When speechwriter David Frum, author of the "axis of evil" line in President Bush's first State of the Union Address (well, half of it), announced last week that he was departing the White House, the press began to circle. Frum's wife Danielle Crittenden had written an e-mail expressing "wifely pride" in her husband's coinage and the e-mail had leaked to Slate's Timothy Noah, who published it. The lazy but not unreasonable assumption was that the story did not play well with the leak-averse Bush White House. The Economist summed up the rampant speculation, "Was he pushed or did he jump?"
But this ready-made scandal approach not only overestimated the tactile sensitivity of the Bush administration to an inconsequential e-mail, it also may have obscured Frum's true reasons for jumping ship: ideology and intellectual consistency.
The Canadian Frum rose to prominence among U.S. conservatives by penning the 1994 book Dead Right. In it, Frum hurled rocks at three then-giants of the Republican Party -- Jack Kemp, Bill Bennett and Pat Buchanan -- with remarkable precision. Conservatives in general, Frum charged, had shrugged off their bedrock commitment to freedom via minimal government in favor of trendier issues like sex, race, and wacky theories of economic development.
The tonic he prescribed was an anti-government conservatism not tethered to the electoral prospects of the Republican Party. Rather than engaging in policy cleverness, conservative intellectuals should "practice honesty and pay the price." In varied outlets over the next several years, the libertarian-leaning Frum advocated the decriminalization of pot, cutting back Medicare, popularized the "never more" proposal (a candidate should promise a freeze of government spending at current non-inflation-adjusted levels for the duration of his administration), opposed the war in Kosovo, and even cast an acid glance at Bush's pick of Dick Cheney for veep -- in the New York Times. In short, whether or not you accept his libertarian philosophy, Frum certainly lived up to his own billing.
Then, in a January 2001 shocker, Frum announced in his National Post column that he was joining Bush's speechwriting team to pen the president's economic speeches. Since Frum's vision of government and Bush's compassionate conservatism were nigh incompatible, Frum used the column as an opportunity to swallow much of his previous advocacy for radical reduction in the size of government and warned that such sentiments had almost cost Republicans the Congress in 1996.
Still, there was much reason to believe that Frum was dissembling. He was entering an administration whose actions were often much more conservative than its rhetoric, with a Congress that was then controlled by Republicans. Frum would be employed to mint sound bites to help pass tax cuts, promote free trade agreements, justify deregulation, privatize social security and explain the absence of a promised prescription benefit for seniors. Not a bad tradeoff for one crow-eating column.
But the situation Frum found himself in this year had changed. September 11 obviously shook things up, but many other variables have shifted as well. Democrats control the Senate and may continue to do so after the midterm elections, deficits have made future giant tax cuts unlikely, and Bush is turning out to be less of a peach than anti-government conservatives had bargained for.
The president made a point of including the promised drugs benefit in his State of the Union when he could have used the war to push it off. He championed the expansion of the Clinton program AmeriCorps, which had been particularly hated by conservatives. He stands poised to sign campaign finance reform and to either impose tariffs on foreign steel to placate West Virginia steelworkers or merely shower them with cash. Bush chose perhaps the most hard-line drug czar in that office's history.
All of this would be anathema to David Frum the ideologue; he would have bristled at having to come up with the words to expand government. Could it be that Frum was a conservative version of Robert Reich, the former Clinton Secretary of Labor (and on leave TAP chairman) who grew disillusioned with the president's triangulating centrism and fled the cabinet? At any rate, it's a far more likely explanation for his departure than a piece of leaked e-mail.
