Peggy Noonan has lost it

I've always had the highest regard for Peggy Noonan, a woman of rare rhetorical ability and usually of good common sense. But this column- one in which she strikes a sour note she's hit often in recent weeks- is just plain silly.

No, Peggy. Most people do not worry every day- "terribly" or otherwise- about out-of-control government spending. Most people seldom think about it. This is not to say that it isn't a problem; it is. But you and those for whom you speak really ought to read this before you start leaping to your tall and overblown conclusions about there being no appreciable differences between the Republicans and Democrats on the issue.

Tax revenues were in decline when President Bush took office due to the Clinton recession. One of the things the President and the Republican Congress did to bring us out of it was to enact an historic set of tax cuts, following a strategy used successfully both boy John F. Kennedy and by Ronald Reagan in similar circumstances. While tax cuts do stimulate the economy, in the short term they also reduce revenues.

And then revenues were reduced more, the anticipated Laffer impact lost, and the recovery set back further. A series of unforeseen setbacks such as few recoveries have ever had to endure took place when 9-11, the War on Terror, simultaneous hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the bursting of the dot com and high tech bubbles, a rise in unemployment- and a corresponding need for an increase in social spending all conspired to drive both the deficit and spending in absolute terms upward.

No, the current state of the budget does not so much represent a philosophical schism in the Republican Party on fiscal matters as a reasonable disagreement in practical terms about how to react to a series of events for which ideology has no easy answer. In the face of that "perfect storm" of off-the-wall economic influences, the ideological Right- which lives in the realm of theory and seldom bothers to consult reality- has responded as it habitually does to a disconnect between the ideal and the real: by crying, as a matter of reflex, "We have been betrayed!"

This is not to say that there are not philosophical differences within the Republican Party on spending and priorities. It is to say, rather, that they are the kind of differences which need to be debated and hashed out in the context of precisely a presidential nominating process such as the one we are now facing, rather than being grounds for excommunicating people from the conservative movement and indulging in crazy talk about third parties.

And Ms. Noonan, the national outrage you seem to believe exists about immigration just isn't reflected in the polls. Whatever may be true in solidly Republican districts, the level of support nationally for the President's approach to immigration is seems by every measurement to be considerably higher than the level of support for that of the House.

I happen to share Ms. Noonan's concern for the state of the deficit, and would like to see greater fiscal discipline. But wartime is not generally characterized by cutbacks in spending, and economic circumstances have not exactly conspired to make them feasible during the current administration in any case. And while I share the contempt of many on the Right for the ineffectual Senate immigration bill, the fact is that getting a handle on immigration is going to require a great deal more than the building of walls had the adoption and even enforcement of draconian penalties for illegal immigrants. The border is too long to be effectively sealed, and the motivation of those crossing it is too high. A way is going to have to be found to reduce the motivation of those tempted to do so by means other than making the penalties harsher in the unlikely event that they're caught.

One problem here is the persistent misapprehension of the ideological Right that it represents an appreciable percentage of the electorate. It does not. The number of people who actually do worry about runaway government spending every day, and who cling to an outmoded and impractical 18th Century notion of a proper and rigid division of labor between state and local governments, on one hand, and the Federal government, on the other, is comparatively small- far too small to form an effective political party on its own. The same can be said, of course, for the Socialists on the Left. That's why the rigidly orthodox on both ends of the political spectrum have been forced into coalition with those with whom they share at least most concerns with members of the overwhelming majority of American voters, who inhabit the political Center. Both groups are numerous enough to be an important and influential voting bloc for their respective parties; "delivering the base" is where successful campaigns start. But neither are numerous enough to thrive on their own, and the permanent defection of a substantial percentage of either would simply drive the Republican Party to the Left and the Democratic Party to the Right in search of replacement supporters in the vote-rich Center.

Talk of a third party on the Right is crazy. It would doom the Right to perpetual irrelevance. And should the ideological Right get its heart's desire, and do an ideological Taliban act on Republican Party- driving not only the RINOs but the Center Right pragmatists into exile- one of two things would happen: either the Democrats would become the perpetual party of government, or, more likely, a centrist third party would emerge, and quickly become the real opposition to the Democrats in Congress and the White House. We might have an effective one-party system. We might have a two-party system in which the Republicans were replaced by the new Centrist party. Either way, the Right would relegated to a marginal role as an irrelevant, if sometimes amusing, collection of ideological eccentrics.

The Hard Right's only chance to see its policies prevail is to work within the Republican Party, just as the Hard Left's only chance to do the same is through the Democrats. This is the moment when, logically, people of Ms. Noonan's viewpoint should be shopping for a candidate for the 2008 nomination, and planning their primary challenges to the congressmen with whom they are dissatisfied. If they had the political sophistication one might have hoped , they would by now have already systematically mounted their challenges in this year's primaries, and likely have influenced the current direction of the Republican Party decisively.

Instead, many are apparently bent on the doubly suicidal strategy of staying away from the polls even in districts in which ideologically friendly incumbents are running- some even considering "punishing" the Republican Party by voting Democratic! Ms. Noonan and those who think like her may labor under the illusion that there would be no difference between the current Congress and one controlled by the Democrats, but if they follow through on their strategy, they are likely to find out quickly just how wrong they are.

But that strategy is counter-productive for another reason. The last time the hard Right decided to sulk, it defeated the insufficiently conservative George H.W. Bush, and gave us eight years of Bill Clinton. It will not be forgiven another such tantrum. Far from begging the Hard Right to return to the fold, if the Republicans lose control of Congress this year due to a Hard Right sulk, the reaction I anticipate from the rest of the party is retaliation, not submission. There will always be more votes to be had in the Center than on the Hard Right. The rhetoric about a lack of difference between the two parties is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And I'd hate to see that happen. While I am kindly disposed to the economic concerns of my fellow Republicans, I am a social rather than an economic conservative- and it strikes me as unlikely that the backlash against the Right would be restricted merely to economic issues. Don't get me wrong; that backlash might well nominate a John McCain, but I doubt that it would be strong enough to make Rudy Giuliani a viable candidate.

This time. There is, indeed, a feeling abroad in the land that the nation is too polarized, ideologically- and it is a feeling which, Ms. Noonan to the contrary, is by no means without basis. If a third party movement of the Center does get underway, Rudy Giuliani would be exactly the kind of candidate I would expect to eventually lead it. And whatever else he might be, "America's Mayor" is no Ross Perot. He could even win. Who knows what a Republican Party whose right wing has fallen away might do in, say, 2012?

He's probably the one American who could even win as a third party candidate.

If he didn't, rest assured that the Democrat would.

Myself, I'd stay home if he- or any other pro-choice or socially liberal Republican- were nominated for President. I really wouldn't see a difference between Giuliani and, say, Hillary Clinton (and even less Mark Warner) on the issues I care about.

The thing is, the Hard Right probably would find Giuliani compatible on economic issues. On little else, though. And he'd probably be the last electable candidate who agreed with it on economic issues for a very long time.

Wouldn't it be better to try to save this stormy marriage between the ideologically pure conservatives and those of a more pragmatic bent?

HT: Real Clear Politics