Free Republic

Entering this weekend, I was convinced that Glenn Beck’s star was about to go into eclipse. Just as Michael Moore, amid Democratic disarray, became the unlikely face of liberal opposition to George W. Bush, the mercurial, weepy, demagogic Beck has spent the last 18 months filling the void left by the institutional collapse of the Republican Party. And just as Moore’s influence diminished as the Democrats came roaring back, it seemed plausible that Beck would matter less and less as the midterms and then the 2012 election re-empowered actual Republican politicians. But after spending my Saturday at Beck’s “Restoring Honor”...

Over the weekend, Dave Weigel resigned as WaPo's house chronicler of conservatives after revelations of his antipathy toward the people he was covering. Tonight brings us the spectacle of Ross Douthat, an ostensibly conservative columnist at the New York Times. Appearing on MSNBC's Ed Schultz show, Douthat proffered precisely zero criticism of anyone or anything liberal. But he did manage to mock Mike Huckabee as "passive-aggressive." For good measure, Douthat suggested that "right-wing" people who question Barack Obama's place of birth are too dense to realize that Hawaii is a state of the union. The Nation's Chris Hayes subbed for...

What Tuesday’s results demonstrated, convincingly, is that America is now a country where social conservatives are as comfortable as liberals with the idea of women in high office. More strikingly, they’re comfortable voting for working mothers — for women publicly juggling careers and family obligations in ways that would have been unthinkable for the generations of female leaders, from Elizabeth I’s Virgin Queen down to Margaret Thatcher’s Iron Lady, who were expected to unsex themselves before being entrusted with the responsibilities of state… In this environment, it isn’t a surprise that women in the public square now disagree about everything...

And John McCain’s defeat has been taken as the vindication of this premise. We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation. “Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the...

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008. Certainly Cheney himself seems to feel that way. Last week’s Sean Hannity interview, all anti-Obama jabs and roundhouses, was the latest installment in the vice president’s unexpected – and, to Republican politicians, distinctly unwelcome – transformation from election-season wallflower into high-profile spokesman for the conservative opposition. George W. Bush seems happy to be back in civilian life,...

snip But drop down to ground level for a moment, and consider Ta-Nehisi's response to my post on prison reform. Here we have an issue - the design of our criminal-justice system - that's of burning concern to the African-American community. It's not an easy issue to wrestle with by any stretch: My preferred approach to reform, for instance, would marry a reduced incarceration rate to a substantial increase in the police presence on America's streets, which if implemented clumsily (as most policy shifts are) could mean fewer black men behind bars, but more tragedies like the death of Ta-Nehisi's...

Are certain conservatives setting Sarah Palin up to fail? With the recent news that conservative commentator Kathleen Parker has joined the ranks of anti-Palin conservatives George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum and Ross Douthat (as well as moderate-conservative David Brooks), one has to wonder how these folks will respond if McCain and Palin lose to Barack Obama and Joseph Biden on November 4. It’s likely that Parker, Will, Krauthammer, Frum, Douthat and Brooks will attempt to blame Palin for a GOP loss, arguing that she was not ready for prime time and that her supposed lack of knowledge drove away...

Writing in response to my suggestion that the McCain campaign has wanted for creativity, I think Rich Lowry makes a strong case that they've been quite tactically imaginative, and I agree with Rich that they wouldn't be where they are today if it weren't for some brilliant improvisations. What I had in mind, though, was ideological creativity - the sort of creativity, for instance, that might have provided stronger talking points for your new-minted veep nominee to trot out when the subject turns to, say, the state of the economy. The McCain camp has found exactly one good domestic-policy talking...

Grand New Party: How the Republicans Can Win the Working Class and save the American Dream By Ross Douthat and Reihan SalamDoubleday, 2008 244 Pages, US$23.95 ISBN 978-0-385-51943-4 Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have perhaps already reached the stage among people who follow applied political science where they need no introduction, which doesn’t mean they don’t get one: Douhat /Dow-thut/ is now a senior editor at The Atlantic, for which Salam is an associate editor and also a Fellow of the New America Foundation; readers may have encountered them at the blog, The American Scene. For the purposes of this...