God Weighs In On The Republican Party?

When an earthquake struck the Nixon library in June as he and other panelists discussed DOMA and Prop. 8, conservative former law school dean John Eastman got a round of applause when he said, "See what happens when you mess with traditional marriage?" The moderator, my Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt, headlined a blog post as follows: "God Weighs In On The Same Sex Marriage Debate?"

With a hurricane named for the great patriarch himself bearing down on Florida, the GOP has just canceled the first day of its convention. Was it the Ryan pick? The pre-1920 platform on women and abortion? No way. I trust with all my heart that God doesn't punish people with weather and falling buildings, including especially the three reported killed already by the hurricane. In June I praised Br. Hugh for the wisdom of his question mark; I only jokingly borrowed it for this post (before getting back to praying for all in Isaac's path).
Photo: USA Today

Holy Hugh

An Independence Day thank you to my Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt for his shout-out to my St. John's pilgrimage posts.

Roberts Rules

My Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt doesn't like the Supreme Court's health care ruling. But he knows the chief justice, John Roberts, with whom he shared an office in the Reagan White House, and believes that he ruled as his conscience dictated:

The Chief Justice's decision is the consequence of his personal integrity as it would have been much, much easier for him to rule the other way. Critics of him will have to consider what they would have done if they believed the mandate to have been justified by the taxing power.

The Quaker Shaker And Gay Marriage

My Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt put this video on YouTube with the headline "God Weighs In On The Same Sex Marriage Debate?" I thank God for the question mark.

Hewitt was at the Nixon library Wednesday night moderating a debate between conservative John Eastman, former dean of Chapman University's law school, and liberal UC Irvine law dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Hewitt regularly hosts the legal eagles on his syndicated radio show.

With cameras rolling (providentially? There's that question mark again), a 4.0 earthquake struck Yorba Linda while Eastman was speculating about how associate justice Anthony Kennedy might rule on Prop. 8 and DOMA. After the shaker, which occurs at 3:45 in the video, Eastman said, "See what happens when you mess with traditional marriage?" and basked in a thundering ovation. Offered the opportunity to interpret the event himself, Chemerinsky paused for a long moment and said, "My field's constitutional law, not geology."

Note he didn't say "theology." Hewitt and Eastman get kudos for handling a scary moment with elan. But I'm glad they didn't test the ineffable grace of heaven any more than they did. The God who would send an earthquake to a double-domes' debate must've been a lot angrier at the tens of thousands he killed by dropping buildings on them in Japan and China. My God, that one is not. Chemerinsky may have been tempted to say that the incident could just as well have been a rebuke as an affirmation of Eastman's rhetoric. He was wise to leave God's intentionality out of the earthquake as we -- experts, voters, and judges -- continue to do our our best to behave honorably and justly toward all his people on earth.

With You And Other Old Friends

That's Hugh Hewitt on the big screen Saturday night at the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach. Kathy O'Connor, Richard Nixon's last chief of staff, has know him since 1980, when they briefly worked together in Nixon's Manhattan office. Born in the Bronx, she calls him You You-it.

Hugh and I are serial job-swappers. In 1979, before the Nixons moved east from their post-Watergate exile in San Clemente, he recommended me (then a Democratic journalist) for a job writing research papers for 37's book Leaders. Then Nixon hired me to replace Hugh after he headed off to go to law school, serve with future chief justice John Roberts in the Reagan White House, and, on my recommendation to Nixon, launch the Nixon library in 1990. I replaced Hugh again when he left the library to become a law professor and nationally syndicated radio talk show host. In the late 1990s, when he starred on a local PBS news program, "Life and Times," he invited me to sit in for him occasionally when he was out of town.

On Saturday Hugh was genial master of ceremonies at a 50th anniversary celebration of the Lincoln Club of Orange County. Thanks to Lisa Hughes of St. John's, who has joined the club's board, I was invited to give the invocation. I paid tribute to club founders' "bold and audacious belief that it was possible to cultivate candidates who embodied conservative virtues but could still win elections in the state of California." At right that's Bruce and Lisa Hughes with Kathy and me.

In the 1990s, during long afternoon conversations at the knee of the late Bob Beaver in historic Fullerton, California, I'd learned how he and other local politicos had built the Lincoln Club from the wreckage of Nixon's disastrous 1962 gubernatorial campaign against popular Democratic Gov. Pat Brown. Bob, inventor and philanthropist Arnold Beckman, and other business-minded Republicans thought Nixon would've won if it hadn't been for his bruising battle for the GOP nomination against a super-conservative state assemblyman, Joe Shell.

So the Lincoln Club actually began by championing moderates. Bob and his friends wanted to identify and fund candidates who could win and scare off those who couldn't. Though Nixon joined the club in its early years, these days it leans well to his right, so he doesn't get quite as much space on the marquee as other famous Republicans. In a video presentation at the dinner, Newt Gingrich credited the club for its longstanding support of Ronald Reagan but didn't even mention Nixon, who in many respects, after all, governed to the left of Barack Obama.

Last night's keynoter, political consultant and George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, is taking Bob Beaver's Lincoln Club model national. He said he's raised $250 million toward the $300 million he wants for political action committees that will oppose Obama while trying to elect and reelect Republicans to the House and Senate. Rove gave a spirited, detailed critique of 44 -- high unemployment, big deficits and growing debt, an increasingly unpopular health care bill, and polls showing him stuck at 45% overall approval and running even with near-certain GOP nominee Mitt Romney. He urged Republicans to run a respectful campaign, warning that Romney won't win without millions of people who voted for Obama or stayed home in 2008.

Other speakers were more pointed. I hadn't been served such a heaping mess of political red meat for years. Romney was getting the same treatment at a Democratic gala somewhere else in the U.S., I'm sure. Hyperbole beats the ways certain other countries settle their differences. Besides, it was fun for Kathy and me to talk to friends from our past lives such as former Gov. Pete Wilson, political stalwarts Jo Ellen Chatham, Doy Henley, Buck Johns, Howard and Janet Klein, Lincoln Club chairman Richard Wagner, and former chairman Mike Capaldi.

But in 2012, I remain 100% undecided. For the next seven months, I'll be waiting with millions of others for answers to two questions. Rove told us that one out of six adult Americans needs a job. Which candidate will do a better job for them? Second, whose policies will spur the kind of Reagan- and Clinton-era GDP growth that we need to create opportunity and jobs and reduce deficits, debt, and the spirit-sapping anxiety of bad economic times?

Romney's advocates will say that Obama would do no better on growth and jobs in a second term than he's done so far. But as I listened to Rove last night, I wondered what a President John McCain would've done in the midst of early 2009's panic. A big-ticket Keynesian stimulus and the GM and Chrysler bailouts, just like Obama? Almost certainly. A health care bill? Certainly not (and I'll bet the president now feels that he should've focused on job creation instead). Obama-style contributions to the national debt, which has swelled to 70% of GDP? Maybe not, if only because McCain, in "Nixon goes to China" style, would've grown federal spending and also raised taxes in the name of fiscal probity, just as the Lincoln Club's hero Ronald Reagan did (and in record fashion). But for purposes of argument, if during a national emergency Congress wouldn't vote modest new revenue for Obama that it very well would have done for a Republican president, whom should we replace: The occupant of the White House, or the House?

Nixons In Love

Thanks to my Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt for the link.

Ten Reasons All Together

Responding to my Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt, Conor Friedersdorf (who's a conservative) gives seven good reasons why right-wing talk show hosts shouldn't moderate GOP debates. Addressing the issue when Hugh raised it November 2010, I could only think of three. Here's one:

[I]f they're smart, candidates look for opportunities to hone their skills in tough forums. Who cares who's asking the questions? If you're going to win and be able to govern, you learn to answer the ones you wanted instead of the ones you got. Once you have power, you don't get to decide who's allowed to cause you problems.

The Gospel Truth?

While the four gospels were all written in the first century, the earliest manuscript fragment we have is a bit of John from around 125. My Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt pointed out this post about a purposed fragment of Mark from the first century.

Chris Christie For President

My Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt, who says the GOP nomination will be decided by the Florida primary, puts the best face on the South Carolina debacle:

Newt’s greatest contribution to the race has been to demonstrate that the style of political argument that Chris Christie and Paul Ryan debuted in the last couple of years actually is not a luxury but a necessity to win hearts and minds in the GOP. The 2012 election will not be won because of Mitt Romney’s tax returns or his years at Bain, or because of Newt’s past marriages or the payments from Freddie.

Fair enough, Hugh, when it comes to Gingrich's ADD policy motor mouth. But never have I heard Gov. Christie or Rep. Ryan say that the president of the United States takes his inspiration from socialist Saul Alinsky instead of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Our country could be wounded by Gingrich's demagoguery. Is it too late for a Christie candidacy?

He Wants To Shift The Entire Planet

Hugh Hewitt reproduces Mitt Romney's list of Newt Gingrich's pronouncements about himself:

Gingrich on Gingrich:

• “I Think I Am A Transformational Figure.” (PBS.org, 12/2/11)

• “I Am Essentially A Revolutionary.” (Adam Clymer, “House Revolutionary,” The New York Times, 8/23/92)

• “Philosophically, I Am Very Different From Normal Politicians … We Have Big Ideas.” (Andrew Ferguson, “What Does Newt Gingrich Know?” The New York Times, 6/29/11)

• “I Have An Enormous Personal Ambition. I Want To Shift The Entire Planet. And I’m Doing It. … I Represent Real Power.” (Lois Romano, “Newt Gingrich, Maverick On The Hill,” The Washington Post, 1/3/85)

• “I First Talked About [Saving Civilization] In August Of 1958.” (Robert Draper, “He's Baaack!” GQ, 8/05)

• “Over My Years In Public Life, I Have Become Known As An ‘Ideas Man.’” (Andrew Ferguson, “What Does Newt Gingrich Know?” The New York Times, 6/29/11)

• “I Am The Longest Serving Teacher In The Senior Military, 23 Years Teaching One And Two-Star Generals And Admirals The Art Of War.” (GOP Presidential Candidates Debate, 12/15/11)

Rage As Performance Art

Will Newt Gingrich's slashing populist attack on the allegedly anti-conservative U.S. news media deflect criticism of his checkered personal life and allay concerns about his obvious temperamental unsuitability for the White House? It would probably help if other conservatives joined in, but they didn't.

Ron Fournier on tonight's GOP debate:

The first question from CNN moderator John King was posed to Gingrich: Would he like to respond to his ex-wife?

"No," Gingrich replied. "But I will." While the partisan audience applauded in support, Gingrich glared at King and blamed the messenger. "I'm appalled that you would begin a presidential debate with a topic like that," he said.

In hindsight, perhaps Gingrich had been preparing for the moment for months by leading the attack against the media at nearly every debate. Partisan audiences, especially Republican crowds, generally believe the media are slanted against them. Journalists are easy targets.

"Every person in here knows pain. Every person in here has someone close to them going through painful things," Gingrich said. It was a brash bit of political theater: A thrice-married man who has admitted to cheating on two wives ducked his ex-wife's charges and dismissed his infidelity as merely "painful things."

Despicable? Trash? Those are not words he used to describe his actions. Rather, Gingrich called ABC's decision to broadcast the ex-wife's story two days before the South Carolina primary as "as close to despicable as anything I can imagine."

He denounced CNN for taking "trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate."

Gingrich described King's question as an example of an elite media attack against Republicans designed to help Barack Obama. But when King asked the other candidates if they thought Gingrich's personal life was a legitimate issue, the GOP voted 2-1 in favor of CNN's editorial judgement. Rick Santorum said he was thankful for God's forgiveness but added, "Issues of character are for people to consider...for everyone in this audience to look at." (Later in the debate, he accused Gingrich of grandiosity, "worrisome" behavior, and political cowardice and reminded the audience of Gingrich's policy ADD and the GOP coup that ousted him from the House speakership.) Ron Paul said, "Setting standards is very important" and mentioned his wife of 52 years. Only frontrunner Romney urged King to get to the real issues, though he'd already pointedly introduced himself as an implicitly faithful husband and the father and grandfather of multitudes.

My Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt, no booster of the MSM, hasn't blogged about tonight's debate yet, but he wrote this morning that the Marianne Gingrich interview was "devastating." At NRO, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Newt’s opening answer was very strong and will be replayed a lot. But I thought it was overstated and, as he kept going, it became clear he was trying to squelch the issue rather than express his true rage. When he was all lovey-dovey with John King after the debate, it underscored that it was as much performance as anything else.

Republicans are lucky to have such an entertaining performer to enliven their debates. But they won't nominate him to run for president.

NOAA? Right.

Thanks to Hugh Hewitt for linking to my post about Obama dissing Nixon.

Paulists Pressed

If Ron Paul is nominated, my Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt's voting for Obama.

The Sheer Logic Of Agnosticism

A moving appeal by novelist Martin Amis to his ailing friend, polemicist Christopher Hitchens:

My dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about your impending embrace of the sacred and the supernatural. This is of course insane. But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of zealotry, to my own persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great, you put very little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle. "The measure of an education," you write elsewhere, "is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance." And that's all that "agnosticism" really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I know you won't make it) would seem to me consonant with your character – with your acceptance of inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual romanticism, and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as superior to my own.

The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a "higher intelligence" – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

Hat tip to Hugh Hewitt

Semifinal Five

Filling out his brackets on behalf of thinking and probably overly optimistic center-right conservatives everywhere, my Nixon brother Hugh Hewitt picks five 2012 GOP frontrunners without including a placeholder for the likes of Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee, whose prospects seem to have improved now that they've coyly arched their eyebrows in the direction of the Obama birthers. Perhaps Hugh thinks that he's got the fringe covered by including Newt Gingrich, whose love gift is of the Muslims-as-Nazis variety.

And where's Sarah Palin in Hugh's morning line? Maybe if no one mentions her, she'll go away.

Con law professor Hewitt even has a talking point for the leader of the pack (Hugh's pick in 2008 as well):

[Mitt] Romney remains the front runner, with strength in staff and fundraising and the experience of having been around this track once before. The "MassCare is Obamacare" trope is old already, though it will be used by his GOP competitors and by the president again and again. The best response remains the true one: An attack on an experiment in Massachusetts is an attack on federalism -- dangerous in the era of the Tea Party -- and that which is allowed to the states -- individual mandates -- is not constitutional when attempted by the federal government.

The De-rogue-ifier

My Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt has stimulated a debate between Donald Rumsfeld, President Bush's defense secretary, and former White House aide Peter Wehner over how much stress Bush placed on democratizing the Middle East in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Rumsfeld says it came up very little behind closed doors. Wehner says Bush mentioned it in several major speeches. Hewitt aptly leapfrogs the conversation:

Whatever one concludes about this debate, most serious observers connect Libya's disarmament of WMD with America's overthrow of Saddam, and aren't we glad this week that Qaddafi isn't sitting on his stockpile of deadly agents?

Hewitt's argument is preferable to those that credit Bush and his freedom agenda for Egypt's Nile grassroots revolution. What's still at issue isn't Bush's admirable post-Sept. 11 vision of a freer Middle East and Persian Gulf region but the use of force to bring it about. Besides, how could the Egyptians have been inspired by Iraq, since its inenviably tenuous democracy occurred as the result of an invasion by Western powers?

But Libya's self-de-rogue-ification because it didn't want to mess with Texas was a definite win for Bush, U.S. interests in the years since, and Libya's besieged people today.

The Next Mubarak Is In The House

Thanks to Br. Hugh for his link this morning.

Walk Like A Nixonian

During an animated lunchtime conversation about God and politics today, my Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt graciously invited me to appear on his radio show to talk about what 37 would do about Egypt.

I demurred -- and then thought about it the rest of the afternoon.

It's hard to take leaders out of their eras and contexts. Nixon's lacked today's broadening intellectual and political consensus against Arab dictatorship. It's not that anybody ever loved it, but ready alternatives used to seem well out of reach. Remember that until the 1980s democracies were the exception to the rule, as scarce in Asia and Latin America as they are in the Middle East today.

Besides, during the Cold War there were worse devils than ordinary tin horns. Neocons and other fervent anti-communists, including Nixon, insisted on the moral distinction between authoritarian regimes such as Hosni Mubarak's and the totalitarianism emanating from Moscow and Beijing. If an imperfect regime like Egypt's joined us in the anti-Soviet coalition, it was golden. In Nixon's time, the U.S. Egypt policy would probably have added up to little more than assuming that Mubarak would do what was necessary to reestablish order or even goosing him to do so.

It wouldn't just be White House or State department realists encouraging tyrants to keep their jack boots polished. Even the media sometimes agreed. When I was performing counterjournalism for Nixon as his chief of staff in 1987, I tried to get Raymond Bonner and the New York Times to withdraw the false charge that Nixon had authorized Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to declare martial law in 1972. The irony was that nobody would probably have looked askance if Nixon actually had done so. The Times itself had run an editorial portraying Marcos's move as an unfortunate but necessary means of restoring order amid acts of anti-regime terrorism.

With democracy now far more prevalent, an Obama-era Nixon would have less latitude to encourage an autocratic regime to maintain order in the face of a popular uprising -- not that Nixon would naturally side against the people. When it came to June 1989's doomed rising against the Chinese dictatorship, Nixon didn't hesitate to speak truth to power, the escalating importance of the Sino-U.S. relationship notwithstanding. After Tienanmen Square, the first Bush administration sent a secret delegation to Beijing that resulted in a photo of U.S. officials smiling and clinking glasses with the hardliners. Then Henry Kissinger was reported as telling paramount Chinese leader Deng Xiaopeng that a great power couldn't permit demonstrators to clog the center of its capital indefinitely without taking steps.

It fell to the disgraced former president to denounce the Chinese leaders to their faces (I was along), saying that U.S. differences with the Chinese over the crackdown -- in which hundreds and perhaps over a thousand had been killed -- were "huge and unbridgeable."

And yet a hypothetical 98-year-old Nixon probably wouldn't have been as quick as Obama to build a bridge to the crowds clogging Tahrir Square. His first concern would be geopolitics -- back in the day, the implications for the U.S.-Soviet relationship, in our day the struggle against militant Islamists. In this dimension, the 2011 Nixon would be a statesman out of time. The attacks of Sept. 11 notwithstanding, it's hard to believe he would've considered terrorism as comprehensive a threat to the United States as Soviet communism. But having perched restively on the sidelines when the Carter administration was equivocating in its support for the shah of Iran, Nixon would've taken pains to avoid saying anything that would make Mubarak's life more difficult.

In 1979, Nixon considered the shah's fall a lost battle in the Cold War. His worry today, as Obama's must be, would be the danger that Mubarak's successor would equivocate on Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. He'd scoff at Kai Bird and others who claim that a less friendly Egypt would increase the chances that Israel will make peace with the Palestinians. Since losing Egypt and Jordan could set the peace process back for a generation, Nixon would be dumbfounded by Obama critics who accuse him of favoring a regime that would be less friendly to U.S. interests, including Israel. If that happens, all is probably lost in his pursuit of the signature achievement of a Palestinian state.

Only after gauging the Egyptian revolution's strategic and regional implications would Nixon give in to the Wilsonian aspect of his nature and consider the interests of the Egyptian people. Even here, it's by no means certain that he would've considered popular democracy the ideal outcome, at least in the short term. The White House tapes reveal his archaic predilection for ranking the world's peoples and their readiness for political freedom. There's also the matter of Egyptians' simultaneous devotion to democracy as well as savage, medieval practices that are irreconcilable with it. One can imagine Nixon telling aides, "For God's sake, four out of five of them want to stone you for adultery and converting to Christianity. You really want to give them the vote right now?" Nixon would've wished Mubarak had done a better job for his people. But right now he'd be rooting for the next Mubarak.

The Hierarchy Of Middle East Thugs

Hugh Hewitt views Hosni Mubarak's regime in its regional context:

No doubt he is a brutal authoritarian, and that the Egyptian nation and the world would be better served by a democratically elected president committed to human rights.

But there are far worse thugs in the recent past of the region. Unlike the first Assad in Syria, who leveled Hama and killed thousands, or Saddam, who didn’t hesitate to use of chemical weapons against his own people, Mubarak’s authoritarianism as chronicled, for example, by Robin Wright in her 2008 book “Dreams and Shadows,” allowed for the emergence of some opposition, some personal freedom, some religious liberty.

It also, of course, maintained the peace with Israel and supported the United States in its interventions in the region.

Much, much worse could be around the corner. Would any of the talking heads care to argue that the world is better off for the shah having fallen in 1979 as opposed to a quieter exit a year or two further down the road with anyone except the fanatical mullah as Supreme Leader?

Most astonishing is the ease with which some on the various sets dismiss the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is a movement of great concern to the classically liberal minded. Again, read just one chapter from Wright — left-of-center and beyond challenge as a voice of mainstream American foreign policy elites — and the prospect of a Brotherhood role ought to alarm anyone concerned with the rights of women in Egypt or the future of the Copts.

Stanley Schemer

Making a careful study of hardening, harsher, and sometimes more paranoid attitudes among conservatives compared with those of a generation or two ago, historian Maarja Krusten writes that she's disappointed conservative pundit Stanley Kurtz really thinks he has to conceal his true identity lest perfidious (in his view) liberal archivists withhold the juicy stuff. She also finds it ironic that Kurtz complained about this to my Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt:

That Kurtz chose to describe his research as if he saw a need to skulk about and disguise who he was baffled me. Especially since he was speaking to Hewitt, who once served as director of the private Nixon library. Hewitt stated in 1990 that he would bar Bob Woodward from doing research at the Nixon library (then controlled by the Nixon foundation) “because he is an irresponsible journalist.” John Taylor, who succeeded Hewitt as director, announced in 1990 while Hewitt still was in charge that Nixon didn’t want that and researchers would be admitted “without regard to their opinions on any subject.” Why Kurtz presented himself to Hewitt, of all people, as someone who might be interfered with in his research due to his ideology or goals comes across to me as comical as well as mind boggling.

When writing about this incident a week ago, I'd forgotten that as Nixon's chief of staff I'd publicly repudiated Hewitt's Woodward ban. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure that I warned Hewitt about it and that he said he understood why we needed to climb down.

After all that, so as far as I know Woodward's never done research at either the private or public Nixon library. He and I did have an exchange of e-mails in January 2007, when he was trying to confirm a claim by one of his and Carl Bernstein's sources many years ago that former Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell had briefed President Nixon about the roots of Watergate over dinner on June 19, 1972, just two days after the break-in. He asked me to consult the White House daily diary, which disclosed that Nixon actually had dinner in Key Biscayne with buddy Bebe Rebozo that night before flying back to Washington. I never did find out what Woodward was working on.