Kristol ball: William Kristol looks at the future of the GOP.

Meyerson, Adam

William Bennett once commented on the irony that many of the most effective conservative politicians these days are former academics. "Conservatives who come from universities have learned to cope with ideological hostility," Mr. Bennett said. "It isn't such a big shock to meet a group of hostile reporters or hostile members of Congress after you have been dealing with faculty colleagues."

It is remarkable how many of the GOP's most influential leaders used to be professors. Newt Gingrich, the next leader of Republicans in the House, taught history. Senator Phil Gramm and Representative Dick Armey were economics professors. Mr. Bennett is an erstwhile philosophy teacher.

William Kristol, a former teacher at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is universally regarded as one of the most capable and brilliant political strategists in conservatism. Chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, and previously to Mr. Bennett at the Department of Education, Mr. Kristol last year directed the Bradley Project on the 90s. He is now chairman of a new organization, the Project for the Republican Future, whose goals are to challenge the premises and purposes of liberalism, and to serve as a "strategic nerve center for a network of thinkers, activists, and organizations committed to a coherent agenda of conservative reform."

In November 1993, Mr. Kristol talked about Clintonism and its vulnerabilities, and the future of the Republican party in an interview with Policy Review editor Adam Meyerson.

Policy Review: The congressional elections of 1994 will probably be the most important elections in this country since the Reagen landslide of 1980. How many seats in the Senate and House should Republicans aim at picking up? What are the most important defining issues for Republican congressional candidates to run on?

Kristol: Republicans should aim at picking up a majority in both the House and the Senate. There is no point in setting one's sights any lower. The great opportunity for Republicans will be to run against Clintonism, and to mount a whole-hearted challenge to contemporary liberalism. Running against the Clinton health program will obviously be very important, because it is the grandest and most striking embodiment of contemporary liberalism. But we need to challenge the premises and presumptions of today's liberalism across the board.

This means making the case for limited government, and then explaining as well that limited government is more energetic and more effective government. We have to say there are certain things we expect government to do, such as making the streets safe and national defense. And there are certain areas where government is ineffectual or shouldn't be involved in the first place. We have to show how a conservative agenda in areas such as education and health care will address the problems that people are concerned about - without increasing, and in many cases actually reducing, the scope of government.

P.R.: Does George Bush bear primary responsibility for the disappointing performance of GOP congressional candidates in 1992? Or has there been a deeper problem in the party, reflected in the GOP's loss of the Senate in 1986, and the failure of Republicans to win many open House seats during the Reagan presidency? What must Republicans do better in 1994 and 1996 if they are to win control of the Congress?

Kristol: George Bush has to bear some responsibility for the disappointments of 1992. His departure from Reaganomics was very damaging. But Republicans were hurt as well by the absence of an aggressive conservative reform agenda on a broad range of domestic issues such as health care, crime, and education. This wasn't just George Bush's fault. The party as a whole didn't do as much work as it should have done in some of those areas.

P.R.: Many Democrats as well as Republicans are sharply criticizing President Clinton over his performance as commander-in-chief, arguably the most important responsibility of the presidency. Do you think foreign policy will re-emerge as an important election issue in the 1994 congressional races and the 1996 presidential race? If so, how should Republicans best be framing the foreign policy debate?

Kristol: Ideological and partisan battle lines in foreign policy aren't as clear as they used to be, so I'm not sure Republican Senate candidates will be able to run as hawks or doves, as isolationists or interventionists. People in both parties seem to be all over the lot on these issues. But I do think that Clinton's incompetence in foreign policy will hurt the administration's general approval rating, and that this in turn will hurt the Democrats generally in 1994. In 1996, when there's a presidential election, the issue could bite more deeply, and Democrats could be hurt very badly if the world looks dangerous and Clinton still looks so feckless. Foreign policy would then come back as a major voting issue in the presidential race and could spill over into congressional elections.

P.R.: Let's talk about health care some more. Why have Republicans been so slow in responding to President Clinton's health care plan? Why is it so important for this plan to be defeated? How can Republicans - and conservative Democrats for that matter-turn this issue to electoral advantage?

Kristol: The health care plan is, as Clinton himself has said, the centerpiece of his presidency and the centerpiece of contemporary liberalism's domestic agenda. It is important that it be defeated not only because it would be bad for health care in this country, but because it could be the key to unraveling Clintonism, and thereby laying the groundwork for a counter-offensive on behalf of the conservative reform agenda. We have the opportunity to turn the health care debate into liberalism's Afghanistan - the over-reaching that exposes liberalism's weaknesses and causes its collapse.

Clinton's health care plan embodies many of the characteristics of contemporary liberalism - the amazing faith in government, the distrust not just of market forces but of normal people making decisions about their lives, the arrogance of taking over 14 percent of the economy and trying to shape it from Washington. The whole corporatist structure of "alliances" and price controls is hostile not only to free markets and to good health care, but to die very character of a free society.

Republicans have been too timid and defensive so far in their reaction to Clinton's plan. The goal over the next several months should not be simply to wound the proposal, to nitpick the numbers or criticize some of the most onerous provisions, but to defeat the Clinton plan root and branch. This is important on the merits. It is also crucial as a matter of political strategy.

Mr. Clinton's health care proposal is a huge political opportunity for Republicans and conservatives. It gives us a chance to delegitimize contemporary liberalism in a way that normal policy debates don't. That is why the organization I am involved with, the Project for the Republican Future, is going to make defeat of the Clinton health care plan one of our very top priorities. We want to use the health care debate as a model for routing contemporary liberalism and advancing an aggressive conservative activist agenda.

P.R.: Mike Joyce of the Bradley Foundation has been urging conservatives to embrace the "New Citizenship" as a unifying principle for the great political and cultural debates of the 1990s. What are some of the most important examples of the "New Citizenship" that are already working well? What are some of the most promising opportunities to get citizens more involved in rebuilding their schools, neighborhoods and communities?

Kristol: Mike coined the term the "new citizenship" to distinguish it from the kind of citizenship encouraged by contemporary liberalism - the idea that citizens should vote every year or two, but otherwise should play virtually no role in governing themselves. Rather, they should be treated as clients or dependents of government. This modern conception of citizenship is in sharp contrast to the expectations of our Founding Fathers for a vigorous, self-governing citizenry.

The heart of the "new citizenship" is that citizens should take charge of their own lives and not be intimidated by the so-called "experts" - the government bureaucrats, social welfare providers, therapists, and their friends in the media, who are trying to radically limit the ability of families and individuals to control their own destiny. School choice is at the center of the new citizenship agenda because education is so important to families, and because there has been such a massive transfer of power from the family to a distant bureaucracy. This is why the educational establishment resists school choice so vehemently. The education establishment may claim to think choice is bad educational policy, but, what they really fear isn't that parental choice will fail; they fear that it will succeed. Its success - of which there's already evidence - strikes at the heart of the education establishment's power and its claim to rule.

The new citizenship looks to strengthening civil society against government. Liberals think that being a citizen is voting for your elected official, who in turn should defer to bureaucrats and "experts." We think being a citizen is participating actively in shaping the civil society in which we live.

The fight over the Boy Scouts is indicative: The Left despises and is trying to destroy the Boy Scouts not simply because it dislikes particular provisions in the Boy Scout oath. What the Left really hates is that this is a private civic organization of parents and community leaders who band together to teach and pursue common objectives. Conservatives want to liberate civil society from the therapeutic welfare state, and encourage groups like the Boy Scouts to flourish.

P.R.: School choice is a hot-button issue for conservative activists, but, as the California initiative this year shows, it hasn't yet won at the ballot box - or in state legislatures. Is this an idea whose time will come soon? Or are conservatives perhaps putting too much emphasis on politics in pushing for greater access to private education?

Kristol: The advocates of school choice were outspent by $15 million in California, and it is almost impossible to win in those circumstances. But school choice's time is coming, and we have learned some important lessons from the results in California. The main one is that it is hard to ask citizens to scrap the entire education system they're used to, and put their faith in something that so far is untried.

This is a case where we should pursue radical ends by incremental means. We should make sure that private-sector voucher programs are set up much more widely throughout the country, so that people can see the benefits of vouchers, especially for low-income families and children. We should focus on school choice efforts in specific cities and localities, more than in entire states. And even statewide, we might want to look at targeting the vouchers, at least in the first years, to lower income families who are hurt most by the current system. This will help build support for choice among middle-class families who are worried about an untested new experiment.

It's important to remember that many middle-class parents have worked very hard to buy a house in an area with decent public schools. To these families school choice seems to endanger the financial investments they have made, and the quality of the schools that they have worked so hard to get their kids into. We may think that it is unwise for parents to have these fears, and we may think we have good policy answers to those fears, but those fears are real and they are understandable. It will take an incremental strategy to show those fears are wrong.

If we do pursue incremental steps in school choice, then I think fundamental change will come very rapidly. The first anti-tax initiative lost in California in 1968, I believe, and by 1978 Proposition 13 passed. The parents' revolt against the teachers' unions and the public school monopoly has the potential to be in the 1990s what the tax revolt was in the late 1970s.

P.R.: Do you agree with the prevailing wisdom that Republicans lost the "family values" debate of 1992? sort of mistakes did Republicans make? And what kind of rhetoric on issues such as homosexuality, abortion, and working mothers would enable Republicans to appeal to social conservatives without frightening away other constituencies?

Kristol: Even elite opinion - including President Clinton - now concedes that Dan Quayle was right in pointing to the breakdown of the family as key to many of America's worst social ills. Barbara Whitehead's important article in The Atlantic, called "Dan Quayle Was Right," pulled together the massive empirical evidence of devastation resulting from the collapse of families.

Having said that, though, let me admit that too much of the Republican "family values" debate in 1992 seemed to be simply moralizing about values instead of explaining the human costs of the breakdown of certain value structures. This is the key lesson I learned from 1992. People may agree with you in general about the right and wrong ways to lead one's life, but I think they expect public officials to focus on concrete outcomes. We should have been clearer than we were in pointing out that a society with a lot of illegitimacy will be a society with too much crime, too much poverty, and too little educational achievement.

I don't buy the conventional wisdom that "social issues" are terribly divisive for Republicans, or that we are in danger of being a permanent minority party because of our allegedly intolerant positions on abortion and homosexuality. Indeed, on abortion I believe we can achieve a great deal of unity in opposing Mr. Clinton's radical policies, such as federal taxpayer funding for abortion on demand.

I am pro-life, but I acknowledge that we are unlikely to achieve much of the legislative pro-life agenda in the near future, beyond some limitations such as the denial of taxpayer funding. I do think that the pro-life agenda is very much worth fighting for over the long term. For now, we can seek whatever legal restrictions in abortion are feasible, and we especially need to try to vigorously oppose the left's efforts to totally legitimize abortion on demand and to make it virtually impossible to raise moral objections to abortion in public discourse

Here we can benefit by stressing Mr. Clinton's own statement that he wants to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare." He has, of course, done nothing to make it rare - quite the opposite. But it is striking that he felt compelled to say that. After all, if abortion is simply a right like every other right, like the right to free speech or the right to assembly, then why would he want to make it rare? Surely, President Clinton is acknowledging there that there is something troubling about abortion or at least about the huge number of abortions we have in America. I think we can begin from that acknowledgement by the president and work to educate our fellow Americans in such a way that we lay the groundwork for much more pro-life public policies in the future.

P.R.: Fifteen states have now passed term limits, and the term limits movement has brought into the political process hundreds of thousands of activists looking for reform in Washington and state legislatures. So far the term limits movement seems to have hurt GOP candidates as much - if not more - than Democratic candidates. How can Republicans and conservatives do a better job turning the term limits movement to their own political advantage?

Kristol: I wish the Republicans were more aggressive in identifying with the term-limits movement, which is a genuinely populist movement. Perhaps the main problem is that Republicans have many incumbents of their own, though not as many as the Democrats, of course. But it is short-sighted to protect these incumbents at the expense of the longer-term good of the party and the country.

Term limits have to be supplemented by other constitutional public policy reforms that attack the pathologies of the welfare state. But term limits are a useful remedy for one of the biggest problems in our government today - the capture of policy-making by an "iron triangle" of special interest groups, bureaucrats, and the congressmen and their staffs who dominate the relevant congressional committees. Term limits strike at the "iron triangle" by striking at the current seniority system and committee system, which are key pillars of interest-group welfare-state politics.

P.R.: Earlier this year, many commentators referred to the Perot movement as the most important swing vote in America today. Do you agree with this assessment? How can Republicans best appeal to the Perot movement, and especially its activists?

Kristol: The key to understanding the Perot movement is that it really isn't a Perot movement. It is a reflection of great popular dissatisfaction with business as usual in Washington. Mr. Perot became the vehicle for this dissatisfaction and tapped into it extremely well. But I'm not sure Ross Perot can maintain his position over the next few years as the poster boy of this dissatisfaction.

It is important for Republicans to criticize Mr. Perot when he becomes dangerous for the country, as he was with his opposition to NAFRA. Republicans also have to make sure that Ross Perot isn't seen as the alternative to Bill Clinton, which pushes Republicans off the stage. The best way to appeal to Perot voters is not to imitate Mr. Perot's demagoguery, but to have an aggressive agenda for reform, and not to be what President Bush was perceived to be, a comfortable captive of the status quo.

P.R.: Who have been the most effective heads of the Republican National Committee in recent years? What do you think should be Haley Barbour's priorities?

Kristol: Haley Barbour is doing a good job as Republican National Chairman. There are some limitations in the nature of the job that neither he nor his predecessors can overcome, and that is why I think there is room for an organization like the one we have started. Given the shock of losing the White House for the first time in 12 years, I think the RNC did pretty well in opposing Mr. Clinton's tax-and-spend package earlier this year, and is doing a decent job of fighting the health care plan. The RNC is constrained by the need to speak for the broad spectrum of Republicans and therefore can't take quite as sharp a tone as I know Haley would like, and as I think we can take as an independent organization. Bill Brock was an effective chairman because he had the good sense to put the RNC on the side of the supply-side movement in 1978. He saw that the supply-side movement could be key not just to winning in 1980 but to changing the character of the Republican Party and to establishing, at least for a while, a governing majority. I think Haley is modelling himself on Bill Brock, and I hope that he has the chance to achieve as much over the next few years.

P.R.: The late 1970s were a period of extraordinary creativity and party-building for the GOP, even though the Democrats had control of the White House and whopping majorities in both Houses of Congress. Are there any other important lessons from that period that should apply to the GOP today?

Kristol: The story of the supply-side movement is worth studying. There a small group of thinkers, elected officials, publicists and Capitol Hill staff members took a new perspective on economic policy and promoted it not just as a new way of thinking about taxation but as a way of changing the character of the Republican party. Supply-side economics broke us free of some of the traps that kept us in minority status, and turned Republicans into the party of populism and optimism. And Mr. Reagan of course took that message to victory in 1980. We at the Project for the Republican Future hope to do in several areas of Policy what the ad hoc group of supply-side activists did in the 1977-1980 period.

Another lesson from that period is that if you beat the incumbent Democratic administration in the right way, you do not just stop their momentum or deal them a setback, you really lay the groundwork for a counteroffensive and for your own governing agenda. Jimmy Carter's energy plan was announced with almost as much hullabaloo as Clinton's health plan. It collapsed partly as a result of real-world events, but also because David Stockman, Ronald Reagan, and a few others really attacked it. Mr. Reagan didn't just challenge the Carter energy plan as too costly or too unwieldy, he challenged it on its premises.

And indeed in 1981, when he became president, Mr. Reagan decontrolled oil and gas - something that was politically unachievable just four or five years earlier before the failure of Jimmy Carter's big government energy plan. So I would say again that beating Clintonism, if done on the right grounds, can lay the groundwork for making progress on a governing agenda in the opposite direction.

P.R.: What explains the sudden change in big-city politics - with moderate to conservative Democrats taking over cities such as Philadelphia Milwaukee, and Cleveland, Republicans winning in Los Angeles and New York, and a conservative Republican winning by a landslide in mostly black and Hispanic Jersey City? Do the gains by Republicans in mayoral elections offer opportunities to build a stronger Republican party in grass-roots urban politics?

Kristol: We shouldn't overstate what has happened. It is going to take quite a while for the political character of the big cities to change as much as we would like. But we can see these recent local elections as a sign of the fundamental weakness of contemporary liberalism. The failures of the welfare state are nowhere more evident than in the biggest cities, for if any place has been the object of liberal solicitude and experimentation, it has been our biggest cities and especially our inner-city neighborhoods. And it is precisely these places that are suffering most in America.

So, I think there is a real opportunity not simply to win some votes in cities but to illuminate much more. clearly just how disastrous contemporary liberalism has become. America is a strong country, and many of our suburbs can shrug off the ravages of contemporary liberalism with some success. But in the big cities, unfortunately, communities and neighborhoods aren't as strong, citizens aren't as wealthy, and families aren't as stable, so the pathologies have a much more virulent effect. The human damage in inner cities is heartbreaking. But it's also a useful wake-up call for the rest of us about the natural effects of contemporary welfare state liberalism going unchecked.