Lee Edwards, The Heritage Foundation

                                 "Conservatives Can Govern"

The Philadelphia Society

Chicago, April 29, 2000

I speak from the basic proposition that conservatives can govern--although there is some recent evidence to the contrary. Let me offer as proof the remarkable accomplishments of conservatives in three quite different decades.

In 1948, President Truman achieved a historic upset victory by running, not against his opponent Thomas E. Dewey, but against what he called the "do-nothing" 80th Congress.

But what in fact did the 80th Congress with its Republican majority accomplish?

(1) A reduction of 7.5 percent in federal spending (not in the growth of spending, mind you, but in spending itself).

(2) A cut in personal income taxes that reduced rates by 10.5 percent at the top and removed 7.5 million people in the lower brackets from the tax rolls.

(3) Passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which redressed a labor-management imbalance that had existed for over a decade.

(4) Passage of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, basic building blocks in the policy of containment of communism.

And yet Truman convinced the American people in his election campaign that the 80th Republican Congress had done nothing.  Why? Because Republicans led by their presidential candidate Tom Dewey did not bother to rebut Truman's false charges. A concerned Senator Robert A. Taft urged Dewey to hit Truman hard "every time he open[s] his mouth." But a complacent Dewey responded that over the years he had found that when he got into controversies, he lost votes.   

In the summer of 1981, President Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Act, which cut all marginal taxe rates by 25 percent and indexed tax rates to offset the impact of inflation.  Within a year, the stagflation created by President Carter had disappeared and an unparallled period of economic growth began which is still continuing today.

In 1982, President Reagan told the British Parliament at Westminster that "the march of freedom and democracy ... will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."  He was right: just seven years later, after challenging Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, the wall did fall and communism collapsed behind the seemingly indestructible Iron Curtain.

Why was Ronald Reagan so successful? Because he concentrated on doing a few things very well and let others worry about who was going to use the tennis court.  But he focused when it counted, lobbying Congressmen in person and by phone to get their support of the above-mentioned Economic Recovery Act. 

He also succeeded because he was a genius at building and maintaining coalitions. He was also a pretty fair speaker. And he could call on a vital conservative movement for ideas, political muscle, and people to run his administration. 

In 1995 and 1996, the 104th Republican Congress was responsible for the enactment of several historic measures, including a balanced budget, welfare reform, including the elimination of the first welfare program (AFDC) since the New Deal, and the phasing out of farm subsidies.  And yet President Bill Clinton won reelection by running against the Republican Congress.

The parallels between the Gingrich 104th Congress and the Taft 80th Congress are instructive. Both were ruled by hubris. Both were more often ideological than prudential. Both misjudged the political skills of the president they faced. Both took the people for granted.  Having won what they considered to be a mandate, Republicans did not think they had to bother communicating what they were doing, and why, to the public. Ronald Reagan did not make any of these mistakes.

And what of the role of ideas in each of the above three cases?

Senator Taft was not an intellectual, but a professional politician. He had the most brilliant mind in the Senate, incisive, analytical, logical. But he was a reader of legislation, not of books. The one document he knew by heart was the U.S. Constitution, and he would not deviate from it. He was also a prudent politician, in the tradition of Edmund Burke. When Congressman Hartley wanted to eliminate the right to strike from their labor reform bill, Taft blocked the move, arguing that workers had the right to strike and that such a provision went too far and would endanger passage of the bill.

Ronald Reagan was a great reader. There are two conservative books in particular that made an impression on him--F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Whittaker Chambers' Witness. Reagan was also a subscriber to Human Events and National Review and a member of the Conservative Book Club. He was the embodiment of Richard Weaver's aphorism that ideas have consequences.

The trouble with Newt Gingrich is that he read too much-the Federalist, Drucker, Toffler, Marvin Olasky, anything and everything, without making a clear enough distinction as to what was important and what was merely interesting.  In the early 1980s, Gingrich provided the Republican Congressional Committee with so many ideas that they finally set aside three cabinets for his suggestions. Every drawer but one was labeled "Newt Ideas." The drawer at the very bottom of the third cabinet was labeled "Good Newt Ideas."

Yet Gingrich publicly acknowledged the conservative patrimony that he had inherited. He knew that he stood on the shoulders of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and others and their influence is clear in the Contract with America and the other legislative accomplishments of the 104th Congress.

Given the size of Leviathan, it is clear that conservatives must take the long view in their politics. The modern welfare state was not built in a day and it will not be dismantled in a day.  To prevail in politics, you must be prepared to run not a 100-yard dash, but a marathon.

Amid all the inevitable ups and downs, advances and retreats, conservatives can take solace from the fact, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, that in politics, there are no permanent victories or defeats.