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Bob McDonnell, Conservative Pragmatist -This Virginia Republican offers a conservatism that can win again.
The p-word, pragmatist, has had a malodor in conservative circles since the Reagan years. Back then, it was a term of abuse that conservatives used against their moderate adversaries in intra-administration battles.
It’s time to rehabilitate the word, and Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell shows why. McDonnell is a conservative pragmatist whose campaign is winning independents — by 2–1 in a new Public Policy Polling survey — with an emphasis on basic quality-of-life issues. He relentlessly talks of three things: jobs, transportation, andeducation.
Both words in the label “conservative pragmatist” are important. McDonnell is indisputably a conservative — a Reaganite whose social-conservative credentials are impeccable (just ask the
Washington Post, which has been crusading against him for these views, expressed pungently in his long-ago graduate-school thesis). But he’s also a wonk who has focused on crafting policy to address the everyday concerns of Virginians.
The McDonnell campaign is consciously modeled after the successful George Allen campaign of 1993, which achieved the same synthesis of basic conservative values and a raft of innovative policy. Although now the issue mix is different. When Allen ran, welfare and crime were top-shelf domestic issues. They’ve faded since, and — besides jobs — McDonnell is concentrating on transportation and education instead.
This tack seems so commonsensical it should be unremarkable. Yet, there’s been an intense intra-conservative debate since the election last year between the traditionalists on the one hand and the reformers on the other. To over-simplify, the traditionalists think the mere assertion of conservative principles is enough to win elections (and if not, too bad). And the reformers think contemporary conservatism is so dated that it at the very least needs new policy and perhaps needs to be torn down entirely and built again.
McDonnell’s campaign demonstrates just how arid much of this debate is. McDonnell’s traditionalism informs his policy, and his policy invigorates his traditionalism and makes it appealing to the vast numbers of voters who aren’t driven by ideology or abstractions.
McDonnell has energized his base while not speaking exclusively to it.
Maybe the word “pragmatist” — too redolent of the weather vane and of surrender — can never quite be rehabilitated for conservatives. If so, forget the label and just think of what McDonnell is doing in Virginia as conservatism that can win again.