One of the last panel sessions was a discussion of the future of conservatism. Since our drubbing on November 4th, quite a few people have come to the fore to offer their assessment of what needs to be done to advance conservatism in the future. Of course, these “Wizards of Smart” (as Rush calls them) include people with questionable motives, and even dumber proposals. Kathleen Parker and Heather MacDonald are today calling the religious base of social conservatives the root of our problem. We can’t ever win again until we drive them out of the party (One pictures an army of torch and pitchfork bearing Wall Street brokers in 3 piece suits chasing families of bible carrying Baptists with 8 buck-toothed children out of Wal-Mart and into the wilderness).

Fortunately, no one on this panel was recommending the ostracism of 20 million voters as a prescription for electoral victory :rolls eyes:. Instead we had a good cross section of people with different views of the problem, offering assessments of what works and what doesn’t.

Ramesh Ponnuru opened the discussion talking about the actual make up of the electorate, regarding core political philosophy. He pointed out that polls show that voters are not leaning more toward the left, but actually more to the right. The claim that America is now a center-left country, as is made by the DKOS folks, is actually a fallacy. This statement is backed up by polling data that Pat Toomey mentioned. Club for Growth conducted this poll in 12 swing districts. The link above will take you to the actual poll results (it was a little hard to find on the CFG web site). Here is an example of the poll results,

Q: All things being equal, which type of candidate for Congress would you be more likely to vote for? A candidate who wants to reduce overall federal spending, even if that includes cutting some money that would come to your district. Or a candidate who is willing to increase overall spending on federal programs and grow the federal budget, in order to get more spending and projects for your district: Cut spending: 66.3%, Bring projects: 23.4%, DK/Refused: 10.4%

Note that the respondents in this poll preferred Obama to McCain by 48 to 44.

Ramesh continued by offering that conservatism is about innovation. We use our core principles to find and apply solutions to current problems. This echoed the point Mitt Romney made earlier in the week that “there are no problems, that conservatism can’t offer a solution for.”

Ken Blackwell offered analysis of why it is so hard to win elections, given that our philosophies are correct,

People who are served by bureaucracies become addicted to them. It is easier to run on a platform of increasing their size, than it is on reforming them. This political reality makes the implementation of conservative policy proposals difficult.

Fred Thompson offered a very sobering analysis of the importance of the judiciary, and how much damage the election of Obama will cause. It was a very deep and thoughtful analysis (as you would expect from Fred), which did not cheer anyone up in the room. We are going to be kicking ourselves over this election for a very long time. Ed Whelan was asked whether the Senate Republicans can be effective in blocking Obama’s judicial appointments. He was not optimistic at all,

Getting Republican Senators to filibuster judicial nominees is a bridge too far. Just getting them to fight, make a case against, and vote against a nominee will be an improvement.

One of the true bright spots of the panel was Darcy Olsen of the Goldwater Institute which is a state level conservative policy institute. She made the point that many of the brightest spots for conservatism occurred at the state level in 2008, such as Prop 8 in California and Amendment 2 in Florida. She believes that one of the best things we can do going forward is to strengthen the state level organizations, and to push policy and reforms through state level ballot initiatives. This activity will allow for blunting of the inevitable federal overreach of the Obama administration. She offered an excellent example of using a state constitutional amendment to thwart the federal attempts to implement “card check”.

We have a 21 word amendment that can be used in all state constitutions. It requires the use of secret ballots in all Arizona elections, whether they are public or private.

While looking at their website, I found other gems of ideas in a document they have published, called “100 ideas for 100 days”. It includes the following:

27 - Amend the Arizona Constitution to prohibit preferential treatment on the basis of race, color, national origin, or ethnicity in government contracts, employment, and education.

28 - Amend the Arizona Constitution to prohibit any law limiting or penalizing the right of individuals to choose private health care systems or insurance.

The work that Darcy is doing in Arizona was the biggest eye opener for me on the cruise. I strongly believe that as RedState works to strengthen state and local organizations, working to tie those efforts to state conservative policy organizations will be critical.

Jonah Goldberg offered a lengthy and typically cogent assessment of the political landscape that we are playing in. He offered that in 2004, when Howard Dean took over as DNC chair, many people on our side celebrated. The Democrats were shifting leftward, and abandoning the center,

This was the wrong reaction, and turned out to be disastrous for conservatism. As the left abandoned the center, the temptation for Republicans was to try and claim the center as our own. But this strategy is flawed, and proved to be our undoing in 2008. We have to move the core philosophy of the center rightward toward us, not compromise our principles to try and gain their votes.

This was echoed by Ramesh in a conversation I had with him. He believes that the best electoral strategy is to aim for a 51% share of the electorate, so as to limit the temptation to jettison our values in an attempt to pander to persuadable voters. Trying to reach 60% landslides is an unreasonable goal, and look at how many core principles Obama had to compromise in order to assemble the 53% of the vote he received. You saw the same effect in the McCain campaign, where they became a pandering policy machine in the last few days (e.g. federal purchase of mortgages in order to establish new terms), throwing out daily proposals to try and attract a few more persuadable votes.

Finally, we had a presentation by Kate O’Beirne to explain her new role with the National Review Institute. They plan to act as a policy clearinghouse, where they will bring together all of the good conservative ideas developed at places like Heritage and Cato. They will provide a central source for policy proposals, as they are needed by congressional leadership, candidates and advocacy groups.

Return to Part 7.

In Part 9, I cover some interesting errata and offer final thoughts.