Frum: U.S. Needs "Grown Up Politics"

In early March, David Frum dialed into the national radio program of American conservative firebrand Mark Levin. The evening prior, the host had spent roughly 10 minutes denouncing Mr. Frum in ugly terms. He was a “putz,” an “a-hole” a “frat boy.” The phone call did not go well. Mr. Frum tried explaining his reasoning for criticizing in his Newsweek column conservative broadcasting idol, Rush Limbaugh, the column that had set off the tirade: there were, he explained, insinuations made by that other conservative host about the president’s race and a subtle denigration of the esteem of the office of the president. As he spoke Mr. Levin began to yell, drowning out Mr. Frum.

“How silly are you? Silly. How silly are you?” He said. “Yeah, yeah, keep sayin’ it.” He then cut off Mr. Frum’s microphone.

This is not the sound of conservatives getting along, something many in the U.S. Republican party blame on David Frum, among a handful of other figures. It was also an example of the very conservative message these days — angry and uncompromising — that has put Mr. Frum on the outs with so many Republicans.

Conservative writer Mark Steyn wrote on the National Review website that Mr. Frum looked as though he was “putting his own interests ahead of the party’s” by attacking Republicans in a liberal magazine like Newsweek. And that same month, after Mr. Frum wrote a column lambasting the Republicans’ for refusing to work with Democrats to hammer out a better health-care plan, granting the President free reign and later telling Nightline that Republicans were discovering “we work for Fox [News]” an editorial in the Wall Street Journal dismissed him as “the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans.”

He was shortly afterward told by the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing think tank where he had for seven years been a resident fellow, that it would no longer employ him. In the Daily Beast, conservative writer Tunku Varadarajan, repudiated Mr. Frum by accusing him of compromising principles as a “polite-company conservative ... who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway—who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness, their shrillness and their talk radio.”

It’s true at least that Mr. Frum is increasingly unlike many prominent U.S. conservatives these days. He rankles at the acidity coming from right-wing mouthpieces such as Mr. Levin, Rush Limbaugh (who, truth be told, Mr. Frum critiqued in Newsweek, also for his “private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history” which, he said, portrays conservatives as “self-indulgent”), as well as Sarah Palin and former house speaker Newt Gingrich. He believes what Republicans are saying about the president’s party, and the high levels at which its being said, is worse than anything he heard under George W. Bush.

Mr. Frum speaks Monday at a Canadian Club of Toronto event as a man struck out on his own: having launched last year a conservative news website his own way, FrumForum.com, which draws, he says, up to a half a million visits a month, he’ll be speaking about how internet journalism is changing politics. At least, he hopes his own will.

“At exactly the moment that American society needs wise and responsible people to step forward, on my side the stage is being dominated by unwise and irresponsible people,” he says. “I’m not advocating being nice to Democrats for the sake of being nice. What I’m saying is the American system depends to a high degree of consensus among, I know it’s a dirty word these days, but a high degree of consensus among elites.”

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