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Let us count our blessings and thank the good people who attended GOP precinct caucuses in Iowa last week. Now it will be possible to watch the news without hearing Phil Gramm.
His campaign was so well planned that last summer, they were up here filming of the Texas senator and his family rafting down the Arkansas, for use in commercials this year.
Around here, we speculated as to how the footage would
be used: When Phil and Wendy get into whitewater, they
do it the old-fashioned way.
Or maybe a regular-folks
approach: Like millions of other down-home Texans, the
Gramms enjoy summer vacations in Colorado.
Could be
they were just trying to position the senator as an active
outdoorsy fellow rather than a bookish economic wonk.
Perhaps they planned some geographic fun: Up here in
Colorado, the Arkansas River runs fast and clean. When it
gets to Kansas, Robert Dole's home state, it dries up. And
we don't even want to talk about what happens to it when it
gets to Arkansas, the home state of the Evil Clintons who
wanted to destroy the best health-care system in the world
and replace it with one of those horrible socialist systems
like they have in backward nations like France and
Japan.
The Gramm family visit was all pretty mysterious. They were in and out before we heard anything about it.
Gramm had money, organization and something to say. There was even a time when I admired him. Last year he went before some family-values forum and possessed the courage to say that preaching was best left to the clergy; he was running on economic issues that were the proper concern of government.
Naturally, he had to recant his heresy in order to placate the pious mob, but it was refreshing to see a Republican with a backbone, no matter how ephemeral.
The problem with the Conservative Revolution
is
that conservative
really doesn't mean anything. It's
a fashionable term, so they all try to position themselves
as conservatives.
A few examples should suffice. William F. Buckley is a conservative. He has written that the War on Drugs is an immoral and unjust abuse of governmental power and an infringement on our constitutional rights. William Bennett is also a conservative, and he the only thing wrong with the War on Drugs is that they haven't locked up enough people yet.
Phil Gramm is a conservative, and he believes in free trade. Patrick Buchanan is a conservative, and he believes in protective tariffs and other trade restrictions.
Bob Dole is a conservative, and he has supported food stamps throughout his congressional career. The House Republican freshmen are conservatives, and they say food stamps just cause us to be shiftless and lazy and they really hurt people.
Steve Forbes is a conservative, but he apparently sees abortion as a matter for women and their physicians, not as a criminal matter. Meanwhile Buchanan, and many others, wants a constitutional amendment; presumably, the death penalty would loom for any woman who
Conservatives lash out at broken families and divorce, yet make divorced George Will a prophet and worship at the shrine of Ronald Reagan, our first divorced president. They're horrified at the size of the federal debt -- which tripled and more during the Reagan-Bush years.
They attack academic elites,
while Newt Gingrich
and Phil Gramm were both college professors who never met a
payroll before getting elected to office, where they got
more room at the public trough.
No matter what the issue -- Bosnia, the Gulf War, China trade, gay rights -- you can usually find conservatives on both sides.
The confusion grows when you hear an aspiring
office-holder define himself as fiscally conservative
but socially liberal.
Wait a minute. How can you operate liberal social programs without spending a lot of tax money? But it doesn't really mean that. It means that he's socially tolerant, thus following the traditional conservative principle of limited government.
Liberals oppose censorship on the Internet, but so does state Sen. Charles Duke, and nobody would call him a liberal. Conservatives oppose government regulation, except they trip over themselves to support V-chips and anti-porn laws.
More points of confusion emerge with further
contemplation. If conservative means anything, it should
mean defender of the status quo.
However, the
conservatives
in the House of Representatives also
call themselves revolutionaries,
bent on uprooting
status-quo programs like Medicare and Aid to Families with
Dependent Children.
Since conservative
doesn't mean anything, and it
doesn't tell us where a candidate might stand on any issue
from abortion to zymurgy, why don't retire the word, at
least for this election year? They're all
conservatives.
But what are they really?
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