Lessons Learned the Hard Way / The Freshmen

...Conservative ideology was on the march...

...The idea behind attaching the two provisions was that Clinton needed to get the disaster relief money out sooner rather than later, and that he would therefore accept these GOP priorities—or perhaps compromise and agree to one of them...

...The explanation conservative ideology offered for what happened in November 1994 was simply that conservative ideology had triumphed...

...A prolonged and deepening split over bona fides between insiders and outsiders might lead to failure: "Let's skip the battle altogether and just get on with the fun of deciding who lost it...

...But why should he have...

...At least that was what ideological conservatives believed...

...It passed, but not without many hard feelings...

...Nor were the exhausted forces of Democratic Party liberalism capable of a serious counterattack...

...For the first two years of the Clinton administration, conservatives stood more or less united in opposition to the president and the Democratic Congress...

...presidents always did, as the Reagan experience demonstrated...

...There were many quarreling elements within its ranks, contending schools of thought and competing personalities, but those arguments never seriously endangered the big project everyone had signed up for, namely, remaking the government according to conservative ideological principles...

...ideological conservatives responded with surprise, frustration, and pain...

...T hose two quotations aptly capture the divide in ideological conservatism today...

...Viewed from the inside, conservative ideology was an irresistible force...

...They were right in the first place but didn't follow through...

...They claim that the politicians did not adequately prepare public opinion for the shutdown, nor do anything to counter the Democrats' well-financed media campaign of demagogic accusations about Republicans' intentions...

...During this period they honed their arguments and broadcast them as far and wide as possible...

...That was progress on all fronts...

...The Republican leadership has not suddenly grown moderate in sensibility or preoccupied with the legislative process—as a mechanism for retaining power—at the expense of outcome...

...Outsiders need reassurance that insiders still believe in the critique of liberal ideology developed back in the days before there were insiders and outsiders...

...Gingrich writes: "We had much too cavalierly underrated the power of the president, even a president who had lost his legislative majority and was in a certain amount of trouble for other reasons...

...Virtually overnight," Killian writes of the freshmen, "they had been transformed into a markedly different group than that which had arrived in Washington one year earlier...

...And to judge by the conservative critique of liberalism, those outsiders had ample reason to be satisfied with the progress of liberalism as a governing ideology...

...The conservative credo will be that this is the best of all possible worlds—not out of any regard for present conditions, but out of the certainty that things will get worse...

...It not only claims to know what to do...

...Michael Oakeshott comes to mind...

...he "had probably done just as44 If conservatism is going to govern, then those two views must be reconciled...

...The GOP freshmen emerge from Killian's reporting as people of principled determination and unwillingness to bend under pressure...

...With virtually all GOP incumbents and challengers signed on, House Republicans spoke with one voice...

...a sense of themselves as agents of change, as people whose job it would be to reverse the fundamentally wrong course of American government...

...he was weak and vacillating, and by advancing a radical health care proposal he had just contributed mightily to a historic defeat for his party...

...Bill Clinton, a figure of questionable legitimacy to begin with, would recede into nothingness and be replaced by a Republican president in 1997, at which time whatever remained of the prescriptive part of the conservative ideological agenda would be signed into law...

...Or it might prove an aberration, a strange moment when conservatism unhappily left the safe harbor of small magazines and think tanks, where the survivors will return after the whole thing crashes on the rocks...

...He had to make a deal...

...Insiders complain that the outsiders are willing to concede only tactical faults, ignoring strategic problems that started when Republicans overreached the mandate they had won in 1994 and underestimated the power of their opponents...

...a self-confident ideology that would step forward, engage, and eventually defeat liberalism...

...It's the theorists versus the practitioners—more to the point, it's a battle between the outsiders and the insiders over what really happened during the government shutdown and since, and what that means for the future of ideological conservatism...

...Another would have prevented any statistical adjustment of the 2000 Census, which Republicans view as an opportunity for Democratic chicanery...

...Their effort encompassed elected officials, the party's national committee, outside activist groups, conservative think tanks and non-profits, and conservative media—especially the new "alternative" media that rejected the liberal culture of the establishment's outlets...

...While some ideological conservatives had complained about the Contract on grounds that it didn't do enough, they ultimately accepted it as the consensus on what to do first...

...In all this, they were of like mind with the new GOP minority leadership that had emerged in the io3rd Congress of 1993-94— especially with Newt Gingrich, who had positioned himself to take over the House Republicans come the retirement of the ineffectual Bob Michel...

...No it wasn't, said the outsiders...

...In effect, the ideological conservatives unilaterally enrolled the majority of the 1994 American electorate as members in good standing of their ambitious political enterprise...

...Until it failed...

...Clinton had no real standing with the public...

...Instead, with a practiced hand from the days of the government shutdown, the president vetoed the legislation and blamed Republicans for standing in the way of disaster relief...

...When the outsiders say that conservatives on Capitol Hill stopped marching, insiders reply that you don't march unprotected into the enemy cannons...

...Those are precisely the standards the outsiders will apply...

...The liberal outsiders had confidence, however, in the intentions of their political leaders...

...The fight will have gone out of it, and what's left will be a conservatism of sensibility —among among whose central tenets will be the smug conviction that those silly ideological conservatives, who thought they were really going to stop this long decline and fall, really got everything wrong...

...an agreement over basic principles...

...Conservative insiders must understand that their comrades don't have fifty years of success to look back on and draw confidence from—their history is only four years old, and much of the time has been full of frustration...

...In sum, they blame ideological exuberance of the kind they once acted on—the kind still promoted by the outsiders...

...What the freshmen and these leaders had in common, and what in turn connected them with myriad outsiders who felt they had a personal stake in the 1994 elections, was ideology...

...This ideology hardly came out of nowhere in 1994 (although that's how it looked to most liberals, who simply hadn't paid much attention to conservatives up until then...

...Forty years of Democratic control of the House would now be succeeded by a like period of Republican control...

...If that happens, conservatism in this country will become something very different from its current battered, but still vibrant, incarnation...

...A great president can accomplish much with the legislature controlled by his opponents, but not what would have been possible with his own party in charge...

...Having nationalized the elections as a referendum on conservative ideology, they eagerly claimed a mandate and set their sights on implementing it...

...Gingrich quickly pulled44 A newfound respect for the limits of politics is not the same as a lurch to the left...

...Perhaps ideological conservatism — forward-looking, reform-minded, optimistic about what happens when people are freer—will not be able to govern after all...

...But mostly, the divide between the theorists and the political practitioners holds true, and their conflict continues to rip at the heart of American conservatism...

...The insiders—chiefly the GOP politicians on Capitol Hill and professional Republicans at the national committee, including an army of consultants, pollsters, and camp followers—blame the problems on their own initial overreaching...

...This view, it seems to me, is off the mark...

...It granted Clinton more spending than he had even asked for as well as Big Government policy changes in such areas as health care —all in exchange for phony entitlement reform and a puny tax cut that only made the revenue code more complicated...

...Lindsey Graham, now a sophomore, "When it got tough, Newt cut and ran....After leading us up the hill, he went down the other side without us...

...The Freshmen, by veteran Capitol Hill reporter Linda Killian, offers the view from the legislative trenches, a portrait of the new members elected in 1994 and their triumphs and frustrations along the way to 1996...

...But as Killian notes, it wasn't just the size of the class that made it meaningful to speak of this group in shorthand as "the freshmen...

...Some say the problem was not that Clinton won in the opinion polls over shutting down the government, but that the Republicans suffered a failure of nerve: They reopened the government at the very moment when public support for the president was starting to erode...

...Oit The American Spectator • June 19 9 8 71...

...The GOP once again took a beating in opinion polls...

...This view echoes the argument that since George Bush had broken his tax pledge, conservatives would be better off for his loss in 1992...

...The recent flowering of ideological conservatism in American politics —a new kind of conservatism that sees the country's best days in the future, provided that we wrest national politics and policy from sixty years of statism—might be the birth of a new era, potentially as important as the preceding New Deal era of ideological liberalism...

...They were worn out and tired, and they were sick of fighting and losing...

...By turning over the House and Senate to Republicans in November 1994— responding to a specific invitation, complete with a detailed program of what would follow—voters bought not just particular candidates but a whole package...

...77 much [as Gingrich] to get them elected," they believed...

...Political reality does not so readily bend to force of will, they say...

...One would have precluded another government shutdown by providing an automatic government funding mechanism...

...Losing is not only bad politics, it's had for conservatism, because it sets back the prospect of moving the government in a conservative direction...

...Gingrich himself knew that this was no mere legislative agenda he was pursuing: "I ...was essentially a political leader of a grassroots movement seeking to do nothing less than reshape the federal government along with the political culture of the nation...

...Any future account of this historic period is going to draw heavily on these two books...

...17 the plug, ordering a vote on the relief money without the riders—the clean legislation Clinton wanted...

...Nor did conservative ideology develop wholly without reference to the practical problems of wielding power...

...Two new books offer vastly different but complementary perspectives on the first years of this political experiment...

...it was a sellout...

...Almost four years later, with the GOP still in power on Capitol Hill and that same president coasting at his highest approval ratings ever, many ideological conservatives deem the result a disaster—and blame it on the failure of elected officials to fight for their principles...

...Insiders will find a more receptive audience for complaints about the difficulties of political reality if there are no suspicions on these lines...

...His achievements, in their view, were epic, and the defects of his administration, in their view, can be traced to a Democrat-controlled House and to the apostasy of some of his appointees...

...But as Linda Killian quotes Rep...

...But in the runup to the election, Gingrich and Armey marginalized other voices within the GOP through the Contract with America, their legislative program for the first loo days of a Republican 1o4th Congress...

...Linda Killian Westview /463 pages / $28 REVIEWED BY Tod Lindberg he great national political story of T the century's closing decades is the collision of conservative ideology and political reality—that is, what happens when conservatism tries to govern...

...Ever since then, in the outsiders' view, the politicians have been shell-shocked, afraid of their own shadows—and of the shadow of Bill Clinton above all...

...They had come of age during the formative years of a new, forward-looking conservatism—an ideology that promised to lead conservatives out of the political wilderness to which they had been relegated during decades of liberal advance...

...These men and women shared a certain view of the world...

...Most Republican officeholders, on the other hand, don't consider themselves any less conservative now than in the exuberance of 1995...

...TOD LINDBERG is editorial page editor of the Washington Times...

...They were "history...

...Some of those on the inside — especially among the freshman class 011994—remain 70 Jun e 1998 The American Spectator outsiders in spirit...

...A newfound respect for the limits of politics is not the same as a lurch to the left...

...There were seventy-three new Republican members of the House elected in 1994, a hugeincoming class by any reckoning...

...The 1997 balanced budget deal GOP congressional leaders made with President Clinton was a dramatic case in point...

...With hindsight, principled determination is easy to portray as pigheaded vainglory...

...they claim incremental success in the face of extraordinary opposition and ask for patience...

...And how few, from the triumphant first days of the GOP Congress to the ignominious GOP surrender after the second government shutdown, were the conservative ideologues inside or outside the Congress who saw things right...

...Hence the decision to include the two riders in the unrealistic expectation that Clinton would have to go along...

...Their principal commitment now is to survival, the preservation of the Republican majority, whether or not that majority can implement the conservative ideological agenda...

...Moreover, on matters of the budget Congress had the upper hand —as the Democrats had proved by forcing Reagan to accept the spending, and consequent deficits, which he abhorred...

...The outsiders—the bulk of the Washington activist community off Capitol Hill, including the think-tank types, most (though not all) nationally prominent conservative media voices, and most of Rush Limbaugh's (and others') listeners—mainly blame the practitioners...

...Lessons Learned the Hard Way is the view from the top, House Speaker Newt Gingrich's memoir of his progress to date as the leading figure of ascendant Republicanism—an astonishingly honest and insightful account of his mistakes in that role...

...This was the collision of ideology and political reality —the the moment of truth when it became apparent that conservatism didn't have all the answers it needed to transform ideas into action...

...Some trace its development back to the early days of National Review, or to the Goldwater campaign of 1964, through the birth of neoconservatism in the 1970's, and so on in a million pamphlets, position papers, research reports, and magazine articles...

...G ingrich's new book is in large measure a confession of precisely this error: "We mistook [our own activists'] enthusiasm for the views of the American public...

...It will become insular, rueful, dour, resigned to permanent political irrelevance...

...As Gingrich recalls the source of the problem: "however weary and bruised and gun-shy some of its House members had become, [the GOP] would nevertheless continue to be dominated by those of us who still believe unconditionally in the power of will...

...Ronald Reagan was nothing if not ideological, and is still revered by conservative true believers...

...Clinton would get blamed for the shutdown...

...No, in fact, he didn't...

...it claims to have an explanation for its own successes and failures, and for those of its enemies...

...Here was a balanced budget by 2002 that cut taxes and included many reforms, in such areas as Medicare, that Democrats had previously derided as cruel...

...The "we" to which Gingrich refers in that statement should properly be understood as the entire conservative ideological community...

...The outsider-insider split has led to legislative trouble as well, as in the Republicans' biggest fiasco of 1997, the botched GOP disaster relief bill...

...To be sure, there were other kinds of Republicans elected to Congress in 1994: old bulls more interested in the craft of legislation than its content, some of whom became committee chairmen...

...The first months of 1995 proceeded on the assumption that Clinton, having notoriously insisted at a news conference that he was still relevant, was in fact anything but...

...The forward march of conservative ideology, its implementation as a governing philosophy, wasn't irresistible after all...

...Yet conservative political leaders must get used to being judged, and found wanting, by standards they consider unreasonable...

...Accordingly, it was more or less at this point that ideological conservatism divided into two camps that remain edgily suspicious, if not outright hostile, to each other even now...

...The American Spectator June 1998 69 Gingrich thought Clinton would have to make a deal on the budget in the face of pressure from the shutdown...

...They speak out against Republicans losing their conservative moorings and have little patience for the new incrementalist sensibility of GOP leaders...

...Once it turned out that Clinton could resist and win by doing so,44 The forward march of conservative ideology wasn't irresistible after all...

...Whether or not this group or collection of groups constituted a genuine "conservative movement" in the mass sense, from Newt Gingrich to the freshman Republicans to the Washington activists to the supporters and subscribers and listeners throughout the country, its members truly felt connected to a common project, and their happiest day was November 8, 1994, when they believed their ideas would at last become the law of the land...

...and with Dick Armey, then the chairman of the House Republican Conference...

...most of the GOP leadership voted against it...

...instead, you try to win one little piece of strategic ground at a time—sometimes at the expense of less important ground conceded to your opponent...

...the ideal is always going to be used to fault what's real...

...Republicans first sent the White House the legislation, whose primary purpose was to get aid to flood victims in the Northern Plains, with two riders dear to the GOP...

...Some on the outside think they see the significance of this: What we have now is merely a center-right Congress, not an ideologically conservative one, and our best chance for the latter may be if the current crowd gets the heave-ho...

...and the group of self-described "moderates" who 68 June 19 9 8 The American Spectator regarded the ideological conservatives with distaste...

...You can't make the president sign the legislation, and if he vetoes it, unless you have enough votes to override him (as Republicans don't), you lose...

...The answer has been unfolding since the election in November 1994 of a Republican Congress that, notwithstanding a Democrat in the White House, promised a "Revolution" in Washington...

...Right now, there are plenty...

...They bungled, and as a result, they lost...

...The insiders popped the champagne corks, claiming that at last they had won the victory Bill Clinton had temporarily denied them...

...If conservatism is going to govern—if it is to be not merely a theoretical exercise but a political program that changes how things get done —then those two views must be reconciled...

...T he main lines of the fight are clear...

...Nothing would make them stop or even hesitate in their task...

...How wrong that was...

...Not for nothing, as Killian notes, did the 1994 freshmen name Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their class...

...While liberal ideology reigned supreme, its tangible results nevertheless ebbed and flowed, and those on the outside were sometimes frustrated by the lack of progress...

...Like any ideology, conservatism has both a descriptive and prescriptive component...