The Party of the Furrowed BrowWilliam Kristol
March 23, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 27
If you’re an establishment Republican, ripples of doubt are intruding on your normal placid contentment.
A special House committee to investigate Benghazi? Gee, is the public still interested in that? Isn’t it time to move on? And isn’t the chairman, Trey Gowdy, close to . . . shudder . . . the Tea Party?
An invitation to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress? Isn’t he kind of a polarizing figure? Couldn’t he lose his own election next week? Then how will we look? And wasn’t the protocol of the invite sort of mismanaged?
An open letter to the leaders of Iran on the nuclear deal? Isn’t that a touch unseemly? A tad presumptuous? A distraction from the serious debate we’re carefully teeing up for a few weeks or months from now? And look at all those attacks on Tom Cotton! Why didn’t they listen to the cooler conservative heads and grayer Republican beards whose advice has been so helpful in the past?
If brow-furrowing were thinking, the Republican establishment would be geniuses. If hand-wringing were prudence, GOP politicians would be exemplars of Aristotelian virtue. If tongue-clucking were eloquence, conservative elites would be orators for the ages.
But of course Trey Gowdy, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tom Cotton have done more for conservative principles and Republican prospects in the last few weeks than the brow-furrowers, hand-wringers, and tongue-cluckers have done in years.
How do we know about Hillary Clinton’s emails—a revelation that will damage and could even derail her 2016 prospects? From the Benghazi committee headed by Trey Gowdy. Who forced the beginning of a serious debate about the full scope and meaning of the administration’s capitulation to Iran? Benjamin Netanyahu. Who stimulated a real discussion of the implications of the administration’s failure to go to Congress for approval of the Iran nuclear deal? Tom Cotton and his 46 colleagues.
And who scares the left? Judging from the vitriol, it’s Gowdy, Netanyahu, and Cotton. Why? Because they’re tough. And because they fight on important issues rather than trivial ones. And because they fight intelligently and strategically. And because they fight to win.
And they may win. The GOP congressional leadership, Republican elites, and some conservative advice-givers, on the other hand, don’t much like to fight. Given that they expect, deep down, to lose, they would prefer to do so gracefully, or at least politely.
In provoking the attacks on them, Gowdy, Netanyahu, and Cotton have also done a service. Used to dealing with a feckless opposition and fastidious opponents, the left has flipped out. The infantile and hysterical McCarthyism of the assault reveals, for all to see, the character of today’s left. And the failure of respectable liberals to repudiate the left’s McCarthyism is also telling.
As a great American writer put it, “Politics ain’t bean-bag.” Republicans and conservatives spend an awful lot of time playing endless variations and ingenious permutations of bean-bag. But it’s baseball, not bean-bag, that is the American game. It should of course be played cleanly and forthrightly, and according to the rules. But baseball is hardball. So is politics. Maybe it’s time to stop fussing and fretting long enough to learn how to play it.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/party-furrowed-brow_884673.html
