Leonard Boasberg: Advice to conservatives

Leonard Boasberg  —  12/01/2008 5:40 am

The conservative mantra, in the wake of Barack Obama's overwhelming victory, is, as Republican House leader John Boehner put it, "America is still a center-right country." As Bill Kristol put it, "It is still a center-right country." As Brent Bozell put it, "This country remains every bit as center-right as it has for a generation."

Bozell, in an interview on Fox News, also called Obama "a liberal, left-wing Democrat" who "won as a conservative," adding: "That means Barack Obama does not have the mandate to enact the progressive agenda he wants to enact."

If a 365-173 electoral college majority doesn't constitute a mandate, what would?

"Some Democrats and pundits may want to read (Nov. 4's) results as a repudiation of conservatism," Boehner wrote in a Washington Post column. "I don't see it that way."

What was it, then? According to some conservatives, it was a repudiation of George W. Bush, who took the 2000 election by running as a "compassionate conservative" and ended up spending more money than all his predecessors combined.

Obama's election, writes the Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last, "seems less an endorsement of his political beliefs -- whatever they are" (haven't you been listening, Mr. Last?) -- "than a rejection, root and branch, of President Bush."

Blame Sarah Palin. She turned out to be smart, sassy, and so uninformed and intellectually shallow as to boggle the mind, and so far to the right as to be falling off the edge (where she could see Russia).

Blame John McCain. He selected the unknown and unknowing Sarah Palin, whose executive experience amounted to a year and half in the Alaska governor's office and mayor of a town of 8,000 or so citizens. And who ran an erratic, unfocused and ultimately dishonorable and farcical campaign centering on "palling around with terrorists" and Joe the Plumber. And who could never escape the Bush albatross.

Blame the media. "The media," according to Last, "worked tirelessly against" McCain.

Blame bad luck. Blame the economic meltdown, but don't blame the conservative policies of trickle-down economics and deregulation that led to the economic meltdown.

Blaming someone or something means never having to say you've been wrong. It means keeping the conservative faith that George W. Bush betrayed. It means modifying policies, if necessary, but only in strict accordance with conservative principles.

I have a suggestion to my Republican friends: Wise up. Americans are not conservative, they are not liberal, they are not center-right, they are not center-left. They are all these things and none. They are mostly non-ideological, and above all they are pragmatic.

They don't care what you call it so long as it works. When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked how he would explain the Tennessee Valley Authority to people, he said, "I'll tell them it's neither fish nor fowl, but whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the Tennessee Valley."

If Republicans go on believing that the American people are really, really conservative, if they insist on ideological purity or demand that all their policies must be fitted to a Procrustes bed of conservative dogma, they are destined to a long sojourn in the political desert.

Leonard Boasberg, a commentator and reviewer, is a former member of the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board.

Leonard Boasberg  —  12/01/2008 5:40 am