Just Say "No" To New Gop Voters
New contributor Crystal Wright yesterday posted a debut piece here at FF explaining why she now regrets her vote for Barack Obama in November 2008. A healthy political movement and political party enthusiastically welcomes new supporters. And unless those new supporters are just emerging from infancy, there is only one place to find them: among former non-supporters, even former opponents.
Many years ago, at another dark time for conservatism, William F. Buckley did a marvelous interview. It's collected in his book of columns, Inveighing We Will Go. I'll have to quote from memory here, but the interview concluded with an explanation from Bill about the mission of National Review as he then saw it. We are maintaining an air strip in the jungle. And when the planes begin to land, we'll be there to welcome them - coffee and coke on the house.
That's the spirit of the evangelist.
As I said, that was a long time ago. Today, conservatives are barricading our landing strips. Look at the comments under Crystal's piece: 55 as I write this. Do a blogsearch for her name. The cumulative hostility of the discussion is breathtaking. I realize blog discussion is not a statistically valid sampling, and that no doubt many read Crystal's words in the right spirit. The trouble is that the tone of our movement is set by those who do speak up. And too many of those who do speak seem to think that the test of true conservatism is tolerance for maximum obnoxiousness.
That it seemed to me was a subtheme of the discussion earlier this week of the now notorious Mark Levin "gun to temple" broadcast. A prominent conservative radio voice shrieks at a woman caller, accuses her of hating her country and the constitution (actually "my country" and "my constitution" - apparently US citizenship and the US constitution are not to be shared with those who disagree) and then advises her husband to kill himself. Unattractive, one would think. Off-putting even. Across the conservative blogosphere, however, opinion ran strong: This kind of talk is OK, a pardonable, even laudable, way of communicating frustration.
Unfortunately, frustrated people make poor spokespersons, and they make worse welcome committees. Barack Obama won almost 10 million more votes than John McCain. The next Republican president will have to win a lot of them back. Berating and insulting is probably not the most effective strategy for doing so.
Here for once is where the Reagan example really does hold continuing validity: Reagan never asked the people who joined him for proof of lineage. He was as glad - even more glad! - to welcome those who had voted for Carter in 1976 as to welcome those who had voted for Goldwater in 1964. Bill Buckley was the same way. That spirit of inclusion ranks high among the qualities that made these men not only great men, not only good men, but successful men. Let's emulate them, and say: "Welcome Crystal. We're glad to have you."