The GOP's master strategist - William Kristol - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by Jon Meacham

To be sure, Kristol does not ignore history altogether. Like his mother, whose studies of Lord Acton and Victorian England, for example, reveal a formidable appreciation of the complexity of human affairs, Kristol knows the world is a complicated place. Still, he has difficulty publicly overcoming his tactical instincts to acknowledge that the other side - in this case, the Democrats - ever has a point. "Conservatives do of course favor an energetic government within its proper sphere," Kristol said in a speech last year. Today, asked directly about what the "proper sphere" is, he says: "What's most striking today is when there's a problem - spouse abuse, you name it - right away someone stands up and introduces federal legislation. There is something crazy about politics of this sort. It creates a politics that is so driven by the crisis of the day or of the week that it's awfully hard to have a sensible debate about anything."

A wonderful answer: witty, glib, partly true. There is a lot of posturing and nattering on Capitol Hill. But that doesn't tell us what government's "proper sphere" is. Ducking the hard choices about what services should continue and what should be cut, Kristol instead argues for dismantling the federal government as we know it. He proposes term limits for lawmakers, a balanced budget amendment, a flat income tax. Fair enough; they are all ideas that deserve a hearing. But note that these are ideas that don't require taking on any particular interest. The GOP has promised such prairie fires before, including abolishing the Departments of Education and Energy, and never delivered. The real question, then, is whether Republicans have anything beyond Kristol's indisputably clever way with words to recommend their being trusted with government again.

Right Jabs

When Kristol was at Education, for example, he and Bennett did some smart things, including beating back the more extreme aspects of bilingual education and making the right speeches about values. People who were there remember Kristol as an excellent manager and strategic thinker. But for all of Bennett and Kristol's commendable rattling of the cages of the education lobby, what did they actually accomplish in those years? Not a great deal. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation noted, in 1989: "Inside Washington, Bennett accomplished little to make reforms part of the legislative framework. He preferred the bully pulpit to negotiating on the Hill."

Kristol brought the same fondness for strategic style over substance to the Council on Competitiveness, a small body with a staff of eight that worked under Kristol in Quayle's office. Though the Bush administration generally failed to live up to its anti-regulatory rhetoric - it published 35,000 more pages in the Federal Register than Reagan did in his first term - Kristol used the Council to position Quayle as a conservative champion of business interests within the White House. The Council would review major proposed federal regulations (usually at the request of affected industries, which were usually big-dollar GOP donors) and would in turn lobby agencies to soften the proposals.