The Cheney Phase

In his debut column, Ross Douthat laments that Dick Cheney didn’t throw his hat into the 2008 ring, because a Cheney candidacy would have left conservative reformers a stronger hand today:

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation.

“Real conservatism,” in this narrative, means a particular strain of right-wingery: >a conservatism of supply-side economics and stress positions, uninterested in social policy and dismissive of libertarian qualms about the national-security state. And Dick Cheney happens to be its diamond-hard distillation. The former vice-president kept his distance from the Bush administration’s attempts at domestic reform, and he had little time for the idealistic, religiously infused side of his boss’s policy agenda. He was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

I think this is a clever thought experiment, but I doubt that it’s literally true. I think the reality is that governing necessarily involves compromises. But fans don’t like to see the politicians they support compromising. However, as long as the politicians in question are winning it all seems forgivable and you focus on the aspects of the agenda that you support. But when a strategy that entails some compromise leads you to defeat, you necessarily see a backlash from the base which insists that greater purity could have carried the day. I’m fairly certain this impulse would have existed no matter who the Republican standard-bearer had been in 2008.

A further observation would be that while I don’t cherish the thought of conservative purism, one complicating factor for the reform camp is that it’s not true that moderation is always the path to political victory. The Democratic Party’s basic 2008 positioning was considerably to the left of its 2004 positioning on most issues—foreign policy, health care, climate change, civil liberties, you name it—but times had changed and it worked. Meanwhile, though “the base” is always very important in primary elections, the specific electoral system in use in GOP presidential primaries makes it very possible for a candidate who’s not-so-popular with the base to win the nomination.

The noteworthy thing about 2008 is that even though two mavericky candidates (McCain and Huckabee) did well, as did one guy with a moderate record (Mitt Romney), the three of them together came up with about zero interesting, innovative, or sound policy ideas. I think this paucity of real ideas—as opposed to ideas about the need for ideas—is, rather than historical bad luck in not having a Cheney ’08 campaign to point to as a cautionary tale—the bigger problem for reform conservatism.