ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 27, 1996 TAG: 9611270077
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A7 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: CAL THOMAS
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
ABOARD THE M/S Veendam in the Caribbean - You might think that a post-election cruise for conservatives sponsored by National Review would resemble a wake, mourning the White House loss. Far from it. The success in maintaining a Republican majority in Congress has given conservatives a confidence they have mostly lacked in the post-Reagan years.
Conservatives believe they have won the intellectual arguments about the excessive size and cost of government and are winning the battle over taxes, welfare, illegal immigration and the general cultural rot. Still left to conquer are the issues of entitlements, racial and gender quotas, and the role of America in the world.
The Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed made the most intriguing remark when he told me that ``we are going to have to invent a presidential candidate for the year 2000.'' By that he meant finding a person who already subscribes to what most conservatives believe rather than attempting to squeeze a moderate-to-liberal Republican into an ill-fitting ideological suit.
Perhaps this person would resemble former Wyoming Republican Sen. Malcolm Wallop, who presented a speech on the cruise that he had delivered the previous week to the economically conservative Cato Institute.
Wallop said that conservatives must not see themselves locked in a shotgun marriage to the Republican Party. He indicted the GOP leadership for ``tacitly [accepting] the liberals' premise that the voters disapprove of the conservative vision of American society. In their view, piety, propriety, responsibility, standing for the rights of citizens and families against bureaucratic encroachment are the hallmarks of `extremism,' and so the Republican leadership pressed upon candidates nationwide an agenda best characterized as Rockefeller Republicanism - fiscal astringency combined with claims of superior competence in management, and guilty protestations of moderation. Basically the Michael Dukakis campaign. Meanwhile, President Clinton and the Democrats baldly cast themselves as the defenders of families, religion, indeed `our values' against dark forces threatening them.''
According to exit polls, about 25 percent of self-described conservatives and a large majority of moderates, most of whom share conservative cultural views, voted to re-elect the president.
Wallop listed specifically how and why conservatives should extricate themselves from a party mentality. There are too many to recount here, but the first step is to stop viewing the party as the exclusive property of Rockefeller Republicans who have by default been setting the party's agenda. Those Republicans have lost the White House twice in the past two national elections, compared to the three-in-a-row victories delivered by two Reagan administrations and one Bush administration.
Republican ``moderates'' have suckered the media and too many conservatives into believing conservatives can't win without moderates and that conservative views are political death. The last 16 years prove the opposite. Victories were delivered to conservative ideas, not Rockefeller Republican ideas. The Rockefeller bunch should be expected to follow the lead of conservatives, which is the future of their party, and to submit to that leadership.
As conservatives dominate the intellectual and political high seas, Wallop had a word of caution: ``My concern is with the character of American conservatism. In Europe, conservatives long ago gave up the principled battle against the welfare state, became just another set of claimants and have taken up the anti-immigration cause, not without racism. If you want to see a conservatism more niggardly and with less of a future than Nixon's, Dole's, Pete Wilson's or Christine Whitman's, just go to Europe. The American conservative tradition, which began with Washington and Adams, is founded on a concern for character. No phrase came from Washington more often than `We have a national character to establish.'''
Wallop correctly asserted that America, with each passing year, resembles less what the Founders intended and more like the countries our immigrant forefathers fled. ``This is happening in large part,'' he said, ``because the people who run our government, our universities, our media, the entertainment industry, the arts and so forth have used the enormous powers of the U.S. government to make it happen.''
Conservatism has many obstacles to overcome, not the least of which is the stereotype of ``mean-spiritedness'' and ``selfishness.'' But like big ships, great social movements take time to turn around. Conservatives are on the right course. The question is, should they be on the Republican boat or abandon ship?
Los Angeles Times Syndicate
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