Ex-White House Official's New Book Tackles Conservatism's Conscience

[deminks]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/30/AR2007103001690.html

For Michael Gerson, the pattern became discouragingly familiar. A proposal to help the poor or sick would be presented at a White House meeting, but Vice President Cheney's office or the budget team or some other skeptical officials would shoot it down. Too expensive. Wrong priority.

By the time he left the White House as President Bush's senior adviser last year, Gerson by his own account had grown weary of the battle, becoming an irritable colleague disillusioned by the conventions of a political party and a government that seemed indifferent to the plight of the downtrodden. Now he is back with a new book and a publicity tour intended to fight for the identity of the Republican party.

"Traditional conservatism has a piece missing -- a piece that is shaped like a conscience," he writes in "Heroic Conservatism." His ambition, he says, is to help "save conservatism from its worst instincts" and build "a conservatism elevated by a radical concern for human rights and dignity."

Gerson, who now writes an opinion column for The Washington Post, was best known as the speechwriter who helped a famously inarticulate Texan find words to define his presidency at key moments. But he was also an apostle of "compassionate conservatism," Bush's effort to shave the harsh edges off the party of Newt Gingrich.

[dflprincess]

1. As I haven't noticed any conservatives with a conscience,

it must be an awfully short book.

[C_U_L8R]

2. Conservative. Conscience? Bwahahaha

They cancel each other out. What a joke.

[Jade Fox]

3. I saw him on the Daily Show today.....

Stewart, after hearing Gerson voice his concerns, sensibly asked why he doesn't switch parties? Unfortunately, I was interrupted and did not hear his response.

I don't know whether to be happy or sad that there are Fundamentalists and Conservatives like Gerson, trying to change those two perspectives from their mean-spiritedness. The current brand of both Conservativeness and Fundamentalism are alienating people in droves, and from one perspective that's a good thing because it lessens their political power (at least I hope it does). Gerson spoke about how younger Evangelicals are sick of their elders' obsession with other peoples sex lives, and are concerned about such things as poverty and global warming, so Fundamentalists will be voting differently, maybe.