As Pure As The Driven Snow

Have you ever picked up newly-driven snow, and compared it to a sheet of white paper? If not, you'd be surprised how impure driven snow really is. I purposely chose the picture to point that out. Ivory Snow took its name from that driven snow. It had a very famous series of ads and commercials featuring one Marilyn Chambers. Very pretty, very pure, and Marilyn was considered very pure herself, right up until it turned out she was a porn-flick star.

OK, you say. He's gone nuts and has started fixating on porn stars and laundry detergent. This is a fringe, right-wing sleaze site after all. Sorry to disappoint, but that's not at all where I'm going with this post. The Republican National Committee recently rejected a "purity test" for vetting future candidates, and I applaud their decision. Though many will think it's a rejection of conservative viewpoints, or of Ronald Reagan's rule-of-thumb, I assure you that the RINOs haven't regained their control of the Republican National Committee.

Political naifs, all with good intentions I'm sure, tried to impose a purity test (in the form of but not the substance of Reagan's "80% rule") on the Republican Party, and the people who knew better defeated the move. Sometimes, cooler heads need to prevail, and those who believe that purity tests will ever work are going to do severe damage to the Republican Party. It is more than acceptable for genuine causes outside the party to have their own internal rules, and to attempt to make them part of the platform of major political parties. It is equally important to recognize that real politics and successful political parties are built in part on reasonable compromises.

Even the great Ronald Reagan himself espoused the "Eleventh Commandment (thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Repubican)," but couldn't always be "pure" enough to adhere to it. He was donwright dismissive of Nelson Rockefeller and the "old guard" of the Republican Party. As for the "eighty percent rule," he routinely ignored it when political necessity called for it. He knew that guidelines and platforms are general rules of thumb, made most effective by their observance, but occasionally by their exceptions.

Ronald Reagan had a marvelous way of understanding conventional wisdom, and he most certainly understood the principle that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." A party platform which opposes abortion, for instance, should guide the candidate. But if that same candidate then found it necessary to argue for returning the issue to the power of the states, getting it out of the federal arena, he would appear to be deviating from the platform. But in fact, he would be setting the stage for abolishing abortion or greatly restricting it since the public will is clearly to eliminate "abortion on demand." That is more likely to happen at the state level than the federal. Has that candidate "abandoned principle," or actually advanced it with a sensible political compromise? In other words, is he pure enough on abortion?

Liberals in the mainstream media were quick to pick up on this misunderstanding of the issue. They essentially accused Reagan of political hypocrisy and the proponents of the purity move as ignorant fools. They got the best of both worlds--attack a great president and mock the right at the same time. But as Mr. Reagan said, "the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so." So why hand them the ammunition to shoot us with?

Unfortunately, the same can be said of some of our conservative friends. The Tea Party movement has its own agenda, much of which I agree with. But until it has a platform of its own and an agreed-upon leadership, I don't want it to control the Republican Party now, or perhaps ever. The very nature of the movement is a wonderful example of the people getting their message out to the politicians. But the moment it starts to attempt to dominate the actual political parties, I begin to have my doubts that it is still a popular movement with many points of view, most of which are common sense, conservative, or both. It will at that point have become a form of political party of its own, and that road leads to disaster for the Republican Party in particular, and the nation in general. You can't win the game if you lose sight of the ball.

Reagan was never able to get his social welfare cuts to go along with tax cuts. As a result, and facing a Democratic Congress, he did the best he could. It produced a new deficit, but it also produced the greatest peacetime boom in the economy in American history. Still, to emphasize my point, it didn't mean he didn't understand the Laffer Curve (the so-called trickle-down theory), he was just unable to get any of it done without compromise. Obama's "trickle-up" agenda shows what happens when a President doesn't understand the Laffer Curve and has large Democratic majorities to advance the damage done by his policies. Unlike Reagan (and contrary to his own words), he is unwilling to compromise. Speech: "I'll listen to the Republicans." Private message to the Democrats: "Ignore the Republicans, full speed ahead."

We have discussed the future of the Republican Party on this site almost since its beginning. One of the things we have suggested multiple times is that a political party needs a platform that it can stand on which doesn't build its own termites into the wood. Tea Party members, staunch conservatives, moderates and candidates can all rally around a platform that states the general principles of the party without agreeing that each candidate (or the party itself) must adhere 100% to rigid rules that prohibit reasonable compromise. A platform that is more "wish list" than bludgeon is called for. That leaves the local parties and movement activists free to hold their local candidates' feet to the fire without attempting to make it a "one size fits all" rigid purity test.

I guarantee you that the Republicans in Topeka have an entirely different view of purity from those in San Diego. A national purity test will accomplish chaos and/or defeat. An eighty-percent rule cannot be either firm or national, unless one small segment of the electorate gets control of the party, and that is a guarantee of defeat. Acceptance of general principles does not squelch our ability to continue to try to convince the majority of the rightness of our own specific agendas. A party that is perfectly pure by the standards of a small minority will remain a small vocal minority party while contemporaneously damaging the ability of the movement activists to get their agendas listened to over the broad spectrum of the American electorate. Each time the Republican Party goes down to defeat as the result of purity tests, it enables the RINOs to point fingers and say "see, conservative views just cost us another election."

Even Andrew Price and I don't agree on everything, and we couldn't produce a "purity test" that both could adhere to. But we agree on general conservative principles, and the necessity of the Republican Party to show national unity in the face of the leftist goals of the Democrats. Barry Goldwater's campaign in 1964 was a prime example of what I'm talking about. His principles were excellent, but his unwillingness to bend on anything the traditional Republicans proposed resulted in a landslide defeat and the re-emergence of the Nixon/Rockefeller/Ford wing of the party.

Ronald Reagan agreed with Goldwater's agenda, but changed the game entirely by including moderates and moderate-liberals in his efforts. He warned that the Ford presidency was the direct result of conservatives being too rigid. The hangover from Goldwater still kept him from defeating Ford in the primaries, but he won the ultimate victory after four years of Carter. Goldwater ideology combined with Reagan willingness to compromise produced a Republican landslide for the presidency by Reagan's second term. Reagan remained throughout the remainder of his life a conservative, but he was not "a lamb without blemish or spot." Anyone who believes that Reagan was a purist has a bad case of selective memory loss.

When viewing the political candidates and parties we will be faced with in the next two election cycles, I remind every conservative of the Bibilical admonition: "For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." St. Paul and St. Peter couldn't even agree on whether gentiles could ever become Christians because they were not Jews. So which of those two saints fails the "purity test?" And if one of them fails, does that mean his words should not be listened to, or that his stature should be reduced by the proportion of his failure?

For all these reasons, and many more, I believe the Republican National Committee made exactly the right decision. Now it's time for them to start preparing those general principles which will evolve into the national Republican platform. If the principles are too liberal, they will fail. If the principles are moderate-conservative, they will succeed. But if they are entirely "pure," it will be a disaster of epic proportions. The left knows that and encourages it, even as it derides purity in order to whip up the ultraconservatives and Tea Party members. It's time for conservatives to wake up to the same reality.

The next time you view the driven snow, enjoy its beauty, but don't count on its purity.