Has Conservatism Failed?
TRANSCRIPT: The Prospect's Robert Kuttner and the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol debate whether conservatives can be trusted to govern.

This debate took place at the Failure of Conservatism Conference, sponsored by The American Prospect and the Campaign for America's Future on May 3, 2007. Click here for more highlights from the conference.

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Bob Kuttner: I think we're going to hear a lot beginning tonight of Gipper nostalgia. We're going to hear a lot of delicate bobbing and weaving in which the Republican Presidential field tries to distance itself from George W. Bush without quite disowning Bush. We're going to hear that he wasn't quite what the conservative movement had in mind, that maybe he was a closet big spender or a foreign policy bungler and that what America needs is a true conservative.

But make no mistake, the Bush era was the conservative movement's moment. The right had wall-to-wall control of the government; it had a cheering squad in the think tanks and the media. It had parliamentary discipline of the sort that is seldom seen in this republic. It took a village. It took a movement. It took the best the conservative movement had to offer. It took Cheney and Rumsfeld, and Ken Lay and Tom DeLay, and Bill Kristol, and Grover Norquist, and the K Street project, and the weird alliance between the religious right and Wall Street. And the right wing got six years in which to try out all of its ideas, everything from abstinence only sex education to self-regulation by the drug industry and by Enron to supply side economics 2.0 on steroids, leaving us with a debt to central bankers from Asia, the total liberation of financial engineering, faith-based science, and a weird blend of Wilsonian idealism and Texas swagger.

These were the fruits of conservative ideology, and it all crashed and burned. And at the center of it was the most feckless, feeble, ill-informed, and easily manipulatable president perhaps ever. The conservative movement took full advantage of the opportunity to fill the empty vessel of George W. Bush.

The foreign policy was built on delusion; the economic strategy led to the widest gap between huge fortunes and the fortunes of ordinary people ever. The attempt to dismantle the core pillars of social insurance, Social Security and Medicare, by re-branding a society of vulnerability as an opportunity society was tried out and mercifully failed.

Every day we see the results of not principled libertarianism but simple opportunism, whether it is the student loan scandal or the failure to regulate the environment, the failure to enforce the laws to protect worker safety and health and on and on and on. When the serial failures of this conservative moment are added up, I think future historians are going to ask where were the Republic patricians who cared about the republic, where were the conservative libertarians who cared about liberty, where were the conservative foreign policy realists, where were the fiscal conservatives, where were the scientists who were principled conservatives who were not pandering to the religious right?

I think the failure of the Bush era is the failure both of conservative ideology and of financial elites who ought to know better. Now, what is strange if you look forward to the election campaign, is that you are going to find Republican candidates delicately distancing themselves from Bush but not from the Bush ideology, because the tendency to play to the base, even though the base is a smaller and smaller and smaller percentage of the American electorate, lingers on. And so you have three frontrunners who actually committed various heresies of moderation and who might be well-positioned at something slightly different doing whatever they can to follow the same playbook that Bush did.

John Kennedy said famously that victory has 1,000 fathers and that defeat is an orphan. We are already seeing many conservatives run for the exits, and to say that somehow Bush was not what they had in mind. This was your moment. It had 1,000 fathers. George W. Bush could not have created this mess alone. And the irony is that Bush came into office with an opportunity to be a uniter, not a divider, and if he had chosen to govern as a moderate, as a healer, he might have built a center-right majority that could have lasted for a generation. But I think historians will record that this was the collapse of an era, the collapse of a movement and the collapse of an ideology. Thank you.

(Applause)

Bill Kristol: I feel that I'm here to adopt that poor orphan that Bob thinks everyone is running away from and since I'm a compassionate conservative, I'm happy to take that orphan home and -- if that orphan is moderate conservatism. The conservative movement started over 50 years ago, the modern American conservative movement. It got modified in the '70's, I would say particularly by the influence of religious conservatives on one hand and the neo-conservatives on the other.

Conservatism really came into power in 1980 obviously with Reagan and, more or less, I think it's fair to say shaped more public policies than not over the subsequent 25 years until now. I am more than happy -- given the normal complexities of any movement and its differences within itself and the difficulties of transforming theory into practice, etc. etc. -- I'd be more than happy for conservatism to be judged by the results.

Let's compare 1980 and today. Do we really think conservative economic policies have failed? I shouldn't ask rhetorical questions in this room since I guess I know the answer. If people who want to go back to the (inaudible) of 1979, 70 percent (inaudible) tax rates, highly regulated airline industries, etc. can make that case but, I think, on the whole, I'm very happy to defend the proposition that the basic thrust of supply-side economics, deregulation, tax cuts, freeing up of markets has been good for the country, has produced very impressive economic growth over a quarter century, has helped other parts of the world grow economically. That in other parts of the world like China and India, I like to prefer India as a democracy but nonetheless in both of them the adoption of market-based capitalist principles brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and that basically, the conservative record on economics is a pretty impressive success by historical standards. I would even say a pretty unambiguous success and the truth is the left isn't going to roll much of that back and can't, I think, roll much of that back.

So that was at the national level with Reagan on economic policy. On other social issues, on crime, Rudy Giuliani took over the wonderful liberal city of New York and was an awfully effective mayor and reduced crime and made the city livable again. On welfare reform, we had a nice (inaudible) of l996 that was a clear fight, a conservative priority for 20 years, change in welfare, terrible predictions from the left about what a terrible disaster that would be, and I don't notice even the most left-wing Democratic presidential candidates campaigning on restoring AFDC.

On cultural and social issues, that's more complicated and obviously wouldn't happen to have a (inaudible) test quite the way one does in some of these other areas but I would very much defend the conservative and the open conservative concerns about the erosion of the family, the sense that the kind of excessive liberalism posed real risks to the social fabric and especially to children. How one solves these problems is very complicated, and I would never claim that the conservatives have all the answers there. But I think the alarm at some of these modern from the right including from the religious conservatives was intelligence and some were vindicated by events.

And in foreign policy, Reagan has one of the greatest vindications I think that any president can have, coming to power with a clear change of policy with respect to the Soviet Union and leaving power as the Soviet Union crumbled and then his successor, President Bush, presiding over the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union and then the integration of Central and Eastern Europe at least, unfortunately not Russia so much so far, but essentially Eastern Europe into a Europe whole and free.

Now here it gets complicated to say what's conservatism and what's not, but at least my form of conservatism which Reaganites, you know, the old conservative, the aggressive willingness to use American power both military but also, of course, political and diplomatic for supporting our friends around the world in good (phonetic) and democracy, I would say also [was] certainly vindicated in the case of the Soviet Union and Europe and actually Asia, I would say.

Obviously, it's been tougher in the Middle East. I think it's the right prescription, however, in the Middle East and the war in Iraq was badly executed, but I am by no means willing to concede even there that we would be better off not to have gone to war and to have Saddam reconstituting his nuclear weapons program, which George Tennant says in his book he would be doing right around 2007.

So I think actually I'm perfectly happy to defend the achievements of conservatism on that over the last 25 years and I am hopeful that we will learn something from those achievements, and I'll come here 25 years from now and I'll defend the achievements of a newly revitalized liberalism that's been informed by the great successes of the conservative movement.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): Now we go to our four-minute rebuttal.

Bob Kuttner: Well, in 25 years I will be happy to come back here and debate you on the 25 year liberal era. It's going to follow the meltdown of conservatism.

You will notice in Bill's remarks that what was barely mentioned was Iraq, for good reasons, because it's the single failure of (inaudible) foreign policy, and what was barely mentioned was George W. Bush. Reagan ceased being president eighteen years ago, and I think you could make a stretch of an argument that maybe the Reagan years weren't so bad, although they were certainly bad in terms of who benefited -- but not a good sign that you have to reach back 18 years to defend conservatism. In fact, economic growth and who benefited from the growth was much, much more impressive in the '90's when, of course, Clinton was president.

Welfare reform cut the welfare roles. It sent people into the labor market. It could have been much kinder and gentler. It could have sent people back to school to learn skills that would pay decent jobs. It could have included decent childcare. Today, I think, the erosion of the family is much more due to economics than it is to cultural factors -- people having to choose between their jobs and their children. Families working 500 hours more per year than they did a generation ago just to keep even. That's the result of the way growth has been distributed.

Last week we learned that the top hedge fund, a manager earned 1.7 billion dollars in a year and let me retract earned -- uh, made. (Laughter) This was emblematic of the neocon or the con economy.

It's a bit much to credit Reagan with the collapse of communism. Some people might credit Kennan and, in fact, it was the policy of containment, which the antecedents of Rumsfeld and Cheney disparaged as the Dean Acheson College of Cowardly Containment, that very accurately saw that communism would fall of its own way if we didn't start World War III. This is really the first time that people around the world have real reasons to worry about whose finger is on the nuclear trigger, and whether the most powerful leader in the world is reality-based or delusional, and we still have 18 more months before we can breathe a bit easier.

So Bill can make a very adroit argument that conservatism has been a success but the voters are going to decide that, and fewer and fewer and fewer voters are buying either the ideology or the incumbent. Gallup had a remarkable study out about two weeks ago which shows that the percentage of Americans who believe that the rich have too much money and that the government ought to play a more active role in creating opportunity for regular people -- those numbers are at their highest since 1939, and my question really is more for liberals and for Democrats.

I think there is no doubt that conservatism has been thoroughly discredited by the verdict of history, but I fear that the residual power of wealth in this country, the translation of wealth into political power, is so strong that even if a Democrat gets elected, even if the Democrats pick up seats in both houses, it's going to be hard to reverse that momentum. It's going to be hard to rebuild the pillars on which the opportunity and security of the mixed economy of the post-war era were built. Some of the disasters of the past several years had some conservative Democrats supporting them -- the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a bipartisan hit job. You have Democrats as well Republicans, often more Democrats than Republicans, preaching budget balance as the mother of all virtues rather than social investment. And so I think the challenge for progressives is to not be complacent and to not assume that the collapse of conservatism is the revival of progressivism. That will take real work.

Bill Kristol: I was glad to hear Bob defend Rubinomics in the '90's and I will be happy -- if that's the alternative to Reaganomics that's fine with me. We can have a decade of Reaganomics and a decade of Rubinomics, and that will be the two-party system in America and that's what we've had in 25 years. Well, that's what we have had and you wanted to fight Clinton's economic performance in the '90s as a counter to Reagan's success, and I'm saying fine.

I accept Clinton's economic performance. That's basically conservatism and I don't believe that any Democratic candidate is going to want to go back to the, as I say, 70 percent tax rate. George Kennan was an impressive man and his doctrine of containment is one that I support but the real existing alternatives of Ronald Reagan was Jimmy Carter, and I would say that Reagan's foreign policy was more successful than Carter's. But let me not run away from Bush and Iraq because I want to defend Bush, too. I mean, the truth is, we had an experiment on these tax cuts. Supply side tax cuts were passed in 2003.

Let's go back and look at the predictions and see who came closer in terms of how big the budget deficit is today -- lower than when the tax cuts were passed; how high unemployment is today -- lower than when the tax cuts were passed. Even, actually, income inequality, which always takes -- the working class wage boosters, which takes longer to come back in when you recover from a recession as we are recovering after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, has now begun to come up a little bit.

So, not everything is great and I, myself, would urge Republicans to move in the direction that Matt Continetti's written about and others at the Weekly Standard, of Sam's Club Republicanism, and thinking more creatively about how to reform government program for the working class and for the stretched working class, middle class, how to be pro-family in a way that's consistent with prospecting market principles and the like. That's a perfectly reasonable second generation, third generation conservative agenda item, and there are some interesting liberal contributions to be made to that thinking. But that's not fundamentally, I think, going to reverse the achievements of a conservative domestic policy. And you know we had a very nice test case in New York in the most liberal city that was governed sort of strenuously and consistently by liberal principles for decades, and it took Giuliani to come in and fundamentally reverse those principles in two or three key areas. And I think New York is an awfully lot more livable city now, especially, including for rich people but also for poor people and also for recent immigrants, legal and illegal, than it was under the days of David Dinkins.

So I'm happy to defend with Reagan against Carter, with Giuliani against Dinkins, I've drifted away from Bush again, I suppose this proves Bob's point, (laughter) my subconscious keeps dragging me slightly a bit away from him but look the truth is, look I'm happy to debate Iraq. That's a whole different story. But I will defend the economic policy; I'll defend the foreign policy and the next Democratic president is going to end up with a foreign policy much more like Bush's, maybe not in style but in content, than people think because the world is the way the world is, and there's a Jihaddist Islam and there are terror networks and Iran is getting, well, there is a Jihaddist Islam. We could discus how big and how threatening it is and I think it's pretty threatening and it's threatening when it's related to terror groups, and it's threatening when there are regimes that are seeking nuclear weapons that embrace forms of that and the next president is going to have to deal with it whether he's Democratic or Republican.

I do wish we had more, it would be healthier for the country to have a more bipartisan foreign policy and, occasionally, I think that having a Democrat as a president who would sort of do what Eisenhower did after Truman in a sense and make what would be the basic structure of Bush's foreign policy a bipartisan effort which is I think what would happen might be a healthy thing for the country. But I can't quite follow the logic of that thought too far and actually fully embrace the Hillary Clinton candidacy. I won't do that because that would not help her, I think, in the Democratic primary.

Karen Tumulty (Moderator): Well, Bob, my question to you is if, in fact, some of Bill Clinton's hardest fought achievements -- you talked about welfare reform, the crime bill -- were fundamentally based on conservative ideas, we're building on conservative ideas, free trade being another one. But with the exception of free trade, you really don't hear the Democratic candidates talking a lot about turning back those ideas and, you know, if these ideas were such a failure, why are Democrats not talking about turning them back?

Bob Kuttner: Well, I think, let's differentiate between Rubinomics, which I could spend a whole hour debating, and some of the other initiatives. I do think you're going to hear Democratic candidates talking about doing more for economic security and for economic opportunity. Clinton was a centrist president. He was a centrist president who had to contend with a Republican house and in a lot of cases, he split the difference and in some cases he went beyond splitting the difference. Welfare reform could have been done and should be done much more humanely. We need things that go far beyond the Clinton social program that I do think you'll hear Democratic candidates standing for such as universal health insurance, such as universal pre-kindergarten.

Let me -- I'm not here as the Democrat. I'm here as the progressive, and I think Democratic conservatives have done a lot of damage by validating kind of a milder version of hard right ideology. Rubin falsely claims credit for the boom of the '90's. It had a lot more to do with productivity growth finally bearing fruit and the Federal Reserve deciding to take its foot off the brake, none of which had anything to do with deficit reduction. And I think the biggest single mistake the Democrats make is to think that this cycle which Bill so warmly alludes to, with Democrats cutting taxes and then -- with Republicans cutting taxes and then Democrats reciprocating by cutting spending.

If this goes on and on and on, you'll end up with a government, as our friend Grover Norquist likes to say, that's so small it can be drown in the bathtub, and that's not exactly progressive. There are all kinds of social needs that should be addressed, and I hope Democrats will move in that direction.

Bill Kristol: I actually have no particular stake in Rubinomics one way or the other, not a particular fan of Bob Rubin but I just knew that an event with Bob Kuttner and sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future I had to say the word "Rubinomics" early on to get everyone's hackles up, you know. Reagan is fine with you guys but Rubin, that's really the -- (laughter) devil.

I could think of other people I could cite of that nature.

Bob Kuttner: Lieberman.

Bill Kristol: Yes. (Laughter) Thank you, I'll save that.

Karen Tumulty: (moderator) I was going to ask the question but it also, as it turns out, came from the audience, Bill. Why do Republicans preach smaller government then increase government spending and the national debt far more than Democrats when they get in power? What's the disconnect here between the idea and the execution here?

Bill Kristol: Well, one disconnect is not all Republicans are libertarian or Grover Norquist-like small government Republicans. I think less neo-conservatives are more willing to accept, not more willing -- were willing to accept the conservative welfare state and try to reform it in ways that might leave government spending at around 20 percent the GDP which is, in fact, what happened. It does seem that there is a pretty strong political consensus in this country where it's hard to budge overall federal government expenditures too much above or below 1/5 GDP. And so liberals promise grand things, the conservatives promise grand cuts and neither tends to happen.

The system is very resistant to radical change. I don't think that's a bad thing. I'm not for -- I don't go to sleep at night worrying that the federal government is taking about 20 percent of GDP. It seems to be perfectly actually quite reasonable. It's better than taking 40 or 50 percent of GDP, I think. I think that's one reason why we're doing better than some of those countries that do take 40 or 50 percent of GDP. I do think it's important for conservatives that kind of conservative reform agenda is important.

Let me mention the Bush program which I was ambivalent about and don't actually know a huge amount about, but the Medicare plan which, you know, was very controversial among conservatives, certainly opposed by the Democrats and by the left of 2003, and I would say that Medicare Part D the prescription drug benefit actually seems to be working pretty well. You know, it's costing less money -- I mean, I think there are ways to do where you wouldn't be giving this benefit to upper income seniors but it was decided to do it universally. The fact is it's coming in under budget, and a huge number of seniors are getting cheaper drugs and getting them pretty effectively. So that's fine. So that was passed by Bush and the Republican Congress.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): But that was not a conservative idea.

Bill Kristol: Well, you can't have it both ways, you know. We're blamed for everything Bush and the Republican Congress does and the two major pieces of legislation they passed were Medicare Part D and the tax cuts, and I think that both have worked out as legislation goes, with all the unintended consequences. Those were two pretty good achievements, judging from the results.

Bob Kuttner: I mean, may I come back a moment on Medicare Part D?

Karen Tumulty (moderator): Sure.

Bob Kuttner: People who have really looked at this issue are quite aware that Medicare Part D was designed as a subsidy to the drug industry and a subsidy to the insurance industry and it's the entering wedge in an assault on public Medicare.

One of the reasons it came in below budget is that the donut hole is so large is that a lot of the seniors find that it's not cost effective to take the policy. So it's a classic example of what happens when you put people who don't have any respect for government in charge of government and see it as an opportunity to enrich industry allies and to destroy social programs by stealth.

Audience member: I have to say that was my whole question and my whole point -- half of all U.S. discretionary spending and half of all military spending in the world is by the U.S. and it's over a hundred million dollars every year for this Iraq war. The big elephant in the room is the Iraq war and the ridiculous waste of money on that and the Reagan military buildup and you didn't even mention it.

Bill Kristol: If you like, I can mention it. I'm happy to defend the Reagan military buildup. It's an incredibly cost- effective way to hasten the decline and the peaceful demise of the Soviet Union. We then took military spending, leveled it off in the '90's and cut the size of the military too much. We should have increased military spending more in my view in the late '90's and certainly after 9/11. One of the biggest mistakes of Iraq has been trying to conduct a post-9/11 foreign policy with a pre-9/11 sized military and doing it through supplemental appropriations which isn't the most effective to obviously build up the military.

We spend 4.5 percent including the supps of GDP on the military. That is not a high number by post-World War II standards. It's not a high number and no higher than it was even in 1989 when the Cold War ended and we can certainly afford it. We should certainly spend more and not less, I think, on the military.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): Bob?

Bob Kuttner: If I can come back on that, one of the things that George Bush managed to slither out of was responsibility for 9/11. Let's call a spade a spade. I mean, if he had been any kind of a president who had been dealing with reality, the Bush Administration would have paid attention to all of the warnings in the first nine months of 2001 and the plot would have been foiled and instead it became (applause) a pretext for a state of permanent emergency, to give the president permanent emergency powers and frustrate constitutional government in this country.

Now, you asked, Karen, what was conservative about an increase in spending? Most of the increase in spending has been for the war which was, I think most people in this room would agree and most of the American public increasingly agree, was a needless war. There are certainly needs to spend money on protecting Americans from jihadism, but the conflation of Iraq with terrorism, other kinds of terrorism, is a complete phony that's been completely discredited.

And one of the things that Bill said to me at lunch, I don't think I'm betraying a confidence by repeating this, is that Democrats are going to have trouble saying what they're for in Iraq. So the right's saying, in effect, that we've made such a complete mess of this that even the opposition can't figure out a graceful way out. I would say that's small comfort certainly doesn't reflect well on the Project for a New American Century or on neoconservative foreign policy. (Applause)

Bill Kristol: Could I just say a word? I mean, I just say something casually at lunch as an analytical matter in a conversation with others that it's going to be tricky politically. It's not so one-sided as people now think just how Iraq plays out in '08 and that the Democrats will have to explain what it means to "get out of Iraq" or end the war, and there are differences obviously among Democrats on that. And this is taken to be some kind of cynical, political statement? It wasn't a cynical, political statement. It's a true fact. It's a true fact.

Bob Kuttner: It's a testament. I wish I could remember the Casey Stengel quote about how you screwed this thing up so totally that nobody knows what to do.

Bill Kristol: I'm not for getting out. I've defended the surge. I've defended Bush and I've defended staying there so I'm not trying to be cute about this. I'm not for the different Democratic alternatives. Having said that, if a Democrat wins the presidency, commits to getting out of Iraq that Democratic president is going to have to figure out what to do and they are running for president in the world we're living in. Several of them voted to authorize this war and certainly voted to appropriate funds for it, and it's just a matter of responsibility for them to explain what their policy is.

But they don't have to defend it. You don't have to defend the war in Iraq. I'm happy to defend it. I'm not running away from it. I'm not trying to deflect responsibility. I will defend it.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): Since the topic of this debate is Can Conservatives be Trusted to Govern, which also suggests a question of competence, we have this question from the audience: Five and a half years after 9/11, why can't the Bush Administration and conservatives guarantee the safety of my cat's food supply? (Laughter)

Bill Kristol: My cat, too. Look, it's not been the most competent administration in history (applause). Karen mentioned the title which I think we hadn't mentioned before: Can Conservatives Be Trusted to Govern. I want to make clear. My answer to that is no. You shouldn't trust anyone to govern. This is a deep principle of the American regimen and a deep principle of conservatism and you should trust but verify and, honestly, if people do believe that it's not simply that Bush made mistakes and made some bad appointments but that conservatism qua conservatism is discredited, obviously they should vote against conservatives and many Americans did in the last election and they may do it in November 2008.

But there's no contradiction, I believe, between conservative principles and competent administration. I don't know anything about really the pet food issue and whether that was some incompetent political hacket somewhere at FDA or was just a normal government screw-up or something that maybe happens anyway. You know every administration has some mistake like that, I suppose.

But anyway, people will have to make that judgment but it's not the case, I think -- I'm very unconvinced by these arguments that conservatives are skeptical about government; therefore, conservatives can't administer government. Katrina is the example of this. I was a big critic of Bush's obvious management of Katrina. We also had a conservative Republican governor and a Democratic governor who had to handle Katrina. I'm not going to say that because Haley Barbour did an infinitely better job than Governor Blanco that proves that conservatives are great at disaster management and liberals are bad. It just happens that Haley Barbour is a more competent executive than Governor Blanco.

Bob Kuttner: Let me challenge that. Let me invert a famous unfortunate line of Michael Dukakis. This is not about competence, it's about ideology. And some of the systemic failures of conservatism are direct outgrowths of conservative ideology. There are principled attacks on regulation. I think they're mostly wrong. They lead to things like Enron. And then there are simply corrupt attacks on law enforcement where you -- pick one, there are hundreds -- you put executives of the student loan industry in charge of policing the student loan industry; you put executives of the drug companies in charge of ensuring the safety of our drugs in our food, and if you start out with that ideology it logically follows that you're going get opportunistic acts. You may not always get people as bad as Brownie. That may be a uniquely Bush kind of ineptitude, but you do get the systemic corruption, and I do think that goes hand in hand with the hate-government ideology.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): Bob, we have a question here from the audience. Isn't the creation of parallel academic and media institution by conservatives to promulgate their ideology proof they never had the courage of their convictions? If they had better ideas, wouldn't they have triumphed in and of themselves? And my addition to that question is if that were the case, why is it that the other side now is attempting to create those exact kinds of institutions themselves?

Bob Kuttner: Well, I think one of the wisest investments the economic elite in this country ever made was in people like Bill Kristol and in institutions like AEI and Heritage. I've believed all of my life that ideas matter. I wish I could persuade some more wealthy liberals that investment in progressive institutions such as mine was a smart thing to do.

The irony is that liberals have been arguing for years and years and years that ideas matter, and I think this was proven to a fare-the-well by conservatives. So I don't think this was a mark of a failure of conservatives to win in the marketplace of ideas. I think this was a very shrewd investment by conservative elites. Whether it has elevated the quality of debate is another question, because you have this odd marriage between a principled conservative intellectuals like Bill and some absolute hacks like the K-Street Project and they both seem to have this weird symbiosis with each other. But at least investments are being made in ideas.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): How about you, Bill? How important do you think these sorts of institutions were to getting conservative ideas out?

Bill Kristol: I think they were useful because other places weren't friendly to conservative ideas, you know. Conservatives aren't going to get tenure in political science departments. More conservatives are going to end up in think- tanks and more liberals are going to dominate the academy, and it still seems to me net, net in terms of body weight, resources, and prestige, liberals are doing pretty well in dominating more of the major intellectual, academic, and cultural institutions in this country than conservatives. So I'm happy if conservatives have been effective with their lesser resources but with the endowment of conservative think-tanks it's pretty lopsided.

But I'm not complaining. People should go where they can go and make the arguments they can make, and I think conservatives have tried hard to do that. Charles Krauthammer had a quip once about FOX News Channel, just to mention something popular in this room, that someone said to him, "Well, that was brilliant of Murdoch to see that there was a niche for a more conservative, fair and balanced, I should say, network." And Charles said, "Yes, it was very brilliant of Murdoch." He saw the niche was 51 percent of the American people and there is some truth to that.

Bob Kuttner: Not much. (Laughter)

Karen Tumulty (moderator): Well, Bill, you had earlier mentioned that some of the kinds of ideas, in fact, that you have been writing about in your magazine, Sam's Club Republicanism, one question from the audience is how long will conservatives wander in the wilderness this time, i.e. post Iraq and Bush?

Bill Kristol: I don't know. Politics is so unpredictable. You would have to bet right now that the odds are slightly better than 50/50, I think, the Republicans lose in '08 but I don't think overwhelmingly better than 50/50. And, of course, the low point of Republicanism, the worst Republican election before 2006 -- the most recent worst Republican election -- was 1974 and six years later Reagan was president. So these things can reverse very quickly, or the Republicans, some of them were chortling about the permanent governing Republican majority in 2000 or 2004 and that reversed awfully quickly.

So I'm not a big believer in the inevitability of these trends and it's a very volatile world out there, and I think politicians and democracies, whatever their flaws, one of their virtues is they react pretty quickly to changes in public sentiment. So, I think '06 was a shock that's still sinking in for Republicans, and I hope it will lead to rethinking and sort of fresh thinking, I guess I should say, moving forward on some of these especially on some of these domestic policies.

Also, on the foreign policy side, though I am a defender of the general Bush doctrine, I think the institutionalization of it, the failure to think hard about how to make it work in practice was a failure of the Bush Administration, and I think the next Republican candidate, if he's going to win, is going to have persuasively explain how he could have similar goals to Bush but execute them more confidently.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): So how about you, Bob. Do you think it's a movement that's been repudiated or do you think it has a next act?

Bob Kuttner: Well, I think it's a movement that's about to be repudiated big time for now. Certainly the public opinion polls show that the public has lost confidence not just in the Iraq war but in Bush as a president and in conservative ideas. I mean, there is more support for government playing a pro-active role in the economy than there has been in many decades.

I want to quote a well-known pundit who recently wrote, "There's almost no precedent for a party retaining the presidency in a shambles." Bill wrote that in the Weekly Standard a few weeks ago but, interestingly, he wrote it in the context of urging Bush not to seek accommodation with the democrats but to be tough. I think this president's tragedy, if it even arises to tragedy, is that he might have been a uniter not a divider, and just about everything that he promised on the campaign trail and in his inaugural speech turned out to be a lie: that he governed as a hard right conservative, even though he didn't have a mandate for that, and I think (inaudible) is going to tarnish conservatism generally.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): We have another question from the audience about public funding of elections and certainly, I mean, after McCain/Feingold we see this ideological war is being fought outside the two-party system in many, many ways. More money is going into elections than ever before, so the question is: How could public funding of elections transform American politics?

Bill Kristol: I don't know. I mean, McCain/Feingold tried to fix the broken system and we now have, a slightly differently broken system. The one good thing about McCain/Feingold, I think, was the doubling of the limits which encouraged more, I mean there's a lot of participation in politics right now and there's a lot of participation in giving money to politicians which is healthy. The Obama phenomenon is pretty startling and, in that respect, maybe the current system can be slightly tweaked to more matching funds for low dollar contributions.

Things like that I'm certainly open to. It turns out to be very hard in a free country to stop money from influencing politics and people will buy newspapers or TV stations or magazines, and there is a free speech issue and on the internet that's even magnified and really trying to stop people from advocating policies. And since policies are, as Bob has shown here, closely associated with individuals, its very hard in the case of Iraq or Bush, it's very hard to stop people from mentioning names 60 days before an election. So I would be mostly for transparency but a deregulatory approach on campaign finance.

The regulatory challenges of public financing, I think, are very great, and you still have a free country in which people can spend money outside of the system. I think the current system where rich people, however, can self-finance and everyone else has to go out and raise money is a little crazy. That really is a bizarre product of a mix of legislation and a Supreme Court decision ending up with a situation where if you are extremely wealthy you can self-finance, but if you're a candidate of modest means who has wealthy backers, you can't take their money, fully disclose it and run and that, I think, is crazy.

Bob Kuttner: Well, I am all in favor of public financing of elections. I think in places like Maine where you have this clean election option, its brought whole new kinds of people into politics, it's relieved politicians from having to spend inordinate amount of time cultivating rich people. The problem is that the Supreme Court is very unlikely any time soon to allow public financing of elections in a serious way at the federal level.

Of course, the problem is that it tilts the entire system to the right because Democrats as well as Republicans spend huge amounts of time with unrepresentative people. One of the anecdotes is for little people to get more involved in politics as we have seen through Move On, as we have seen to some extent through Obama. If you have a campaigner who is really exciting, you hope the small money and organizing energy can offset the influence of big money.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): That actually sort of leads into another question from the audience: In light of corporate influence in the Democratic Party, will its leadership be willing to address the damage done to America by conservatives?

Bob Kuttner: I want to save some of this for my closing remarks, that's the 64 zillion dollar question. The tilt in this country is towards big money and as the income distribution becomes more concentrated so does the distribution of political power.

Now for the Republicans that's not a contradiction. Wealthy Republicans pay Republicans to be Republicans and to carry out conservative ideology. Wealthy Democrats for the most part, except on social issues, pay Democrats to be less like Democrats. So one party starts out with one hand tied behind its back. I think the cure for that is leadership. I think there's a latent desire in this country for more economic security, for more economic opportunity, for policies that don't leave people at the mercy of their HMO, at the mercy of their employer if they happen to get sick and a child needs their attention and they've been told to report to work. And I think if we had courageous politicians on the liberal side, there could be a real landslide in favor of liberal policy. I think the jury is very much out on that question.

Karen Tumulty (moderator): Bill?

Bill Kristol: What part did you want me to answer?

Karen Tumulty (moderator): I think if this is the case, I think we're ready to go to closing statements, and it's your turn.

Bill Kristol: I don't think I need to defend the corporate dominance of everything in America.

Bob Kuttner: Oh, go ahead. (Laughter) Be my guest.

Bill Kristol: I hope Rupert succeeds in buying the Wall Street Journal and turning that into a right wing organ -- oh, it already is! (Laughter)

Look, I hope there is a vigorous liberalism. This country needs a vigorous liberalism, obviously, if only to check a usually dominant and governing conservatism. That would be a nice state of affairs, and I am encouraged by signs of liberal revival in that respect and some fresh thinking among liberals. I would urge -- it's not my business to tell liberals what to do -- but liberals really shouldn't define themselves simply as anti-conservatives.

This is the great charge against conservatives way back in the '50's -- they are just a bunch of people who have grievances against liberalism. I would say that sometimes these days the liberals look like a bunch of people who have terrible grievances against conservatism and, in fact, the great liberal tradition deserves better than that. So I hope we have a vigorous liberalism. We do need a rejuvenated conservatism, partly because of our successes.

This is the problem with getting the economy going pretty well and getting the world economy going pretty well with defeating the Soviet Union and having the cold war end that made possible obviously. I think Clinton's victory in '92 we had a domestic policy election for the first time in a while and crime, welfare, that's all taken for granted so now we can focus on other issues. We need a conservatism that moves beyond some of the issues of which conservatives I think correctly were pre-occupied in the past, a rejuvenated conservatism. I hope liberalism can move beyond being a reactionary liberalism and I would say that, in conclusion, neo-conservatism consisted of liberals who were mugged by reality. Some of them were already middle aged when that happens and it's never too late to become a neo-conservative.

(Laughter/applause)

Bob Kuttner: Well, this has felt a little bit like that '80's show. If the biggest challenge to conservatism is to move beyond its recent successes, then what we need is not just a reality-based foreign policy but we need some realty-based political strategists.

I don't think there is a danger that liberals will simply be reactive. Certainly not this kind of liberal and I think there's a whole unfinished agenda. For the first time in a long time we have a tail wind on our side because of the multiple failures of conservatism. In the last several decades, foreign policy has been the conservative trump even if you prefer progressives on economics, a lot of Americans think that conservatives are more likely to keep this country safe. I think in the same way that the Great Depression happening on Herbert Hoover's watch discredited Republicans as stewards of the economy, the Iraq mess is going to discredit Republicans as stewards of national security for a very long time.

But let's not forget that the takeover by Democrats of both houses of Congress in '06 was more about pocketbook issues than it was about even foreign policy. If people like Sherrod Brown who is going to be speaking a little later today had not run on pocketbook issues and articulated the frustrations of ordinary people in Ohio which is supposed to be a conservative state and had only run on criticism of Iraq, he wouldn't have won. I think that's the lesson for the presidential field in '08 on the Democratic side. I don't think it's a slam dunk, to quote Tenet, by any means but I think it's the greatest opportunity not just the Democrats have had but the progressives have had to build an affirmative program in many decades and I suppose we can thank the fact that conservatism got a full field trial and fell flat on its face for that opportunity. Thank you both for coming.

[Applause.]

Karen Tumulty (moderator): Thank both of you for being willing to engage.