Sunday, May 4, 2008

A solid principle for conservatives to ponder

It came from a recent Rich Lowry column on John McCain's health care proposals:

"McCain's proposal is just the start of what has to be a broader conservative reformation. The sole Republican response to the public's economic anxieties can't be trying to talk the public out of them."

Just so. I don't know that McCain's health care prescription is exactly the right way for conservatives to go. But the important thing is that we try to go somewhere, and deal with these issues that, like it or not, are on the public's mind (such as health care). Whittaker Chambers told William F. Buckley Jr., some 50 years ago, in the wake of a losing Republican campaign in the 1958 midterm elections, that what had done in the GOP, and conservatism in general, that year was their failure to offer real ideas and proposals (you can read about this and the entire Chambers/Buckley relationship in the still-relevant and moving book ODYSSEY OF A FRIEND, a compendium of letters written by Chambers to Buckley) to the electorate--proposals that addressed the issues. If Republicans and conservatives didn't offer something of substance, Chambers warned, why, someone else would. It was not enough to simply say "no." Going in that direction only led to irrelevancy. That point remains as true today as it was then.