As a fully paid-up member of the mushy political center, I am in favor of universal access to health care and also horrified by what President Obama’s bill is going to cost. So whom should I be voting for? If congressional Republicans are determined to fix this bill by, say, reforming the medical malpractice laws that drive up costs and put doctors out of business, then they’ve got my vote. If, instead, they are going to scream “communist” and “fascist” at our democratically elected president — thereby achieving nothing at all — then I want nothing to do with them.
In the coming days, many conservative pundits will surely echo the words of another pundit I know and like, Tunku Varadarajan, who has dismissed Frum as a “polite-company conservative,” and who argues that Frum is wrong about that nasty talk-show rhetoric, on the grounds that “passionate extremism is part of any political debate.” Well, “up to a point, Lord Copper,” as a certain British novelist would put it: The history of the Tories shows that if by exciting your base you lose the center, then you lose the next election too.
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