Genuine “Straight Talk” & Goldwater II
Everybody’s buzzing about Fred Thompson’s interview with David Broder in today’s WaPo. So why not join in?
If there’s anything noteworthy about FDT’s comments, it is that he appears to be ready to not just step off his “front porch” but full-bore lunge:
But he says he thinks the public is looking for a different kind of leadership. “I think a president could go to the American people and say, ‘Here’s what we need to be doing. And I’m willing to go halfway. Now you have to make them [the opposition] go halfway.’ ”
Pardon the interruption, but how does “meeting halfway” translate to “bold leadership”? Unless his “half” dwarfs the entire pie.
Yes, that is naked foreshadowing….
The approach Thompson says he’s contemplating is one that will step on many sensitive political toes. When he says “we’re getting a free ride” fighting a necessary war in Iraq with an undersized military establishment, “wearing out our people and equipment,” it sounds like a criticism of the President and the Pentagon.
Well, that’s because it is criticism of the President and Pentagon. “Peace dividends” are easy to dole out and difficult to pull back, and the Bush Administration has been attempting to fight a global conflict with the threadbare military Bill Clinton spend the better part of a decade gutting. With the number of al Qaeda fronts proliferating, and Iran and Syria still waiting to be dealt with, Fred isn’t wrong to point out that something has to give.
When he says he would have opposed adding the prescription drug benefit to Medicare, “a $17 trillion add-on to a program that’s going bankrupt,” he is fighting the bipartisan judgment of the last Congress.
In other words, he’s no “compassionate conservative.” Or, rather, he sees nothing “compassionate” about a future depression brought about by an entitlements-induced economic collapse that the past GOP Congress was too gutless to take on and the current Donk one is determined to hasten.
When he says the FBI is perhaps incapable of morphing itself into the smart domestic security agency the country needs, he is attacking another sacred cow…
Well, the FBI isn’t a “domestic security agency”. We don’t really have any equivalent to the British MI6. Any attempt to create one would drive civil libertarians insane and have conservatives dreading yet another adversarial, leak-happy intelligence bureaucracy buried smack in the middle of the already unwieldy Homeland Security Department.
His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending “unsustainable” and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government’s fiscal ledger — spending and revenue — the next generation will suffer.
“Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it,” Thompson said. “So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges.”
We “tinker around the edges” because our system is designed that way. The Founders did not intend for drastic ideological swings to be easy to pull off because, they reasoned, that would be more likely to destabilize the system itself.
Such drastic changes take time to build toward and are usually attained incrementally. It took a full-scale Civil War to end slavery, and another century thereafter to expunge the subsequent Apartheid. It took the economic collapse of the 1930s to introduce socialism into an American body politic whose Constitution did not allow for it; it’s taken the seventy-plus years since for the fiscal rot to “progress” to borderline crisis level, thus squaring the circle.
Yet a secular prophet coming along in the 1850s or 1920s proposing the solutions that were eventually enacted in the respective succeeding decades would have been dismissed as a crank, an alarmist, and/or a heretic.
You can see where I’m going with this, I trust. It’s human nature to want to duck problems, the bigger and closer the problem the stronger the urge to duck it. Those who try to force us to confront them usually enjoy (or endure) inverse levels of popularity - until events vindicate them.
Ready Freddie appears to understand this:
Thompson readily concedes that he does not know “where all those chips are going to fall” when he starts challenging members of various interest groups to look beyond their individual agendas and weigh the sacrifices that could ensure a better future for their children.
But these issues — national security and the fiscal crisis of an aging society with runaway heath-care costs — “are worth a portion of a man’s life. If I can’t get elected talking that way, I probably don’t deserve to be elected.”
It sounds to me like he doesn’t expect to win, and indeed, that winning isn’t the point of his campaign. He sounds intent upon being a genuine philosopher-candidate whose mission is to say what candidates concerned with actually winning don’t dare to utter. He intends to be what John McCain only pretended to be in 2000, the perveyor of “straight talk” without the conceited self-aggrandizement and lousy disposition. Or perhaps another Barry Goldwater making a kamikaze run in a year in which no Republican can win in order to, by that political self-sacrifice, reinvigorate and inspire the conservative movement to - perhaps - mobilize the country to make the drastic changes in terms of dismantling the entitlements state and transforming it into something akin to George Bush’s “ownership society” that alone can avert fiscal and economic Armageddon.
Which, of course, raising taxes will only make worse. But I’m assuming Fred already knows that. Just as he knows that such a platform, with anything like the kind of policy prescriptions that can address them, will make him as radioactive to the Left - and more than a few RINOs - as Bush, Cheney, Rove, Newt, and Nixon all rolled into one.
But it would make his belated entrance into the race akin to a Michael Moore cannonball off the ten meter platform. It may recapture the momentum he let dissipate over the past couple of months. And it might just turn the base on enough to sweep him past Rudy and Romney.
I’ve said that if the GOP candidate goes down in flames next November, better to do so with all guns blazing. If FDT was leveling with David Broder, Republican primary voters could do a lot worse than giving Arthur Branch an electoral retainer.
