Editors' Note: The Propsect has invited several conservative writers to respond to Mark Schmitt's cover story in our most recent issue. Our first contributor is Joshua Treviño, a co-founder of Redstate.com and the President of Treviño Strategies and Media, Inc., in Sacramento, California. He was a political appointee in the George W. Bush Administration from 2001 through 2004.
Mark Schmitt's May 27th TAP cover story ("Can Identity Politics Save the Right?") got a great deal right, and from this conservative's perspective, some key things wrong. There is a surfeit of "how the right went wrong" pieces of late, and it is to his credit that he produced an insightful addition to the genre from the perspective of someone interested in conservatism's destruction. There is nothing quite so enjoyable as documenting the fall of one's foes -- except, perhaps, plotting one's own redemption. The sad truth -- or joyous reality, for the TAP readership -- is that for conservatives and Republicans, this redemption is a long way off.
With media attention focused upon the bitter and increasingly strange Hillary Clinton candidacy, it is easy to forget that for a brief period, the Republican primary season was even more vitriolic and shrill than the Democratic campaign is now. From the rise of Mike Huckabee's candidacy in late December 2007 through the end of Mitt Romney's run on February 7th, 2008, the various factions within the GOP and the conservative movement fell upon one another like ravenous wolves upon a stripped carcass. Democrats now are upset because Hillary Clinton mentions RFK's assassination in what, to this outsider's ears, sounds like an innocent if clumsy comment. Republicans, by contrast, were treated to George Will denouncing Huckabee as the moral equal of blood-libel-spouting anti-Semites.
The fight was only superficially about the nomination: the major candidates were each proxies for some aspect of the Republican and conservative reaction to the events of the preceding decade -- and their concurrent visions of the futures of both party and movement. Huckabee was a more refined and, yes, more thoughtful version of 2000-era "compassionate conservatism"; Rudy Giuliani ran as a foreign-policy neoconservative; Fred Thompson was an embodied and inchoate wish for Reagan; and Mitt Romney sought to position himself as "all of the above," with an extra dash of functional competence.
John McCain won this field as a sort of default: "none of the above," though with a war policy more aggressive than the President's, and in doing so, his candidacy became a metonym for the tension between the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Schmitt writes, "conservatism and the Republican Party now rise and fall together and cannot easily be disentangled," but McCain's victory belies his assertion. Throughout the contested phase of the Republican primaries, McCain's march to the nomination followed a remarkably consistent pattern: self-described conservatives on nearly all issues broke decisively for Mitt Romney, or in the Deep South, for Huckabee.
