The Conservative Movement Dead?

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 4

WILLIAM KRISTOL, the conservative leader who is the editor and publisher of the prestigious Weekly Standard, on the Wednesday after the New Hampshire vote pronounced the conservative movement dead. He did the autopsy by adding up the percentages achieved by the three "movement conservatives" in the primary. They were, of course, Steve Forbes, who got 13 percent of the vote, Alan Keyes, who got 6 percent, and Gary Bauer, who struck out with 1 percent. Add that up and, as Mr. Kristol points out, you have 20 percent of the whole. "The conservative movement," he wrote in the Washington Post, "which accomplished great things over the past quarter-century, is finished."

The statement, given its provenance, deserves respectful attention. But an analysis of it should begin with the examination of the data at hand, as assembled in New Hampshire.

Gary Bauer was fading into insignificance as voters acknowledged that his campaign was educational in character. Much the same is correctly said about Alan Keyes. Keyes's showing was something of a personal tribute. He had no money to spend, only his voice, manner, and eloquence to retail. And at the end of the campaign he had become a familiar figure only because he participated in all the debates and gleefully gave interviews to anyone who would listen. But no movement would ever develop around a black radical who treats anybody who believes in the right to abort a fetus as a criminal, pure and simple. Steve Forbes's showing was miserable in the context of his claims for himself and his candidacy. Right through to the final moments of the primary he was saying that the voters would hear his call to principled reforms and elect him president. Up to a point, confidence of that kind is understandable. For the rest of democratic time, the winner of presidential nominating campaigns will be introduced to the convention that nominated him as "the next president of the United States."

In the rhetoric of celebration, that kind of thing is to be expected. But when used as methodically as it was used by Steve Forbes, the impression he gave was of serious hallucination. Asked whether he and candidate George W. Bush would work together in the days ahead, he found himself saying, two days before the vote, that he was certain there would be room in his administration for George W. Bush. His refusal to use the subjunctive mood ("If I am elected, I would ..."), clinging to the historical, declamatory tense ("When I am elected, I will ..."), contributed to a loss of patience by voters who, however attracted they may have been by the platform of Mr. Forbes, began to wonder about the vision of its advocate spokesman. There are those who damage a cause by their espousal of it. If you can't play the piano (I've learned), you should stop performing. There is plenty Mr. Forbes can do to advance his cause without talking about who he will appoint to what position when he achieves the White House.

The examination does not by itself invalidate Kristol's summary judgment. If Bauer and Keyes had bowed out in favor of Forbes, and if Forbes had developed the histrionic powers of Ronald Reagan, he probably would still have lost out to McCain and Bush. But the perspective invoked by Kristol would be sharper.

And we saw, the very first day after Bush was humiliated, the direction he chose to take. In a single appearance in South Carolina he seven times, using the word, declared himself a conservative. And the challenger, John McCain, will predictably woo the conservative vote, notwithstanding Kristol's assumption that it is old and moribund. Returning one night from a television studio, one year before he became president, Richard Nixon said to me, "I discovered in 1962 that you can't win with just the conservative vote. But you can't win without it."

It will almost certainly prove, in the weeks ahead, that the conservative legions are perhaps inattentive, but not inert. The failure of both Bush and McCain is to advance one position on which they are willing to stand or fall, surely the best being, in this day, the need to repeal the misinterpretation of the First Amendment, to permit parents to send their children to schools they want to patronize. The easy way out is to say that reform lies in the hands of the Supreme Court. The arresting alternative is to say that the Supreme Court needs sophisticated instruction. Many hopefully predict that, in such circumstances, the revival Mr. Kristol despairs of, would be there--joy to the world!

--UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE