Meaning no disrespect

The analogy is inelegant, but Hillary Clinton's double win in Texas and Ohio yesterday may be the most dramatic stop of an unstoppable force since Stalingrad. When the Russians broke the German winning streak in February 1943, the Reich's military machine hadn't lost anywhere in Europe in 42 months. Understand, I'm not likening Obama's or Hillary's politics to those two scorpions in a bottle in World War II. I'm merely pointing out an obvious military parallel.

When you remember that the Red Army got massive American aid in turning back the Wehrmacht, the parallel continues -- since Republican crossovers were significantly helpful (though probably not decisive) in helping Hill and Bill prevail with their big-state firewall strategy where Giuliani had failed with a similar plan in Florida.

Now the question is, can Sen. Clinton capitalize on this turning point and gain victory by driving Sen. Obama all the way back to Denver five months from now, as the Germans were driven all the way back to Berlin 27 months after Stalingrad?

Overselling McCain doesn't help

Distinguished former state senator Mark Hillman yesterday on these Backbone America pages joined the chorus of Republicans advocating for an “at least he’s not Hillary or Obama” vote for John McCain in November. Hillman pays lipservice to Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and James Dobson, all of whom are being candid about McCain, but then portrays a vote for McCain as the only move consistent with our principles. Withholding such a vote, he claims, is “suicidal self-indulgence” and “personal pride and prejudice,” and will result in “surrendered freedoms, suffocating tax burdens, and national insecurity” that will be “as much our responsibility as that of those we ‘helped’ to elect.”

This isn’t the way to persuade conservatives, Senator.

This kind of pragmatism-masquerading-as-principle thinking in the GOP is precisely why some of us are considering sitting this presidential election out and focusing on down-ballot candidates who are genuinely people of principle. Enough is enough, and if this weak-kneed party is ever going to develop real backbone again, it’s going to take a revolt of conservatives from within, not a tame, obedient rollover for every lame GOP beltway insider who arises.

In the meantime, if you want to tease conservatives to the polls in support of McCain this year, I suggest a better strategy is to start being candid about what a weak candidate he is, dispensing with both the recitations of how strong he is on this or that issue and the helium about “this election is about principles that will guide our country for the next four years” – that conviction is the reason McCain is in trouble in the first place.

I submit a better strategy is a more humble one: I’m voting for McCain, but I understand if you’re not. He’s weak, and, currently, our party is weak. It’s not clear at all in this case what the right thing to do is. The late William F. Buckley and National Review did something similar in 1956, running a tepid endorsement of Eisenhower entitled not, “We Like Ike,” but “We Prefer Ike.” He was, they thought, given his acceptance of the New Deal and merely mild opposition to Communist expansion, only the lesser of two evils.

That kind of candor has the potential to be persuasive, especially given John McCain is to the left of Eisenhower.

On McCain’s alleged toughness on national defense, here is a story about his joining Democrats in supporting the closure of Guantanamo Bay. Says the story:

“McCain wants to close Guantanamo, he says, because its existence is damaging U.S. credibility abroad. He also wants to speed up trials. ‘He would want to speed up the tribunal process for prisoners, because he doesn't support indefinite detentions,’ McCain spokesman Danny Diaz says.”

This is straight liberal dogma about Guantanamo and puts McCain to the left of all other 2008 presidential candidates except Ron Paul on the issue and to the left of a vast majority of national Republicans.

On McCain’s alleged fiscal and economic conservatism, Sen. Hillman mentions in passing Sen. McCain’s opposition to Bush’s tax cuts. Here is Club for Growth’s take on the matter, entitled “John McCain Is No Supply-Sider.”

Then there was the “Gang of 14” circus led by McCain that, as he did on so many other occasions, undercut Senate GOP leadership in its attempt to prevent Democrat use of the filibuster in opposition to the judicial nomination of Judge Samuel Alito and future such nominations. Senate Republicans had a 55-45 majority in the Senate at the time and could have changed Senate rules to prevent the filibuster from ever being so used again. (The Constitution requires only a majority vote for confirmation of the president’s judges, not the super-majority required to defeat a filibuster.) McCain led the movement to stop that change and was hailed by the media, as he has been on so many other occasions, as a “bipartisan, moderate” hero.

And we are supposed to believe his judicial appointments will be heroic constitutionalists?

The judicial nominations of Reagan and the two Bushes have included Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter. True, they have also included Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito -- as well as several other legal greats who, thanks partially to wimpy Republicans like John McCain, didn’t make it through the confirmation process. But they clearly included a few mediocrities as well, and given McCain is to the political left of Reagan and both Bushes, the likelihood that he will appoint anyone like Scalia or Thomas, for instance, with a Democrat-controlled Senate is simple naivete. The kind of justices McCain would appoint is entirely up for grabs.

Then there is McCain-Feingold. And we are supposed to be worried about the freedoms we will surrender under Obama or HRC? McCain said just last week that, if he could do it, he’d shut down 527’s as well.

The list could go on. There is no question there are some areas where McCain’s record is better than Obama’s or HRC’s – the list could probably be counted on one hand and definitely on two – and if McCain were running as a Democrat, we could without angst hope for his successful nomination as the best that party had to offer. The problem is that he is running as a Republican, bringing a long record of weakness and betrayal toward conservatives and the conservative movement with him under that banner. This creates a deceptive, mendacious candidacy that, like the presidency of Richard Nixon, holds the potential to do so much long-term damage to the GOP and its prospects for forming sustainable governing majorities in the future that many rightly wonder now if a Democrat victory in November is really the worse result.

If this seems like overstatement, think Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. McCain is to the left of both of them. Then think Bill Owens in Colorado.

The usual election-year pragmatism that is becoming current in GOP circles, and that will become more current as the election approaches, is laying the groundwork for the inevitable reaction among GOP elites if McCain does lose to Obama or Clinton in November: conservatives are to blame, and this further shows what Neanderthals they are (especially those nasty evangelical Christian types) with no political sense. If only they’d come out for McCain, he might have won. Let’s join Sen. Trent Lott and “do something about this talk radio problem” so it doesn’t bite us again.

So the 2008 history of the GOP goes: nominate a blue-blood, media-hungry Republican who’s been running for president for over a decade, whose record is pathetic on most things conservatives care about most deeply, sap thereby the central source of principled strength in the party, send out officious memos to state party chapters and conservatives everywhere telling them not to criticize Obama too toughly, and put pressure on everyone, everywhere to get on board the McCain bandwagon or be responsible for electing Obama or Hillary.

What a winner of a strategy. What a heroic, unflinching adherence to what we believe even in the face of adverse political tides!

I have a better idea. Let’s get conservative again. Let’s start actually being people of principle who put principle over pragmatism instead of just telling people that’s what we do. Let’s start learning from the people who are opposing McCain instead of bad-mouthing and marginalizing them. If we start to do this again, perhaps we’ll understand afresh what “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” means, what the sources of America’s greatness are, and how we can recover them again once the disastrous candidacy of John McCain is, mercifully, at an end.

The Telling of the Truth: William F. Buckley’s Life in Letters

“It is always fascinating to watch people react to the telling of the truth,” wrote Bill Buckley in his first book, God and Man at Yale. It is equally interesting to watch people react to the passing of someone who told the truth. Not your truth or my truth. Not the truth as he saw it. Not the truth as best he knew it. Not the kind of truth that feels good today but is opposite to the wisdom of the ages and of the sages, both past and future, and thus destroys tomorrow. The simple truth; or, as Christian apologist and philosopher of history and culture Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying, true truth: about life and about eternity, as it is available to any honest mind. The truth of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, their grandparents, and their grandchildren – linguistically adorned, philosophically beatified, and internationally contextualized to tell a true story that properly placed the man on the street, his full human and spiritual dignity intact, into the drama of the life of the nation and the life of nations.

Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 50 names in the Boston phone book than by the entire Harvard faculty not because he wanted to be cute, but because he wanted to tell the truth.

It was the same kind of truth Buckley told about Yale in 1951 at the tender age of 25. By then he in his exceptional talents had already discerned that even, or perhaps especially, many in the hallowed halls of the Ivy League had developed a curious aversion to true truth. It is an aversion that has almost universally swallowed up American intellectuals, and which Buckley was providentially destined, singularly equipped, and, it seemed, inordinately pleased to battle his entire life.

Even by the standards of the most literate literati, his vocabulary was staggering. And he wielded it not in the pretentious, ostentatious manner in which the mainstream, “drive-by” media are prone to wield theirs in an attempt to justify, mainly to themselves, their right to occupy the august, influential post to which they have risen. Rather, he wielded his with the commanding ease of a man who knew God was bigger than he was, and who was thus less interested in the great words he knew than in the great ideas – indeed, the great ideological worlds – he knew lay behind the words, and less interested in glorifying himself than in, as he put it, standing athwart history crying, in all wise benevolence, “Stop!”

His humor was of a type that has become a bit of a hallmark in conservative circles: the kind that is less a positive creation for entertainment than an unavoidable adaptation to the telling of the truth and the negative or embarrassed reaction the truth engenders. When you repeatedly tell the truth, and that truth is not only repeatedly rejected, but repeatedly caricatured, studiously avoided, and, when the inevitable calamity arrives as a result, repeatedly blamed for having created the calamity, one develops a certain modestly self-aggrandizing humor that every genuine conservative recognizes and that no such conservative begrudges another. So Buckley, when asked why he tended to sit during his TV episodes of “Firing Line” and most other TV interviews: “It’s difficult to stand up under the weight of all I know.”

It’s not arrogance; it’s an attempt to advertise a healthy confidence in the truth in an age peopled by, as G. K. Chesterton once quipped, a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication tables.

His literary output was enormous, for a time almost single-handedly sustaining a post-war renaissance in conservative – that is, true – thought about God, man, Yale, society, state, and history. Like few others – his friend, the late Dr. Russell Kirk, did something notably similar – he put words, ideas, and history behind and around the thoughts, knowledge, emotions, convictions, hopes, and political visions of millions of butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who sensed in the latter half of 20th century the rise of an aggressive totalitarian ideology that was finding a weaker and weaker United States, and a weaker and weaker spiritual, moral, and political backbone in the West, as its only meaningful world opposition.

The talk in the last week about Buckley as a defender of a more urbane, sophisticated, polished, and agreeable brand of conservatism than that to which we – sigh – are now condemned in the wake of his death is mere media kerfuffle. It is the kind of talk that comes from people not substantive enough to know what to say when an authentically great man passes. When Ronald Reagan passed, we heard much the same sort of thing from people who had spent their entire public careers criticizing, caricaturing, slandering, and opposing him. Now that he’s gone, what fond memories we have of him! What a better sort of conservatism he stood for! What dignity, what learnedness, what charity, what disagree-without-calling-your-opponents-names know-how he had! If only we had more like him!

The move is mendacious: a back-handed way of insulting those conservatives – that is, truth tellers – who remain, with whom both Reagan and Buckley consorted and identified their entire lives, and with whom still resides the only authentic stewardship of the life and legacy of either man.

Then, of course, there are the polite but empty compliments from respectable, moderate folk: even if you didn’t agree with Buckley on everything, by God, at least you knew where he stood! Or, even if you didn’t agree with Buckley on everything, you had to admire his talents and passion on behalf of what he believed in! The point being not to praise Buckley for anything genuinely praiseworthy, but to, again in a back-handed way, partake oneself of the immediate trend among the fashionable – the thing one is really in a habit of caring about – of honoring the venerable dead without oneself having to do anything like what the venerable dead did to earn the honor. That is, pay one’s easy respects to the dead without having to agree that this particular dead took the risk of telling the truth; of doing it for a long time; of sacrificing the many lucrative and fashionable engagements that one is oneself angling for and which would have easily been his had he chosen that easier pathway through life; and of putting up with the marginalization and condemnation from enemies, and not infrequent abandonment by ostensible friends, that inevitably attend such a courageous career.

In short, one is offering polite courtesies without offering the one thing that would truly honor the venerable dead: a frank admission that he was right, and you were wrong to disagree with, publicly oppose, or maintain a convenient silence toward him and what he believed, and toward what his genuine friends and heirs still believe.

The modern conservative movement in America – and the movement conservatives who comprise it – recognize innately that Buckley’s influence will last as long as our movement does. Many of us not only grew up with faithful, interested parents who kept copies of National Review on their coffee tables and in toilet-side baskets, but we still now have dusty, closeted boxes full of back issues with cartoon caricatures of Al Gore on the cover and Buckley’s inimitable columns in the back.

Yes, if only we had more of him. Eagles flock not, but one day, if God is gracious, there will be another collegiate Elijah who arises with the kind of spirit to, before he is 30, take on an Ivy League establishment, a political establishment, a world of easy, empty, errant words, with the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker’s truth that man is made in the image of God, and that what has happened once in six thousand years – a Gentile nation consciously and publicly founded on that truth – is not likely to ever happen again.

If principles matter, so does McCain

It's not about John McCain. Nor is it not about Rush Limbaugh or Laura Ingraham or James Dobson, although their views harmonize more closely with my own and those of most conservatives than do McCain's. This election isn't about party or personalities, but about principles that will guide our country for the next four years or more.

Will our nation trend in a direction that is generally conservative or one that reverses modest gains of the past 28 years and lurches toward cradle-to-grave paternalism?

That's why, despite several disagreements, John McCain gets my support against whomever the Democrats nominate. It's also why principled conservatives should check their McCain disdain at the ballot box.

Recently, some conservatives behave as if they have nothing to lose if McCain loses. But a McCain loss equals a Barack Obama win, and we have plenty lose from that.

Conservatives remain unified on three key policy objectives: pro-growth tax policy and no-nonsense budgeting, judges who respect the constitution, and a resolve to defeat Islamic terrorists.

On these key issues the choice between McCain and Obama cannot be dismissed as the lesser of two evils. The choice is clear and the stakes are enormous.

McCain is one of just five senators who flatly reject pork-barrel budget earmarks. He has vowed to veto any spending bill containing earmarks and has already incurred the wrath of several pork-loving Republicans. That's a welcome change from the you-scratch-my-back, I'll-scratch-yours spending of the last eight years.

By contrast, Obama has promised programs calculated to grow the already bloated budget by $900 billion.

Despite his vote against the Bush tax cuts, McCain has vowed to fight to preserve them. Obama conveniently forgets that middle class families benefited most from the Bush tax cuts and instead demagogues against "tax cuts for the rich." However, he can't pay for his big government utopia without squeezing the working class hard.

As a Vietnam veteran, McCain understands the lasting consequences of an ignominious defeat. America's stature was badly damaged for years after Vietnam. We now see that McCain's prescription for Iraq after Saddam was right, and the Bush-Rumsfeld strategy was wrong.

Had Obama's policy of surrender and retreat carried the day, the now-vindicated surge would be merely another paper gathering dust on a shelf, Iraq would remained mired in bloody sectarian attacks, and Iran would be emboldened to direct its terrorist accomplices toward Afghanistan.

Perhaps the most critical, principled reason to support McCain is the Supreme Court. Judging by their appointments' adherence to the text of the constitution, Republican presidents have had mixed success in rolling back judicial activism.

However, two things are indisputable: the constructionist justices on today's court were all appointed by Republicans, and the Democrat appointments are all undeniably liberal activists.

John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the two justices most likely to retire soon, are both activists who re-write the constitution in contravention of the plain text. Replacing either or both with another John Roberts, Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas — each of whom McCain supported — could at last restore the court's historic role as a defender of broad individual liberty and a restraint against over-reaching government. If Obama makes the next appointment, we can be certain he will fortify the court's activist wing. Should a constructionist justice retire or die, Obama could swiftly reverse the gains of the last 28 years.

Finally, the candidates' views on the sanctity of human life provide another stark contrast that conservatives dare not forget. McCain has consistently voted to restrict abortion, parting with pro-lifers only on stem cell research. Obama not only supports abortion on demand but callously voted to deny medical care to infants born during unsuccessful abortions. Some conservatives argue that a Democrat victory would galvanize Republicans for 2010 and produce a public backlash, a la 1994. That's a tremendous gamble.

Democrats controlled Congress for 40 years from 1955 to 1995. In the Senate, Democrats ruled for 34 of those years. Here in Colorado, perhaps more than anywhere else, Republicans should realize how quickly political fortunes can change and how hard it is to reverse that tide.

Conservatives generally recognize short-sighted self-indulgence when practiced by others. Now many conservatives are in danger of practicing a suicidal self-indulgence of their own.

We must put aside self-pity and frustration and do what we always have done: choose the right and responsible course for our country.

If instead we purposefully withhold our votes to gratify our personal pride and prejudice, the surrendered freedoms, suffocating tax burdens, and national insecurity that result will be as much our responsibility as that of those we "helped" to elect.

Bill Buckley personally remembered

"He was our prophet. Without him there would have been no conservative movement, no nomination of Goldwater in 1964, no election of Reagan in 1980, no winning of a Republican Congress in 1994." So wrote James Humes to the sister of the late William F. Buckley Jr. in a personal note of condolence that he shared with listeners on Backbone Radio, March 2. Humes is the author of books on Reagan, Churchill, Lincoln, and Shakespeare, as well as a speechwriter for five presidents.

The Buckley tribute also included personal reminiscences of him by Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute and by hosts John Andrews and Matt Dunn. Here is the full text of James Humes's handwritten letter:

Dear Trish,

Bill was the leading star in the glittering galaxy of your family. But in the rest of the Conservative world he was our prophet.

Without him there would have been no Conservative "movement," no nomination of Goldwater in 1964, no election of Reagan in 1980, no winning of a Republican Congress in 1994.

He was the Founding Father - the combination of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton in our political philosophy - not to mention Edmund Burke.

His resplendent vocabulary manifested the brilliance of his mind and his rendering on the harpsichord radiated a baroque elegance to an all too arid and godless society.

Like the trans-oceanic yachtsman he was, he charted like a Columbus, new horizons for Conservatives to sail. In the world of intellect and politics he did, in Shakespeare's words, "bestride our narrow world like a colossus."

James Humes March 1, 2008