to come back in the years ahead.
Perhaps that is why so many prominent conservatives — from Ann Coulter to Laura Ingraham to Stephen Hayes to Tucker Carlson and many others — have had a favorable word to say about my book. This is a debate we need to have, civil, quiet, and in the open.
For too long a thin layer of folks at the top have run the Republican party. They brook no dissent, and they place winning ahead of advancing the conservative agenda. After the 2008 election, they trashed Sarah Palin, failing to see that she was the only person who gave conservatives any reason to vote. And even now, these same people have urged former President Bush to ask Cheney to end his criticisms of the Obama administration. But the former president is too much of a class act to heed them.
I’ve offered Gillespie, Dana Perino, and Bill McGurn — my top three critics — a chance to have a public discussion about what has happened to conservatism. They’ve refused. So I renew that offer. Perhaps NRO can host it. After all, advancing the conservative cause with a free exchange of views is what this magazine was founded on.
— Matt Latimer was deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush, chief speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld, and communications director for Sen. Jon Kyl. He is the author of the newly released book, Speech-Less, a New York Times bestseller.
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