Posted on 03/24/2010 9:44:55 AM PDT by OldDeckHand
David Frum made headlines by branding Obamacare the Republicans’ Waterloo. Tunku Varadarajan on the rise of the ‘polite-company conservative’—and how Frum gets it all wrong..
Yesterday, I got an email from a prominent conservative academic; it was, I think, a touch harsh on the object of its attention. Here’s what it said: “Frum's pathetic, desperate whining reeks of self-loathing. At least that shows good judgment: I loathe him, too.”
The Frum in question is David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and the “whining” that so goaded my correspondent was a blog by David, written on the day the House voted on health care, in which he described the bill’s passage as a defeat for the Republicans akin to Waterloo. He called the bill the Republicans’ “most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.” The GOP’s tactics—“No negotiations, no compromise, nothing”—led, he wrote, to a “disaster” for conservatives: “We went for all the marbles, we ended with none.”
David is a man I’ve known professionally for almost a decade, and with whom my social interaction has always been very genial. He is a good and energetic man, and has, in the years since he left service at the White House, dedicated himself to being what I call a “polite-company conservative” (or PCC), much like David Brooks and Sam Tanenhaus at the New York Times (where the precocious Ross Douthat is shaping up to be a baby version of the species). A PCC is a conservative who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway—who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness....
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Progressive Republicans.................had enough of them.
Frum is “conservative” like George W. Bush was “conservative” ...
Varadarajan will usually publish a piece here at TDB about every 3-4 weeks. The previous articles have been just as good as this one. Beyond that, the Daily Beast offers no other opportunities to legitimate conservatives - just people like Mark McKinnon and Megan McCain.
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