Posted on 03/07/2007 6:28:29 AM PST by MadIvan
In the run-up to the fateful election of 2008, conservatives face a clear-cut choice: we can rebuild our movement as a broad-ranging, mainstream coalition and restore our governing majority, or else settle for a semi-permanent role as angry, doom-speaking complainers on the fringes of American politics and culture.
We can either invite doubters and moderates to join with us in new efforts to affirm American values, or we can push them away because they fail to measure up to our own standards of indignation and ideological purity.
In short, we must choose between addition and subtraction: either building our cause by adding to our numbers or destroying it by discouraging all but the fiercest ideologues.
No political party or faction has ever thrived based on purges and insults and internal warfare, but too many activists on the right seem determined to reduce the conservative cause to self-righteous irrelevance.
The most recent outrage involving Ann Coulter provides a revealing example of the self-destructive tendencies of some dedicated partisans on the right. Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., the best-selling author and glamorous Time magazine cover girl declared: “I was going to have a few comments about the other Democratic candidate for President, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot’ so I’m kind of at an impasse. I can’t really talk about Edwards.”
Some members of the audience gasped as she deployed the forbidden slur, but many others laughed and applauded. Naturally, Democratic Chair Howard Dean and many others pounced on the incident as another example of conservative viciousness and bigotry, demanding that all Republican Presidential candidates dissociate themselves from Coulter’s comments.
This challenge creates a miserable dilemma for every GOP contender. If the candidate ignores the controversy, he looks gutless and paralyzed in the face of obviously inappropriate and over-the-top insults. If he condemns Coulter, he looks like he’s wimping out to the liberal establishment and offends right-wing true believers who feel instinctively protective of Ann the Outrageous. Any comment by a presidential candidate also refocuses the national conversation on the absurd and unacceptable suggestion that John Edwards is secretly gay.
To paraphrase the old line attributed to Talleyrand: this smear amounts to worse than a crime, it is a blunder. John Edwards deserves contempt and derision on many counts, and I go after him (regularly) on my radio show for his extreme left wing positions on foreign policy and health care, his shameless opportunism, even his long history as a fabulously wealthy and floridly hypocritical ambulance-chasing attorney. Ann Coulter could have found plenty to say about the former North Carolina Senator without invoking the dreaded f-word (all right, the other dreaded f-word).
In fact, Edwards has been a visibly loyal husband to Elizabeth, his wife of more than 29 years, who’s currently battling breast cancer. Together, they’ve brought five children into the world, including a son who died in a tragic traffic accident at age 16. Drawing attention to Edwards’ personal life and away from his policies only helps Edwards and harms conservatives.
In other words, the lame attempt to question the Senator’s sexual orientation is precisely the wrong attack, and Coulter herself is most certainly the wrong attacker. If this issue continues to attract attention, indignant liberals will no doubt point out that the devoted family man from North Carolina exemplifies traditional values far more notably than the mini-skirted, never-married provocateur from the right.
Personally, I like and admire Ann Coulter, and I’ve always defended her in the past – even when liberals gleefully quoted out-of-context from her recent bestseller “Godless” to make it sound as if she suggested that 9/11 widows wanted their own husbands to die and celebrated their fiery deaths. Her caustic humor often upstages her serious and substantive political points, as did the notorious headline “They Shot the Wrong Lincoln” appended to her column attacking her fellow Republican, Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee. That one opinion piece didn’t doom Chafee’s re-election bid, but movement conservatives like Coulter and many others expressed the desire for his defeat—a loss that insured the Democrats’ one-vote margin in the Senate.
Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of concentrating fire on a fellow Republican (even a liberal GOP’er like Linc Chafee) but there can be no argument about the purely destructive impact of Coulter’s sneering slur against Edwards. How could such a nasty shot possibly assist the conservative cause? Which potential Republican supporters would feel motivated or mobilized by her casual use of the term “faggot”? How could a smart woman expect anything other than a disgusted and negative response for her implication that a long-married father of five deserved outing as a homosexual?
The Coulter commentary (and the subsequent applause) reinforced the public image of conservatives as unreasonably hostile to gay people in general, not just opposed to the dubious particulars of the so-called “gay rights” agenda. In fact, exit polls showed that self-identified gay people made up 4% of the total electorate in the incomparably close election of 2000, and nearly one third of those homosexual voters cast their ballots for George W. Bush. In other words, more than a million gay citizens voted for Bush-Cheney, in a race that ultimately turned on a mere 527 votes in Florida, and a national margin in the popular vote of just 537,000 for Gore.
What sense does it make for a featured speaker at a conservative conference to deliver gratuitous insult and offense to that stalwart minority of homosexuals who still choose to cast their lot with Republicans, despite the party’s impassioned (and appropriate) opposition to gay marriage?
By the same token, how does it help for one of the nation’s highest profile conservative talk hosts to use his broadcast on the Martin Luther King holiday to insult the fallen hero as unworthy of federal commemoration? Yes, the overwhelming majority of African-Americans votes incurably Democratic, but in 2004, Bush still drew well over a million-and-a-half black votes. It doesn’t help these courageous dissenters from politically correct orthodoxy if loud voices on the right make them wonder whether Jesse Jackson and Howard Dean are right about the racism of Republicans.
Finally, the most serious challenge of all involves the rapidly growing and increasingly prosperous Latino communities. Were it not for his competitive showing among Hispanics (with some 35% of their votes in 2000, and above 40% in 2004), Bush wouldn’t even have come close to victory, either time.
Meanwhile, elements of the President’s party seem perversely determined to make sure that no future Republican repeats this success with the nation’s fastest growing minority group. Imagine how naturalized Hispanic citizens, or even native-born Latinos might feel, at the suggestion that their cousins amount to an “invading army” bent on destroying America, or the common equation of terrorists (who have all been legal U.S. entrants by the way) and those who enter the country to care for our children and mow our lawns. Anti-immigrant rhetoric (which increasingly dispenses with any distinction between legal and illegal arrivals) provoked a disastrous shift of Latino voters away from the GOP in 2006. If Republicans continue to draw just 20% of Hispanic votes they will never regain control of Congress and stand scant chance of retaining the White House. Nativist posturing (like Congressman Tom Tancredo’s obnoxious slogan, “America Is Full”) may play well with some elements of the conservative base but it could easily doom Republicans to permanent minority status.
Obviously, the future of the conservative movement and of the Republic itself requires GOP recruitment of more Latinos, Blacks and gays, and anything that stands in the way of such participation fatally undermines the party’s future.
The situation hardly requires retreat and retrenchment on key issues of principle in the vague hope of winning more minority support.
Republicans don’t need to drop our implacable opposition to gay marriage in order reach out to gays.
We don’t need to reverse our criticism of race-based quotas in order to bring more black involvement in the party.
And we certainly don’t need to endorse automatic amnesty or “open borders” as a way to connect with Latino voters – but we might want to avoid widespread public advertising for games like “Find the Illegal Immigrant” (devised by a College Republicans chapter in New York City) or giving undeserved respect to crackpot fringe groups like the scandal-tainted “Minute Man Civil Defense Corps.”.
On all the important issues, it’s not substance that needs to change, it’s style.
Republicans need to return to the open, expansive conservatism of Ronald Reagan: more concerned with bringing in newcomers than driving out dissenters, more committed to winning elections than to scoring points in arguments, more determined to steer the government in the right direction than to sit at the sidelines carping about inevitable decline. We should make skeptics feel welcome as Republicans and urge them to fight the issues inside the party where they can have the most impact.
Every major event, every potential speaker, every resolution, every specific approach, deserves evaluation in terms of effectiveness in party building—winning new adherents to the cause.
We should ask a crucial question before we speak or act: will this draw people to conservative ideas and ideals, or will it serve to turn them off and push them away?
It’s not a matter of pandering; it’s an expression of practical politics. At this crucial juncture, conservatives need to recall the obvious point that you strengthen your cause most effectively when you’re appealing, not appalling.
Bump for later reading
How many times are you going to equate "Saying that isn't good" with "Ban that word and lock up those who use it!" You really can't think they're the same thing, can you?
That said, I'm starting to wonder if we're still conservatives here at FR. Think that's too harsh? Well, consider this: One of the classic identifiers of the numb-as-a-hake liberal is that they are quick to declare criticism of an idea they like as being the same as trying to take away the right to express that idea. Haven't we all seen the libs act like they're going to prison if someone says they're not patriotic? Haven't we all seen these people show up at their little war protests demanding to be called patriots when they spew what is unpatriotic, with a gaggle of protesters wearing duct tape on their mouths because the administration took their right to protest away?
Well, it took exactly five posts before it came up in this thread, where aviator asked "Don't we have free speech in this country?" The charge was repeated time and again by others down through the thread. Papertyger even said that those who think Coulter was off-message are cowards who have no interest in fighting America's enemies.
Folks, John Edwards is one of the most vulnerable candidates to criticism that has ever run for president. Ann Coulter was shooting at the broad side of a barn and hit thin air. Yet there is not only a cheering section here treating her like Annie Oakley, they treat anyone who says "This was not helpful to our cause" as if they are the Gestapo, ready to lock her in a dungeon.
So, to help you see where the rest of us are coming from, here's a quiz, just three quick questions. Each deals with an opportunity to advance conservative ideas and harm a liberal enemy, and offers some ways to exploit that opportunity:
1. You are a student at a four year university in an American History survey course. Your history professor tells the class that robber barons preyed on workers and customers through monopolies to support their unbridled greed. If you want to balance or overcome the effect of this drivel and convince your fellow students that conservatism is the better ideology, should you...
A. Point out how the so-called robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller made it easier for the common man to afford products that improved their lives, and used the profits to benefit mankind
B. Use the professor's own published work to prove his unswerving support of Marxist ideology, rendering his views on any capitalist operation suspect at best
C. Ask the professor whether all retards have sex with their mothers like he does, then sit down and wait for his answer. When he objects to your slanderous statement, you accuse him of trying to shut you up based on ideology.
D. Both A & B if the time is available.
2. You are running for city council in a town of 25,000 people. Your opponent is the incumbent and is related to the owner of a local airport. He wants to temporarily raise property taxes and use the money to fund major improvements to the local airport, including a runway extension so 737s and larger airliners can fly in and out. Do you...
A. Run ads detailing the effect of the taxes on the local economy and showing figures that prove no increased air service will materialize
B. Run ads detailing his history of tax hikes to fund pet projects, including several "temporary" tax increase that are still in place
C. Wait until you meet in a debate, and then ask in your opening statement when he will stop having sex with his dog.
D. Both A & B if the time/resources are available.
3. You have an opportunity to comment on a politician who is basically a Marxist ambulance chaser, supports socialized medicine, got deferments during Vietnam but clapped and grinned when John Kerry described Dick Cheney and George Bush as draft dodgers, talks about covetousness and "Two Americas" while owning one of the largest houses in his entire state and a beach house to boot. Do you...
A. Discuss the silliness of his health care proposals and the disaster socialized medicine has been in other countries. Suggest he wants to be president because if his health care plan goes through he's the only one who wouldn't be waiting in line for lifesaving surgery.
B. Call him out on his habitual hypocrisy, especially about poverty, and suggest that if he ever speaks out against car theft the police should look for a chop shop in his garage.
C. Ignore all of his actual positions and faults and call him a "faggot" so you can make a joke about how a bunch of idiot liberals did something to some other idiot liberal.
D. Both A & B if the time is available.
Now, the point y'all seem to be making is that anyone who answered A, B or D on those questions is a wimp, a lib, or in the Gestapo. In fact, some of you are acting as if insulting the enemy is not a means to an end, but an end in itself. Y'all seem to be saying that "John Edwards is a faggot" is not a means to advance conservatism, it is conservatism. Sure, it sucks that the Left says "Bush is Hitler" and other outrageous crap, but they say that crap because they have no ideas. And when the heck have we ever wanted to be like those losers? What principle does it serve to act like them?
So, how did you answer the quiz...and are we the heirs of Ronald Reagan, or Triumph the Insult Comic Dog?
You've got too many words there. You could have said that you missed the entire point in a more succinct post.
1) Even if Ann did miss, he did tag himself as an effemanate poofter. Direct hit. He's a wimp, whining that a widdle girl was mean to him. Not fit to govern. Not able to fight terrorists, etal.
2) She made a titanic, organic logical proof on the fallacy of political correctness. Recently, from Patrick Kennedy to Foley, all you gotta do is say "rehab" and everything you did is all better. Could she have made a more glaring insitu example?!?!
The left hates Ann. They hate FR. They hate me. They hate you. There's not a single way she can get through to them....but this was an interesting experiment in how to grab their golden PC goat....cuz Ann is an itch under their skin that won't go away.
See, I can be succinct.
Dude. Get a life. You spend way to much time on this subject. Find a new enemy.
The left hates Ann. They hate FR. They hate me. They hate you. There's not a single way she can get through to them...
I'm not interested in getting through to libs. I'm interested in drawing people into the conservative movement or at least voting for conservative candidates. Reagan did that with the Reagan Democrats in the Eighties, and he didn't do it by running around calling people faggot and then patting himself on the back for making a "logical proof on the fallacy of political correctness." He did it by communicating conservative values with dignity.
You, sir, are wise.
You just can not STAND being unable to dictate the terms of debate, can you? You can keep insisting the issue is alienating fence sitters till your fingers are bloody stumps. It's not going to change the fact your punctiliousness more about comforting yourself, than anything else.
You're not even satisfied to scream in caps. You have to jack up the font size, too!
The glaringly obvious fault is your soi-disant conundrum is that changing the elements and the circumstances changes the dynamic. (Hmmmm, let's see...letters have no numerical value, therefore the statement "x+1=3" has no meaning)
Simply brilliant!
So, I can put you down for option C on questions 1 and 2?
Are you "not...comfortable with" everything you are opposed to?
I can call you princess, right? It makes some wider point about political correctness?
I wouldn't even waste my time reading your post so I have no idea what you are taking about. You obviously have a problem with Ann. Good luck with it.
I'm not really "opposed" to anything that consenting adults do with each other in the privacy of their own homes, personally. Their lives, not my problem.
And you kinda give the impression you don't even approve of oral sex between a husband and wife . . . which most folks would say is over-the-top, I would think.
Or maybe I misunderstood?
"I'm interested in drawing people into the conservative movement or at least voting for conservative candidates."
Okay then. Let's throw overboard anybody who is against amnesty (or who even uses such hurtful terms as "illegal aliens"), who is for airport "profiling" (or indeed anybody who jokes about the prophet Mohammad), or anybody who doesn't champion gay marriage and adoption, or anyone who doesn't accept global warming as a fact and how the US is responsible....
Shall I go on?
All of those positions drive millions of people away from conservatism.
So who is to say what positions or even words can be allowed to be spoken by conservatives -- even conservative pundits who are making a joke?
You? Should you be the final arbiter?
Let's check your posting history here, and see if you shouldn't be banned from FR, drummed out of the conservative movement and shunned by conservatives everywhere.
I bet you posted something somewhere that could have offended somebody. Why should we put up with being associated with you?
Here, I'll post the most pertinent part of my post...heck, I'll save you time and post just a third of it:
1. You are a student at a four year university in an American History survey course. Your history professor tells the class that robber barons preyed on workers and customers through monopolies to support their unbridled greed. If you want to balance or overcome the effect of this drivel and convince your fellow students that conservatism is the better ideology, should you...
A. Point out how the so-called robber barons like Carnegie and Rockefeller made it easier for the common man to afford products that improved their lives, and used the profits to benefit mankind
B. Use the professor's own published work to prove his unswerving support of Marxist ideology, rendering his views on any capitalist operation suspect at best
C. Ask the professor whether all retards have sex with their mothers like he does, then sit down and wait for his answer. When he objects to your slanderous statement, accuse him of trying to shut you up based on ideology.
D. Both A & B if the time is available.
Now, what's your answer on that...and if it's not "C", why was Ann Coulter right to pick "C" when she went after John Edwards?
"I'm not really "opposed" to anything that consenting adults do with each other in the privacy of their own homes, personally. Their lives, not my problem."
Assisted suicide?
You're deep. (Just kidding.)
Tell you what...I'll concede the point to you as soon as any kind of prayer is returned to school.
There has never been a majority of Americans who believe school prayer violates the establishment clause.
The fact is much of liberal philosophy has been codified into defacto law. There is no conservative analog worth mentioning.
I have no problem with assisted suicide.
That should be a person's right.
Abortion?
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