Where Do Go From Here, Frum?

Taking a look at Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, original Bush speechwriter David Frum's nearly year-old guide to remarketing conservatism by reforming it. Here's a smattering of his ideas, from the American Enterprise Institute's summary.

*A conservative commitment to make private-sector health insurance
available to
every American
* Lower taxes on savings and investment
financed by
higher
taxes on energy and pollution
* Federal policies
to encourage
larger
families
* Major reductions in unskilled
immigration
* A
genuinely
compassionate conservatism, including a
conservative campaign
for
prison reform
and government action
against the public health
disaster of
obesity
* A new
conservative environmentalism that
promotes nuclear
power in place
of coal and
oil
* Higher ethical
standards inside the
conservative movement and the
Republican party
* A renewed
commitment to
expand and rebuild the armed
forces of the
United
States--to crush
terrorism--and get ready for the coming
challenge from
China

A few great things about Frum, Bush's original speechwriter, and his brand of conservatism here:

1. He doesn't get that conservatism is by definition a state of ideological inertia. Conservativism is on one spectrum the enemy of liberalism, and another the enemy of progressivism.

2. The only passionate phrase in his new platform is "to crush terrorism." Pretty much shows Frum's only use for the modern party is ideological dryhumping.

3. Frum suggests "education and persuasion rather than coercion" when it comes to fighting abortion by pursuing "changes in attitudes and beliefs rather than changes in law and public policy." This is so absurd. I'm a middle of the road pro-choicer, and this is exactly how I feel. But I am a cultural elite, and there aren't enough of me who will jump ship to the Republican Party to compensate for all the cultural populists that would be lost in the break-up of the conservative coalition over shmashmortion.

4. He equates conservatism with the GOP. Check out the cover (link above). The title is written on a campaign button with Grateful Dead dancin' elephants. Overhauling your political philosophy to keep the elephants boogie-oogying isn't conservative, it's preservative.

5. There's a word for Gerald Ford Republicans (the ones who fought your precious Reagan at the 1976 convention) who try to reclaim the term "conservative" with the ideas you seem to have discovered yesterday...

6. Progressive Bloggers!

7. Bleeding-heart liberalism doesn't get much worse than stumping for conjugal visits and "enjoyable" food for prisoners, as Frum suggests in his book.

Frum is out of his mind. He is basically presenting to grab the Republican brand from the cultural populists and the libertarians and preserve it for the neocons. Some of his proposals are more to the left than voter expectations of administrable Democratic policies.

And there's the rub. Frum is basically proposing a Neoconservative Democratic party that preserves the GOP name, a doppelganger which could siphon off enough votes from the Dems to make the cultpop/libertarian remainder of the old coalition competitive against the Dems. "We'll rejoin the Dems if Joe Lieberman becomes the party leader," they would bargain.

This would be a one-shot deal, but as a short-term play to Keep Hope Iran, it's sort of savvy. But if what Frum is proposing now is the New Conservatism, we need a new name for neoconservatism to prevent confusion....

Israelofascism?