They're off - conservative gathering sponsored by the National Review Institute is prelude to 1996 Republican presidential campaign - The Conservative Summit

National Review, March 29, 1993 by Richard Brookhiser

The National Review Institute Conservative Summit could be called the Mayflower Caucus of the 1996 Republican presidental campaign. In many ways it was more pleasant than real primary-season events: you didn't have to fly as far as Iowa or New Hampshire, and there were no whimpering farmers or greedy geezers when you arrived. Like an actual campaign forum, it was most interesting for what was said and done in public.

H. L. Mencken wrote that some people come to America because it pays better wages than Bulgaria, while others come because it has laws to keep them sober and their daughters chaste. Broadly speaking, the pols who addressed the summiteers resembled one or the other of these groups.

Jack Kemp spoke to the Summit's first session. He demonstrated then, as he always does, that he has what Oliver Wendell Holmes saw in FDR, a first-rate temperament. Basking in the sun of Kemp's personality is the political equivalent of a week in Jamaica. His manner triumphs even over his chaotic texts, and the address he gave at the Mayflower was atypically tight and concise.

"The purpose of a party in the minority," Kemp explained ebulliently, "is not to oppose, but to become a majority. I'm an old NFL quarterback. Do you expect me to say: |Great. We lost the ball. Now we can turn it over to the defense.'"

Kemp said the GOP had to rebut five myths in order to force a turnover in 1996: that the American people need to sacrifice - "Nonsense. Government should sacrifice"; that the deficit is due to the fact that Americans are undertaxed - "We overtax capital, labor, the family, the poor"; that government can create jobs - "Entrepreneurs do"; that children are a drain on 6the resources of America and the world - "Children are not mouths to feed." That made four myths, and it was time for Kemp to wrap up. But he shoehorned myth five into his conclusion: the conviction that there is any intrinsic problem with the values of the poor. The problem with the underclass, he insisted, and the source of its pathologies, was the welfare system. This last-minute mention of values was his biggest applause line. He ended by denying that he believed in a New Paradigm. "There is one paradigm," he said, "the Declaration of Independence," the key sentences of which he recited, returning them to the words of Jefferson's model, John Locke, by substituting "property" for "the pursuit of happiness."

He left everyone happy. Yet Kemp's intellectual property is beginning to look a little fenced in. Of his five myths, four were essentially economic, having to do with taxes, spending, or deliver systems. And granted that welfare created the underclass, how do we deal with misbehavior in the short run? If the welfare, system and the tax code were perfected, would that be the end of our problems? Two other politicians who appeared it the Mayflower ranged farther afield.

Newt Gingrich, who spoke Saturday afternoon, offered "five pillars" of wisdom for the twenty-first century, one of which repeated a point of Kemp's. Entrepreneurship, said Gingrich, is the key to wealth. He wanted conservatives to promote technological advances, too often delayed and burdened by "bureaucracy, litigation, taxation, and professional guilds," and "quality," Edwards Deming's term for the post-industrial work ethic. But Gingrich urged conservatives to push also for inculcating "the principles of American civilization" and the element, of "psychological strength" ("courage. hard work, persistence, discipline, integrity"). "The greatest threat to freedom today is the decay of American civilization here at home.... If we fail, Bosnia and Somalia are just the tip of the horrors that await our children."

The contrast was most pointed at lunch on Sunday, when William Bennett warned against "decivilization" and "barbarism." As society has become brutal, Americans have gone soft. Bennett compared a member of the Donner Party, who noted in his diary only that he and his fellow travelers were having "a hard winter," with a tremulous questioner at the second presidential debate last fall who begged the three candidates to acknowledge that "we are your children." Such changes for the worse, in our behavior and in our character, prompted Bennett to assail the single pillar of James Carville's wisdom. "It is not the economy, stupid. ... We showed the world that freedom is the bedrock of society. Now we must show the world that freedom can work."

It isn't as if Kemp and Bennett aren't speaking to each other, In fact, they are co-founders of Empower America, the newest of the conservative political/ideological space platforms. But they were saying distinctly different things at Mayflower.

The other important political presence at the Summit, Patrick Buchanan, did not say anything, since he wasn't there, but a fair amount was said about him. His former pollster, Frank Luntz, spoke after lunch on Saturday, while several other speakers beat Buchanan with assorted sticks. Most of the criticism of him was directed at his tone, as in these lines of Dan Quayle's former chief of staff, William Kristol: "Many of our forefathers came here to avoid religious wars. To go around proclaiming a religious war is probably not the way to appeal to a majority of the American people."