OPINION:
THE FOURTH WAY: THE CONSERVATIVE PLAYBOOK FOR A LASTING GOP MAJORITY
By Hugh Hewitt
Simon & Schuster, $24.99, 235 pages
“The most famous conservative journalist whom liberals have never heard of,” wrote The New Yorker a decade ago.
That’s no longer the case.
Hugh Hewitt is a lawyer, college professor, broadcast journalist and a friend of Rush Limbaugh (albeit a soft-spoken one), who rode the wave of the conservative talk radio revolution into a nationally syndicated radio show now heard in more than 120 cities, thereby gaining a strong conservative following.
Then, during this past election year, that audience expanded significantly, and even liberals came to know who he was — so much so, that he’s been offered a column in The Washington Post, along with The New York Times, one of the chief propaganda organs of the opposition party.
During the campaign, he interviewed Donald Trump 15 times on his radio program, appeared as a panelist in four of the primary debates, and began popping up on various popular TV network talk shows — as the Huffington Post put it, “an unapologetic wonk in an industry full of bombast.”
And he fills the bill — white hair, horn rimmed glasses, button-down shirts, good serviceable suits — always pleasant, concerned, perhaps much in the mold of a sincere 1950-ish small town banker or dean of a small liberal arts college, urging people to come together and act reasonably.
A wonk? That may be precisely what’s needed. We’ve certainly had a sufficiency of bombast, which shows no sign of subsiding. But Clark Kent was also a wonk. And Mr. Hewitt’s message to the Trump administration and its allies in Congress is anything but wonkish. That message, essentially, is “Move it!”
Summarizing the substance of this book, Mr. Hewitt put it this way. For this new administration, the key is “Speed, speed, speed” — “Go big, Go far, Go fast. On every issue. In every agency. Through every committee of Congress and to the president’s desk.”
With the Republican Party in command of the White House, both houses of Congress, state houses across the country, and soon the Supreme Court, it would be an extraordinary missed opportunity to bring to an end “the growth of a governing class separate and apart from ordinary Americans.”
“While President Trump, Vice President Pence, Speaker Ryan, and Leader McConnell will lead, the GOP at every level must provide them with the political capital and cover to succeed.” But speed is essential.
Through this extraordinary and apparently endless political season, with the Democrats and their allies in the major media refusing to accept the results of the election, Democrats have effectively dragged their feet through the Cabinet confirmation hearings, stretching them out as they and their allies in the major media dig frantically for anything resembling scandal, a quest to which The New York Times now devotes nearly all its news sections daily.
And as for those historic majorities in Congress, and especially in the Senate, “They can be gone in the blink of an eye.” President Obama, he reminds us, got everything he would ever get from Congress during his first two years, when he had majorities in both houses.
In Washington campaign time, 2018 is just around the corner. The do-nothing, full-court stall by congressional Democrats is having an effect, and a non-stop series of nationwide demonstrations organized by leftist lobbying groups gets sympathetic coverage from the national media, pretending to believe they’re spontaneous.
We can assume there’ll be similar sympathetic coverage when the budget fight begins, and the Supreme Court confirmation process will be dragged out as long as parliamentary rules allow with as many disruptions as Moveon.org and its well-funded cousins can stage.
That means that while this administration still has an edge, it’s got to produce now. There’s been plenty of talk about Obamacare, and the House Republicans and their allies in the think tanks have produced a number of alternatives. Settle on one and put it on the table.
Also, urges Mr. Hewitt, produce the outlines of a coherent infrastructure package and a comprehensive program of immigration reform, and act to implement President Trump’s proposal for building a 350-ship Navy, to which Mr. Hewitt appends a plan for strengthening the role of the Marine Corps in our national defense.
Mr. Hewitt discusses numerous other legislative priorities and reforms in some detail. All of it is doable, he writes. But what is essential is speed, speed, speed.
• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (Wiley).
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