The book on conservatives.(letters to the editor)(Letter to the Editor)

Ramesh Ponnuru's review of our book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America ("Not Quite Right," August 9) was so warped that we have decided to break a pledge never to complain about any of our critics.

Ponnuru chooses to ignore the main argument of the book--that the conservative movement both exemplifies and exaggerates American exceptionalism. Instead, he picks a quarrel with a small part of our text. Ponnuru's objection is that we argue social conservatives can sometimes be electoral liabilities to the Republican party. Disagreeing with us on that score is certainly legitimate. But it does not justify Ponnuru's selective misquoting, ignoring of context, presenting differences of opinion as errors of fact, and downright errors of his own.

We plead guilty to two of the factual errors Ponnuru lists: The cruise hosted by Oliver North and Wayne LaPierre was (partly) sponsored by the National Rifle Association rather than NATIONAL REVIEW, and The Weekly Standard was founded in 1995, not 1996.

Ponnuru is either wrong or guilty of Michael Mooreish misrepresentation on almost everything else. For instance, he claims that it is "not true" to say that 100 people on death row have been exonerated; most respected commentators accept that, for good or bad reasons, more than 100 Americans have been found not guilty of the murders for which they were sentenced to death. He says "Howard Dean was not 'a firm supporter of Israel,' at least in the view of firm supporters of Israel." This ignores context. Our sentence calling Dean "a firm supporter of Israel" occurs in a paragraph assessing the Democrat from the perspective of left-wing Europe, by whose standards, alas, Dean is certainly a firm supporter of Israel (his campaign was co-chaired by a former president of AIPAC).

Ponnuru often presents one part of our argument while ignoring others. For instance, he decides that we consider the Republicans' southern strategy "just terrible: They won southern whites over by sending subtle anti-black messages." We do argue that race was a big factor in the South, as do many fair-minded observers; but we also explain that there were other forces helping the GOP, from the arrival of immigrants from the northeast to the rise of an entrepreneurial business class. Similarly, from Ponnuru's review, you might assume that our book was about abortion, and that we depict abortion as a disastrous issue for Republicans. In fact, we point out that it helped lure blue-collar conservatives to the GOP; that there are signs younger women are more pro-life than their mothers; and that most voters "recoil" at partial-birth abortion.

Yes, we are rude about John Ashcroft--not because we think there is something wrong in being a social conservative, but because we think the attorney general may ...