<html><body>The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and How It Grew Thoughts on Thirty Years of Politics November 3, 2003 Transcript prepared from a tape recording <TABLE cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=1 width="100%" border=0> <TBODY> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>5:15 p.m. </DIV></TD> <TD colSpan=2> <DIV class=BodyText>Registration  </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>5:30 </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Introduction: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Christopher DeMuth, AEI </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText></DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Remarks: </DIV></TD> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>Alan Ehrenhalt, Governing magazine </DIV></TD></TR> <TR> <TD> <DIV class=BodyText>6:30 </DIV></TD> <TD colSpan=2> <DIV class=BodyText>Adjournment and Reception  </DIV></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE> Proceedings: MODERATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, can we come to order, please. Welcome all to the November session of AEI's Bradley Series. There will be following the lecture and question-and-discussion period, a reception for our lecturer in the next room, and I would like to invite all present to the December installment on December 1st when Professor Thomas Pangle of the University of Toronto will be lecturing on Leo Strauss's perspective on modern politics. At that lecture, the secret text behind AEI's neo-conservative cabal will be revealed to the waiting public. [Laughter.] MODERATOR: Our lecturer this evening, Alan Ehrenhalt, is the author of, among other books, The Lost City, 1995, a tremendously deep and evocative history of Chicago Land in its prime, the Chicago of Richard J. Daley and Ernie Banks and Jack Brickhouse. Tonight it is exactly 21 days, three weeks since the great tragedy befell our nation in game 6 of the Chicago Cubs pursuit of the National League Pennant in competition with another team, which has since been forgotten. [Laughter.] MODERATOR: The official mourning period now being over, this is Mr. Ehrenhalt's first public appearance, and we are delighted that he chose an AEI forum to come out of mourning. Alan Ehrenhalt may be the most interesting student of American politics, who is neither a blogger, nor a regular food-fighter on the weekend politics shows. His medium is the printed word in its actual rather than virtual form. He has a long history as a journalist, but since 1991 has been the executive editor of Governing magazine. He also writes with some frequency for the New York Times op-ed page, for the New Republic, for the Times and Post book reviews. And in addition to the last city, which I recommend to all present, he is the author of The United States of Ambition, 1991, and most recently in 1999, Democracy in the Mirror. His title for this evening is "The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and How it Grew, Thoughts on Thirty Years of Politics." Please give a warm welcome to Alan Ehrenhalt. [Applause.] MR. EHRENHALT: Well, thank you. Just to prove that every cloud has a silver lining, I was talking outside a little while ago about the theological proof that I was able to work out after the Cubs' defeat, which is very simple. And it Gods, "God tortures Cubs Fans, therefore God must exist." [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: And I haven't found anybody yet that was able to refute this. So you do learn something even in failure. It's very nice to see so many people here. I think, as Chris alluded to, if you don't do this very often, as I don't, people begin to think you have something really important to say that you are withholding. And this is my chance to disprove that notion once and for all. But I do have a purpose. I thought it would be interesting to stand back and look at a generation of political events and how we might try to make sense of them, if not in a new way, at least in a coherent way. We have to move fairly quickly. Some of you may have seen the reduced Shakespeare Company, where they do 30 plays in two hours. We're going to do about 35 years of politics in 40 minutes. So I probably should get started. I can't resist telling you one thing, though. I came to Washington in September of 1969. And around that time I was reading a Old New Dealers, and they always said things like "I showed up in Washington on a wintery February morning in 1934," you know, and I would read these things and think, "Am I ever going to talk like that?" [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: And now, here I am. Life plays out in strange ways. The first event that I actually covered when I got here was an event that is not particularly well-remembered, but it was the election to choose a new Senate minority leader between Hugh Scott and Howard Baker. Which I didn't understand very well at the time, but it's worth bringing up just for a minute, because it really reflected the old fault line among republicans, between the eastern elite and the midwestern sort of neo-isolationist faction. And it's a line that long since meaningless, but it meant something then. It meant a lot then. This was the same Hugh Scott that Michael Barone pictured wonderfully in his book, Our Country, comparing him to Charles Halleck in 1948. Halleck, the young midwestern Congressman and Scott the Congressman of the eastern elite. And that was still true in many ways in 1969. And it reflected the politics of the previous generation. Howard Baker was trying to claim the legacy of his father-in-law, Everett Dirkson, the midwestern conservative republican. To make a long story a little shorter, Scott won. All the old conservatives, even the midwesterners, voted for him. My theory at the time was they were waiting for Baker to grow a few inches. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: And they weren't ready to vote for him. But Scott won that election. I don't know if there's anybody here who ever interviewed Hugh Scott, but it was something like the journalistic equivalent of consulting the Oracle at Delphi. This is something Hugh Scott actually said in response to a question about Vietnam. He said, "The leaves are now falling from the trees. They will return to the trees, and when they fall again, some of the troops will come home." [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: What I didn't realize is that he was taking advice from Chauncey Gardner. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: But, to get closer to the matters at hand, that was the republican party in 1969, still in many ways divided along fault lines that dated back to the 1940s, and are almost incomprehensible in terms of the politics of 2003. Meanwhile, in the House among democrats, you had really a very simple way of understanding life. It was: One third, one third and one third. You had one third conservative southern democrats, one third liberal democrats, and one third sort of urban ethnic, the polite term would be hack, but not everybody fit us into that category, but it was a House of Representatives with names like Burk [ph] and Rooney and Garmats [ph] and Kluchinsky [ph], all of them supported the Vietnam War. Edward Garmats later went on to become the first congressman ever indicted in a federal building bearing his name. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: But that was the world of 1969 really, and one that seems in some ways recent to me, but is another time. And it was also the beginning of a very interesting mid-term election, and one that was really part of my education. And oddly enough I look at with nostalgia in a certain way. It was a bitter and unpleasant campaign in many ways, but it was a campaign that was about something. More than anything else it was about the Vietnam War. There were real arguments. Candidates went one on one on Vietnam, and they said "I'm for it," and "I'm against it." That was a different kind of politics. This was the election in which Spiro Agnew was accused of being divisive. And he said, "What is an election for, if not to divide people?" [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: And he was right? You know, I think there were many things that Spiro Agnew was right on. And in 1970 you were a hawk or a dove. It was a sign of the passion of the times, and it was also a sign I think of primitive poling. You know, in those days, at least down at the House level, it wasn't that easy for candidates to know exactly where opinion was on every question, and so if you chose to pander, you weren't always sure how large a segment of the electorate you were pandering to. So sometimes you had no choice but to say what you actually believed. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: And maybe that's exaggerating. But if you compare the democrats of 1970 to the democrats of 2002, I think that poling has something to do with it, and it represents one way in which life was different at that time. 1969 was also the summer of Kevin Phillips and the emerging republican majority. And for those of you who have forgotten or haven't read, or don't know about the emerging republican majority, it's thesis simply was: A cycle was ending that began in the New Deal that was a cycle of democratic power ushered in buy the Depression, and a new era of republican power was beginning based on white middle class resentment of the Great Society, essentially. I thought in 1969, and I think now that this was the single most brilliant political idea of its time. Not only that, but the only real explanation for 20 years of presidential politics, beginning around that time and lasting through the 1980s. Middle class people felt democrats were taking things from them to give to an underclass that did not, in their opinion, work for those things or deserve them. And that created the republican dominance of presidential politics. Phillips later took it all back, in a way, because there wasn't a total republican victory, and republicans just won presidential elections; they didn't win all elections. They didn't win Congress. And Phillips kept looking for reasons why the republicans didn't win the ultimate majority that he had predicted. At one point he said it was Watergate, and then later it was the media, and then later it was populace resentment of Wall Street. And Phillips himself really moved to the left over the 70s and 80s. But he was correct the first time; the world did change in 1968, I think. The political world. Republicans became the natural presidential majority. They didn't fulfill Phillips' prophecy and win everything. And the reason, it has always seemed to me, and I apologize to those of you to whom I have been harping on this for 20 years, because elections other than presidential elections were being won on the basis of supply, not demand. Politics was becoming a full-time job. Democrats were generating the talent. It came out of the Civil Rights Movement, Environmental Movement, consumerism, anti-war activities. And the democrats who came out of these movements became the classes of '74, '76, '78 in Congress. Tom Harkin, Tobey Moffett, Barbara Mikulski, and the names could go on and on. And this was true at all levels below the White House. Democrats over the 70s and 80s almost routinely won 60 percent of all the seats in state legislatures in America. That was a remarkable thing. And I think that had more to do with talent and supply than it had to do with anything the voters were particularly asking for. This is a point that it's hard to convince people of, but I remain myself convinced that it was and perhaps is true. It leads to the question--I see we're making progress, we're already up to '74 and it's only been about five minutes. So I think we'll get there. But it leads to the question of what to think of the Watergate election of 1974. It was seen as a cataclysmic event. I've never really felt convinced that it was a cataclysmic event. I'm more inclined now to view it, if not a blip, at least maybe a tantrum. You know. People were made, they voted against republican incumbents. Lots of republican voters stayed home. Part of the same force that elected Carter, albeit narrowly in 1976. But I don't think you can, from the hindsight almost 30 years think of 1974 as a cataclysmic election of any sort. To me, Watergate itself was not a cataclysmic event, despite all of the million words of blather that have been written about it over the last 30 years. If you want a mid-term election that was of landmark importance, I think you're better off looking at 1978. And here's why. 1978 was the year of middle-class resentment. The resentment that Phillips wrote about showed up in economic terms, and got converted into republican votes. Proposition 13, California Tax Cut Initiative, didn't create a major upheaval at the national level. But it made republicans the tax cut party. More important, it made them the party of optimism in a certain way, and they ceased to be the party of party-poopers, guys with rimless glasses with clipped mid-western accents, who sounded like H. B. Kaltenborn or at least Charles Halleck, and said things like "We'll have a Depression that will curl your hair." And other statements like that. That was a little earlier, but it was said. 1978 was the year republicans broke out of that, and became the party of good news. In those days I got to know some members of Congress, including some of the more traditional conservatives. And I had enormous respect for many of them. But they were nay-sayers. Charles Wiggins, who I always thought was one of the most brilliant members of Congress of his generation and perhaps insufficiently remembered. But Wiggins said, "A person who advocates a limited government has to say no." Negativism is endemic to a conservative. And it was 1978 when the party as a whole stopped talking like this. I found myself interviewing Richard Lugar that year, and he was in I guess his first year in the Senate. And he said, "The republican party has always played the role of spoiled sports. People who want to enjoy life, even if they can't afford it. Kemp-Roth, the tax cut plan, has given republicans a new argument and a new style, and it's delightful." I found that about as giddy as Richard Lugar could ever be expected to become. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: Jack Kemp, in fact, put it more simply, "Now I'm saying yes. The liberals are saying no." And that has defined the republican party ever since. And I think if we're talking about changes and the development of some form of majority power, that is perhaps the most crucial point. Republicans all of a sudden were for something. The were for not taxing people. But that was sufficient. And of course Newt Gingrich turned it into a positive and talked about the opportunity society, and '78 was the year Gincrich was elected to Congress. And so republicans became the tax cut party, much in the way that in the late 19th Century, the republicans were the party of the bloody shirt that you could wave against the democrats; they were the party that was soft on rebellion in the Civil War, and democrats are the party of taxers. I think what republicans learned is that in an odd way, calling somebody a big spender doesn't work too well. Calling them a big taxer does. That may say something about the popular will. But nonetheless I think that's true. And equally important, it played into the middle-class social resentment that Phillips understood in the '60s. It still works today. And this brings us in our journey to 1980 and the "Reagan Revolution." Did Ronald Reagan launch a new era? As a self-admitted child of 1969, at least in political awareness, I never thought that. It never made much sense to me. It always seemed fairly obvious that Reagan was the middle of an era, the exact middle of an era, or close to it. And it was an era that began in 1968 and was going strong in 1980. So 1980 wasn't and couldn't be a dawn for republicans. In a certain way, it was high noon of that era. That just seemed almost self-evident to me, even though it didn't seem self-evident to very many other people. But Michael Barone wrote at that time that elections mostly don't create change, they reflect change. And I thought that was a very wise observation. This was 1980. The resentments of 1969 and 1978 came together to elect Reagan, and of course by inflation and Iran. Events are over-determined as we know. The resentment was probably enough. So in 1980 the country was nestled snugly in the middle of an era, or at least as I would argue, with clear rules. The rules were that it's almost impossible for democrats to win the electoral college, but they were producing so much talent that they were the majority party everywhere else. That's fairly simple, and I think that's true. It was true in the 1970s, the 1980s. It was reflected in 1988 when George H. W. Bush became President, and the democrats continued to control Congress. Plus again 60 percent roughly of all the elections for state legislatures. And I'm talking about 7,000 and some elections. So, that seems to me a reasonable explanation of a part of this period. But in 1988 there were clues, at least clues or hints that the era of Nixon and Reagan was going to come to an end. And in retrospect, it should have been clearer than most people noticed. Dukakis carried ten states, to Mondale's two. Really in many ways that election was the beginning of the blue and the red and the class inversion and all these things that we struggle for different ways to describe. Nobody's ever disappeared from national politics more quickly or thoroughly than Dukakis, it seems to me. I mean even though he has done things afterwards. But it was almost as if he never happened. I used to make a point that he was the Al Smith of the Clinton presidency. You may not notice much similarity right off the bat. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: No, but it's interesting. Phillips pointed out, the seeds of 1932 and the New Deal were reflected when Al Smith carried states and cities that democrats had never carried before, and those were places that became the heart of the New Deal majority. And you know, Dukakis carried Wisconsin, Washington, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon. All of those except Minnesota had gone for Reagan twice. Not one of them has ever been carried by a republican since then. So you had this belt of democrat votes all across the top of the country, which is really interesting. And that started becoming a problem for republicans in 1988. And I would argue that it's still a problem. Or we'll see next year. But I think it probably is. So, that raises the question of not what to think of Bill Clinton himself, but what to think of this whole period. You know, it's possible to view Clinton as an aberration between two periods of republican power. That is, there is the Nixon-Reagan-Bush period, and then Clinton. And now Bush and the future. But I'm not persuaded by that either. I am a purist when it comes to the '68 and Kevin Phillips business. I think 1992 ended the era of 1968. That it really did end after 24 years. That was the summer, when as democratic nominee, Clinton went a gay rights rally in Oregon. Or maybe the end of it was the Republican Convention in Houston in 1992, when the republicans fought with each other over social issues. And the Convention I think most people who saw it, which I didn't actually, would agree had a lot to do with splitting the party open. And if look back from 1992 to 1980, and this seemingly odd coalition that elected Reagan, where you had supply-siders and Jerry Falwell, you have to look at it and think, "These people only had one thing in common. They hate communists." That's what they had in common. What would they ever do without the communists? It was not known at that time that the Ba-athist Party could be used as an effective substitute. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: But in 1992 we found out what happened when there were no communists. Republicans fight with each other, and they lost the election. And there are still people who try to make the point that Ross Perot made the difference. That just doesn't seem persuasive to me. I think that if Ross Perot had not run, the result would have been the same. But nobody can prove that. So if Clinton ended an era and began an era, what is it an era of? Well, I would say parody, for one thing. Close elections. Blue states and the red states almost even. But maybe more important, an era of balance on cultural issues. If you want to win nationally, you can't get too far left. Probably shouldn't endorse gay marriage. But you probably shouldn't be too far right either, or get in trouble. So it's kind of an era of conservative tolerance, seems to be the majority position. It's an era in which the majority position may be: "I don't like gay marriage, but I don't want to turn my back on my niece." Or maybe it's my son, or my daughter." And I mean that seems to be the majority position. It's an era in which republican tax cut talk still resonates, but can only withstand a certain amount of economic bad news. We'll find out how much. And it's an era in interesting ways the reverse of the previous one, I would say. Republicans finally won the majorities in Congress that Kevin Phillips kept looking for. And democrats, the one thing they seem to be is fairly strong in the national presidential vote, where supply is really not the question. People's opinions on Election Day are the question. So that would seem to me to define this Clinton era, which may or may not be over. But that raises an obvious question. If 1992 was the end of a republican era, how do you explain 1994? And I'm not sure I can. I think 1994 still is a hard thing to get a hold of. Clinton wins in '92; he wins easily in '96; in between there's an earthquake. What does that mean? Well, in an odd way I think it's kind of I think a mirror image of 1974. People were mad. They took it out on whoever was perceived as the incumbent interest, in an essentially one-shot bolt of resentment. You know, 1994, conditions were--I mean go back and look at some of what was being written then. We were in the midst of downsizing and layoffs and people were writing books like America, What Went Wrong? and the New York Times was publishing the endless series, The Downsizing of America. And you know, it was very common to hear people say, "Our children won't be able to afford a house the way we did." I mean that was a very common opinion, and it lasted I think into 1996. It was an amazing transformation between the spring of 1996 in which Pat Buchanan ran and made progress with his agenda, and late summer. It was sometime in the summer of 1996 that the late '90s really began and optimism took over, the mood turned, and you could feel it. And the resentments of 1994 really had almost disappeared by Election Day. Or at least as political issues. And Clinton reaped the benefits of that. But the most lasting effect of 1994 I think was not in the electorate; it was in the setting free of interest groups. Trade associations, PACs, you know, all these interests that had been living under the Coelo Doctrine since the early '80s which is, "It doesn't matter what you think, you've still got to give the democrats money, because the democrats are the majority party." All of a sudden, they didn't have to do that. Tom Edsel had been writing for years that once the republicans get in, they're going to be very hard to dislodge because you have all these interest groups that have no reason to give to democrats any more, if they're not in power. And I think that turned out to be true. Also republicans seemed to reverse the talent drain, became more competitive in getting candidates. I don't know exactly how they've solved that problem. Maybe democrats lost their enthusiasm to a certain degree. The generation of 1974 got disillusioned. Now, if you look at the class of 1974 in the House, they were very young. I mean probably most of them were in their early '30s. They're only in their early '60s now. There would be no reason why large numbers of these people couldn't still be serving in Congress, and yet they're almost all gone. I mean there's maybe a handful left. It's a very interesting phenomenon, and they turned out to have really very little staying power. You look at Henry Waxman, and he's sort of the exception to the rule, because he's there and growing old in Congress. And they're all off doing who knows what. And perhaps there wasn't enough faith in governmental solutions in the '80s and '90s to produce a new generation of Henry Waxmans or Tom Harkins or Chuck Schumers. Maybe that's it. Or maybe the demographics of the candidate pool are just different in some other way. I look through Politics in America and The Almanac of American Politics. I look at the profiles of some of the new members. I'm not really close to this stuff any more. But I'm struck by things, you just look at the biographies of these people, how many of them are in their 50s and 60s. Long resumes. Not the same kinds of people that were getting elected to Congress thirty years ago. I mean the self-starters coming out of nowhere. Jim Shanon in 1976 or Tom Daschle in 1978. Or people I wrote about in the United States of Ambition. I don't think you're seeing them any more. So maybe we're going back to an earlier climate of politics in which people who get elected are standard-bearers in an ancient sort of way, rather than solo adventurers as they were in the '70s and '80s, and represent a local party or power structure, or something. I don't know the answer. But I do know the rules of supply have definitely changed in politics. More than once. And when that changes, outcomes change. One other crucial development of the mid-1990s that a lot of you probably know more about than I do is the emergence of what I would call the "republican megaphone": talk shows, think tanks. Such as this one, but by no means limited to it. To some extent they had always existed. Talk radio has always had a libertarian bias. I've never been quite sure why there are so few liberal talk shows, but that's an interesting question to debate. But never was it so political as it became in the '90s with Rush Limbaugh and all of the other people putting out the same message. And meanwhile, there was also a shift in intellectual energy in Washington and in the states I think. In the 1970s you had people like Paul Weirich complaining that there wasn't a republican intellectual apparatus to counter the liberal intellectuals. Of course, AEI existed; it was doing good work. Other groups existed. But it's a culture of democrats that was dominated largely by words and talk. Democrats talk louder. By 1996 Bill Clinton was sounding like Paul Weirich sounded in the early 1970s: We don't have the intellectual fire power and we don't have the people writing the papers and giving the speeches and doing the lobbying. You know, this is interesting in view of all the continuing talk of the liberal media elite. People are still selling a lot of books, based on the notion of the liberal media elite. And it's not totally crazy. If you're talking about religion, abortion, social issues, sure there's a liberal media elite. And it does reinforce values that are associated with the democratic party. But by 1996 I would say the intellectual left had been neutralized on economics and foreign policy. Clinton was right, there wasn't much organized support for things he wanted to do, or for left positions of any kind. There was a pretty impressive organized right. Some of which is in this room. And Hillary Clinton used the famous words, "vast right-wing conspiracy". It's amazing how that word has become embedded in the national discourse. I'm pretty sure hardly anyone in this room thinks there is a vast right-wing conspiracy. But nobody ever thinks they're part of a conspiracy. Just like nobody in Washington ever thinks they have power. It's always somewhere else. Who, me? You know. But at Governing, we're having interesting correspondence with the head of a conservative institute in the mid-west, which I guess I won't name. But we wrote at one point not long ago that conservatives were funneling money into state politics. And he wrote back and said, "Wait a minute, conservatives funneling money? What about Ford and McArthur and the Urban League and Pugh, and all of this stuff? They've got much bigger budgets than any of the groups that I have anything to do with." Well, and this can be debated back and forth and it's a legitimate issue. I have to tell you, though, that when I go to my mailbox every afternoon, I don't get much mail on paper any more. I mean that's probably true of a lot of you. But the three largest components in my mailbox are: Mail from senior citizens, Heritage, and the Cato Institute. On an average day half of the pieces of paper in my mailbox are from either Heritage or Cato. I almost never hear from the McArthur Foundation or the Urban League. In the interests of accuracy, I was writing this today and I went and saw my mail, and it was a release from the Cato Institute, a copy of the Weekly Standard, news from the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, and something from the Harvard Design School. You can make of that whatever you choose to. But, to get back to Hillary. If she had said, "We're up against an elaborate and sophisticated conservative network," I'm not sure that that would have been all that controversial or debatable a statement. It's pretty clear that something exists. The issue is: how sinister do you want to make it look? And that depends on your overall attitude. But to get back to the time line here, because I'm, well we'll probably make it, we reached the end of the 1990s with republicans holding many of the important cards. Again a little like democrats in the '70s and '80s. All the technical advantages of talent and money. But not all the advantages. Republicans were embarrassed in 1998. They didn't win the popular vote in 2000. And you have quite a few states that in an interesting way republicans have winning now. New Jersey and Connecticut are the two most interesting ones to me. In 1984 Reagan got 60 percent in New Jersey and Connecticut, more than his national average. In 1996 Clinton carried them both--they've been voting together--in 1996 Clinton carried both with 53 percent. In 2000 Gore got 56 percent in both Connecticut and New Jersey. So to me that says the bastions of the old moderate eastern republicanism, the Hugh Scott types, are gone. These voters are democrats now. They're listening to NPR and going to sushi bars. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: So I think the evidence from all these elections is somewhat ambiguous. Of course, there's 2002. And we know what the result was. Many things contributed. Money. Candidates. District lines being redrawn. But it's hard to draw lessons, I think, no matter how hard you try from 2002, because it was so overshadowed by September 11th. If I can be only a little bit cynical, I think the best way to see 2002 is as the ground hog day election. And what I mean by ground hog day is in the movie, you know, where Bill Murray would keep waking up every morning, and it would be the same day all the time; he couldn't get past that day. Bush made sure that it was September 12th every morning when we woke up, until the 2002 election took place. And that is, we had just been terrorized and we were in the midst of this anti-terror campaign. And he was out there fighting it. And it did work. I have to say that I got 2002 wrong for almost the whole year. I thought Enron and that stuff would make a bid difference, and it turned out not to. But ground hog day won't work in 2004. So I think we would all agree on that. The hold is loosening. It's remarkable how little media saturation coverage there was this September 11th two-year anniversary compared to one year. And of course, Iraq has burst that bubble to a great extent. It doesn't mean Bush won't win. But he won't win the way he did in '02 on terrorist rhetoric. So, it's one year before a presidential election. Exactly one year, isn't it, tomorrow? You've got one party who in 30 years has shown that they can't elect anybody except sometimes a southern governor. You have another party that in 16 years has not shown that it can elect any president at all without the help of the Supreme Court. Fred Barnes wrote this week in the Weekly Standard that realignment has taken place. And I think it's quite an ingenuous argument. He takes a very simple and sweeping view that the democrats took over in 1934 with the New Deal, and their era lasted until '94. And this is the republican era. And that's about all you need to know. With due respect to that argument, I think republicans can't claim to too much hegemony until they actually win a presidential election the old fashioned way, which consists of getting more votes than the other candidate does. So, 2004 is a real test. Republicans go into it with great advantages. And they also have to watch that they don't score too high on the arrogance meter. And you might dismiss that as liberal propaganda. But I voted for Bush myself. So you have to take that on faith. But it's true. My wife asked me what I was going to say at this point. And I said I was going to say republicans need to be careful about arrogance. And she said, "Well, doesn't everybody know that already?" And I don't think they do. At least not from reading the newspaper I don't think so. Unless you could argue that cockiness was what people wanted after 9-11. But I think you could also argue that it's not successful in the long run. The one thing about Reagan that's interesting is that at least I don't have the feeling that he ever seemed arrogant to people. That quality was not there. He wore well. Arrogance doesn't wear very well. You can get away with it if you're in a position of overwhelming superiority, if you're the 27 Yankees. The republicans aren't the 27 Yankees. And they have amassed great resources and real intellectual energy and self confidence. I think it's a short step from there to an arrogance that the American people are unlikely to reward over a long period of time. So I wouldn't be surprised if democrats start planting this seed. You know, you can start playing interesting games with what slogans they could come up with. Slogans sometimes work in presidential elections. Romanism and rebellion wasn't too successful. But communism, corruption and Korea did real well in 1952. I wonder if next year we'll get people talking about Iraq, Enron, and arrogance? They don't all start with the same letter. But also corruption and Korea don't start with the same letters. So that might not work, or it might. If Bush does win, despite all the problems, then maybe it will make sense to talk about realignment, a republican era. Whether it will represent a conservative triumph is another issue. I think about 1952 a lot partly because I never have been able to escape from the 1950s. But 1952 is interesting, because you had, by my standards, three conservative candidates. And you may not all agree with this one, but let me try it out on you. You had Robert Taft, who believed more than anything else in limited government. I think that's an easy one. You had Eisenhower, who stood for the cautious and prudent use of American power. To me that's a conservative. And you had Adlai Stevenson, who was a New Dealer, but had this tragic view of human life, profoundly tragic view of human life. And to me, that is an important part of conservative as an intellectual doctrine. And we don't have anything like that now. At least it doesn't seem to me that you do. And we haven't had it for a long time. So if Charles Wiggins were alive, which I regret that he isn't, I'm not sure who we would have to vote for this year. So I guess I would just make one plea, and that is a simple one. If there is going to be a vast right-wing conspiracy, I would hope that there would be a place for conservatives in it. Thank you. [Applause.] MR. EHRENHALT: What do I do now? Let's do members of the conspiracy first. And then we'll move on to others. Yes? QUESTION: I'd like to suggest a different interpretation on a couple of key issues. The election of '92, Ross Perot. And I think that Ross Perot's supporters, I think my recollection was two out of three normally have voted for Bush. And that he did bring some new people into the electorate. But if he hadn't been there, I think most political scientists would say that Bush would have won. Also about '92, George Bush I was not really excited about his campaign. He clearly was a tired, unenergetic campaigner. And that came through I think to the public. In '96 Mr. Dole was a weak candidate. His language and lack of vibrancy and so forth. MR. EHRENHALT: His language was pretty good. He may have lacked vibrancy. QUESTION: Yeah. Right. Actually his wife would have been a much better candidate. And the election of 2000, usually when we have an incumbent with full employment, no war, they will get re-elected. And the fact that Gore lost that election in the Electoral College of course, and nearly lost it in the popular vote, says to me that we really have a strong conservative movement. So that's an alternative interpretation of what you said. But I've enjoyed your comments very much. MR. EHRENHALT: Well, and it's certainly not a crazy interpretation at all. I mean you can explain away--all of those are good explanations. I would only say that if you have to explain away individual events too many times in a row, probably something is at work other than the events themselves. So, we'll see next year. Peter? MR. : Alan, you didn't mention governors. It's interesting starting in '76, with two democrats, two republicans, governors getting elected president. The only non-governor we've had has been George Bush Sr., who was really sort of Reagan III. And this time you have the specter at least of two governors running against each other. Why the change from Congressional candidates always winning the presidency for the previous 20-some years? Why do you suppose that would be? MR. EHRENHALT: Well, I don't know. That's a great question and one that I wonder about. But I think that members of Congress have never been particularly good or successful candidates. Isn't Kennedy the only person in-- MR. : [Off mike.] MR. EHRENHALT: Harding. Right. I knew I forgot one of them. Sitting senators to go right into the White House, it doesn't happen very often, and [audio break] to become president. You have people, you know, Nixon was in both houses of Congress. And you can find others, P. George Bush was in Congress. But nevertheless, it is a disadvantage of some sort. Is it the voting record? You know. Do you leave a paper trail that makes you vulnerable? Or is it something about temperament? Or are you distracted as a member of Congress in campaigning in a way that you're not as a governor? I think that's a great question, and I have no idea what the answer is. QUESTION: You talked about arrogance. I wonder, though, if you wouldn't agree with me that perhaps the election of 2004 was decided in the first debate-- MR. EHRENHALT: Which one? QUESTION: In 2004. Excuse me, 2000, I'm sorry. 2004 hasn't happened yet. The 2000 I felt, anyway, after watching the first debate, and watching Al Gore's performance, that frankly I wanted the election to be held about five days later, because--I've met Al Gore and he's a very nice man, at least he seems to me to be--but in that debate, he seemed like he was a such an arrogant smarty pants, and Americans don't like smarty pants. And I thought that his performance particularly in the first debate wasn't really terrifically better in the second and third. But that must have had a great deal of effect in downsizing expectations about Gore and I would say neutralizing the benefits that he brought to the campaign of running after you know 6 or 7 years of economic boom and a popular president and so on. And if one listens to the discourse of some of the presidential candidates now, particular Governor Dean, I could imagine a replay of that in the 2004 debates. Whatever cockiness may exist in the White House I mean, Governor Dean's style is, if I may say so, far, far more arrogant even than anything we saw with Vice President Gore. I wonder if you'd comment on that. MR. EHRENHALT: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most arrogant of all? QUESTION: No. But I don't think arrogance is a characteristic normally--cockiness maybe. Arrogance is not something-- MR. EHRENHALT: Well it's a fine line. Carter was in some ways arrogant to Reagan, I think in 1980. Despite the humility with which he normally tried to and did present himself. You know, I would take all of that only as evidence that it probably is not a real good idea to appear arrogant to the American people, whether you're president or challenger. So I agree with that. Chris? MR. : There is a view of what has happened in our politics that explains why the republicans with so much going for them have not gotten more than exactly to 50 percent, that I thought was going to be a theme of yours. Because there were big intimations of it at the beginning of your talk. But then I never heard anything more of it. The view is that politics has become such a business that for constitutional reasons we have a two-party system. Those two business firms have become extremely adept through poling, through moving resources around from one district to another, through doing things that the Congressmen you were talking about in the '50s and '60s never could do. That it is not surprising that when Election Day comes, they are exactly at a tie in the presidential contest, in the House of Representatives, in the United States Senate. Which would explain why, although we talk about cycles and governing parties and so forth, that maybe we're not going to have a governing party. There were times when it sounded as if you were saying that no the real problem is that the American public is split right down the middle on important social and economic issues. And it could be that both of these things are going on. But I wondered what your view is of the professionalization of politics, which leads to increasingly muted debates over content? As tough as things seem this year, nothing like the good old days that we remember. MR. EHRENHALT: The idea, being I guess in the end that one party is going to find 50 percent of unoccupied territory and is going to occupy it, and therefore it's going to come pretty close. I think that's a very interesting idea, but I don't think I buy it. I don't know there's anything about professionalization that prevents one party from really bombing and making a big mistake. So, maybe that's going to happen two or three times in a row, but I'm inclined to think that a simpler explanation for the seeming parody of the American political system is that it is based on a real parody. Somebody said after 2000 that the American public is evenly divided, but it's not bitterly divided. And I think that was true in 2000, and it was one reason why we go through the mess of Florida without more strife than we did. But I'm not sure that's true any more. We might come into an election evenly and somewhat more angrily divided, which probably is not a good thing. Yes? QUESTION: Thanks. One factor I think you seriously under-represent is the power of ideas in explaining political economic change. And I particular I think changing attitudes towards the efficacy of government. And I think people's confidence in government has changed enormously and declined enormously in the period that you are describing. And I want to link that with something that you do emphasize. And that is the question of the changing nature of the talent pool, where you emphasize that the democrats had a much stronger talent pool in the past, and now it seems that republicans have a stronger talent pool. It seems to me you don't really have a very good explanation for why that is, and my explanation for that would be is because of the power of ideas has attracted a different sort of person into those two political parties. And in particular I think a higher quality person in the republican party. If that is not the explanation, how do you explain the change in the nature of the talent pool? MR. EHRENHALT: I don't think that's a bad explanation at all. I mean it's very hard to prove. But if I created the impression that I don't think ideas play an important role in fostering political change, I didn't mean to. I think ideas are very important and they're important in generating talent. And the big idea for democrats in the '60s and '70s was: You can use government to accomplish things. And I think that idea ran out of steam for reasons that would be a longer discussion. And the idea that markets should be unleashed became big idea for republicans, and brought a lot of people into republican candidacies. I thought for a long time that republicans had a problem and that the free market enthusiasts who really didn't like government also tended not to want to stay in it very long, once they got there. But I see no evidence that that's true in this last generation. Ben you got a question? QUESTION: [Off mike.] It must have been in the early 1980s that the late Pat Moynihan called the republicans the 'stupid party.' And he said that has changed; they are no longer the stupid party, the other guys are the stupid party. I really think as I listen to this that, what's changed over the years, you have had an infusion of serious ideas into the republican party. How you would play out and [audio break] that's all correct. But ideas and foreign policy about extending and expanding liberty and human [audio break] and on economic liberty as well. And it seems that there is evidence around the world that these things are happening. And that's why the Chirac thing [audio break] can be the ball game. I mean it's a huge thing. But that there has been a major change in, I don't know if in ideology, but in ideas. And it's worked to the republicans' benefit. How it will turn out is another story. MR. EHRENHALT: I completely agree with that. And while one can debate whether there is some advantage in being the stupid party, the only thing I would add is that being the too-smart party may not work either. And maybe there's an element of that. I don't know. The competition for being the stupid party is an intense one, I think actually. [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: And either side can win, really you know. It's open to question. How much more time do we have. MR. : [Off mike.] MR. EHRENHALT: Yes? QUESTION: I was just curious as to how you drew your lines with respect to the political eras, when you said the era that began in 1968 ended in 1992. But is it fair to say that's putting an awful lot of focus on domestic issues rather than foreign policy issues? Because the theme going through the democratic presidential candidates, this dovish anti-war theme, is so reminiscent of McGovern and the Vietnam era candidates, it really brings back to me the characterization someone once made, which I thought really stuck, that the republicans are the Daddy party and democrats are the Mommie party. And if perhaps foreign is when historians look back on this era, that's really the major issue that they're going to be looking at, especially if we have another September 11th. Isn't it fair to say the democrats, the sea change for them was in the 1960s and they haven't changed their stripes at all? MR. EHRENHALT: Yeah, I think that's basically right. I mean the democrats changed from being a labor-based, urban working class, blue-collar party essentially to being a party of minorities and people who listen to national public radio. But that's not too far short of a majority, or at least it has been reasonably close to it. As for Vietnam, you know, is it bad for the democrats to be identified as doves on Iraq, just as they were on Vietnam? I would say maybe it is, but if Iraq comes to seem more and more in people's minds like Vietnam, I don't think that's very good for republicans, either. So I think it maybe works two ways. Yes? QUESTION: I'm curious to know, you mentioned that the republicans finally in the late 60s, early 70s, or I guess you said '78, would be able to start talking about tax cuts. And I guess I keep waiting for the day to come when tax cuts have been, there have been too many of them. And it never seems to come. What's your feeling on the life of tax cuts as a political strategy in the future? MR. EHRENHALT: So far, it's immortal. But I think in really stressed economic times, people might make a connection that would be against the interest of the tax cut party. Just as people don't worry too much about budget deficits, but if you have runaway inflation, then somebody could make the argument that maybe these deficits are really bad. I mean in good times, you know, in the abstract, people want their taxes cut and they don't care much about deficits. But sometimes the abstract doesn't prevail. So I don't know. Not so far. QUESTION: First I would like to say, for me it's hard to tell which party is the stupid party. And second, I wanted to comment on what the gentleman in the front said. I did watch one of those debates, and both candidates did seem arrogant. Not only Gore, but Bush came off as arrogant. He was trying to use the Clinton-Lewinski incident, sort of like throw that in Gore's face, and say that, "All you democrats, all you do is just cheat on your wives and do all kinds of stuff like that." But my question is: Gore tried to isolate himself from Clinton because of that Monica Lewinski incident. Do you think that maybe hurt him? Because we did have a good economy during that time. Do you think maybe that hurt him, trying to isolate himself from the Clinton administration, and all the good things that happened? MR. EHRENHALT: Well, I don't have the benefit of any special knowledge or poling on that. My instinct is that he's in there with Clinton, and that's the way you play it out, and you're much better off not trying to distance yourself. And had he not done that, he have done better. I'm curious how many people think Bush would have defeated Clinton in 2000 in this room. Am I to understand that most people think Clinton would have beaten Bush? Well, I think that kind of answers the question, if that's-- [Laughter.] MR. EHRENHALT: One more. Norm, where are you? There you are. MR. : Discussion of the talent pool, Alan, is particularly interesting. But of course it assumes that there is competition and that the talent rises to the top in competition. We are now in a situation where probably less than 10 percent of the House seats are competitive by any objective standard between the two political parties. And that's true in most of the state legislative situations as well. And I wondered if you could reflect a little bit on what happens in an era when you may no longer have it, maybe that one end of the era was a 52-seat change in the House of Representatives in 1994, and we may not find another election in the foreseeable future where you'd have a change of more than ten or 12 seats, where the republicans, Tom Delay's explicit goal, is to add just enough seats so that you can withstand a national tide and maintain a majority, and to govern almost as a parliamentary majority as if you had a 60-40 margin in a 50-50 country. What does that do to our politics over time? MR. EHRENHALT: Well, I think that may very well happen. You know in states, in New York State you have one legislative chamber, the Senate is republican, and the Assembly is democratic, and it's been that way for 30 years and both parties are happy with that. And it's unlikely to change at any time in the foreseeable future. And I suppose that could happen with Congress. But you know you're still generating talent and people in those situations, because the seats turn over, and there may not be a party change. But you're going to have an evolution of what kinds of people come here. And then you have the 10 percent in which there is intense competition and recruiting, and you get presumably top-quality, well-financed candidates. But that's applied to a very small number of the seats. From looking at legislatures, which I do do now, you have cases where 10 percent of the seats are competitive, and the parties take an intense interest in who runs in those seats. And there is a very elaborate recruitment process. And then in the other seats where they're saved for the party, the party doesn't even pay much attention to who gets that. That's just a free for all, and the guy who knocks on the most doors tends to get that. And those are just very different situations, and I think the produce different incentives and different kinds for people. But, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean how would we ever have what happened in '74 or '94 again? I don't know how we'd have it. MODERATOR: Alan, thank you very much. [Applause.]</body></html>