The drawing board.(Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again)(Book review)

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Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, by David Frum (Doubleday, 213 pp., $24.95)

CONSERVATIVES discontented with President Bush and his party are thick on the ground these days. David Frum is one of them, but he does not share their most common complaint--that Bush has failed to govern as a conservative and thus trashed the Republican brand. Frum points out that Bush won in 2000 in large part by presenting himself as a better heir to Bill Clinton than Al Gore would have been. Bush would preserve the status quo, welfare state very much included, without drawing national attention to Washington with tawdry scandals. Gore, meanwhile, ran on a promise to take on "the powerful" on behalf of "the people."

Had Bush run on a more conservative platform, Frum argues, he would have lost. Had he governed more conservatively, he would be even more unpopular than he is now. Conservative journalists and policy experts complain that Bush added an expensive prescription-drug benefit to the already-unaffordable Medicare program. "But," writes Frum, "public support for the benefit ranged between 80 percent and 90 percent through the first Bush term.... On issues from Social Security to health care to environmental protection, conservatives find themselves on the less popular side of the great issues of the day. That does not mean that conservatives are wrong. But it does mean that we are likely to lose if we continue repeating old formulas without adapting them to new times."

To react to the disappointments of the Bush years with nostalgia for the Reagan years is a big mistake, in Frum's view. Few of the country's problems "can be fixed by Reagan-style tax cutting and deregulation." But it is conservative themes, not just conservative policies, that need to be updated. "[H]ow many Americans in these opening years of the 21st century feel too little liberty to do what they want to do?" We have more liberty, and less order, than we used to have, and popular anxieties have shifted in response. The cultural issues that have brought Republicans to power over the last generation have also lost their potency. "FDR's party eventually accepted that nobody remembered Herbert Hoover any more. How many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale?"

Frum is, however, himself rightly nostalgic for the idealism and empiricism of Reagan-era conservatism. That conservatism saw accurately the challenges of its moment and devised ways to meet them. Younger conservatives have not produced successors to Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson, people who are both willing and able to do the intellectual work necessary today. "A new generation hungers for answers and solutions, and too often they hear only polemics, wisecracks, accusations, and talking points." In his treatment of what ails conservatism today, Frum is penetrating and wise--and indeed, to quote the title of one of his earlier books, dead right.

Frum not only identifies a vacuum but attempts to fill it. He gives advice to conservatives and Republicans about how they should tackle issue after issue. On some questions he wants conservatives to be bolder. He thinks that racial preferences in college admissions have removed an incentive for bright teenagers to work hard in school, and wants to abolish them. In the name of international competitiveness, he would abolish corporate taxes and most other taxes on investment. Immigration reform should aim not only to halt illegal immigration but to increase rather than decrease the skill level of our labor force. Frum even puts in a good word for term limits, a conservative cause now remembered only by, well, nostalgics.