Has my interview with Ed Gillespie gone viral?

U.S. Senate candidate Ed Gillespie

Last weekend I interviewed Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Virginia, at the terminus of the annual Crozet Independence Day parade.

My line of questioning was designed to discern how Gillespie, author of the 2006 book, Winning Right: Campaign Politics and Conservative Policies, would like to roll back the size and scope of government. Specifically, I asked him which three federal programs he would like to eliminate because the private sector or state governments should perform their functions.

Rather than answering my questions -- because candidates generally prefer not to be specific about anything -- Gillespie pointed me to his overall "Ed Gillespie's agenda for economic growth" (EG-squared), saying

One of those five points on that agenda is cutting wasteful spending, balancing the budget. We're going to roll out specifics of that over the course of the summer, just as we just rolled out the specifics on our energy plan, which was one of the five points as well, last week. So we're looking at various areas of the budget where we can cut wasteful spending, reduce spending, eliminate programs. One that I have said already that I believe should not be reauthorized and doesn't deserve to be continued in funding is the ExIm Bank, but we'll roll out more details later as we go along.

The version of the interview published on Examiner.com seems to have struck a nerve -- not with Gillespie or his campaign, but with his opponent, incumbent Senator Mark Warner, and Warner's supporters.

First the Warner campaign cited the interview in a press release that drew an analogy between Gillespie's answer and Texas Governor Rick Perry's famous "oops!" moment during the 2012 Republican presidential primary debates. (The link on that press release increased traffic to my Examiner.com pages by a factor of 20 or more.)

The Democratic blog, Blue Virginia, republished the Warner press release on Monday afternoon without commentary.

Then the Augusta Free Press picked up the Warner news release and basically reprinted it without crediting Warner's campaign.

Tuesday night, DailyKos, the national left-leaning blog site, took its cue from the Augusta Free Press but also drew upon a chunk of my original article.

Most recently, former Reason magazine contributor Dave Weigel, writing in Slate today, headlined his story "The Export-Import Bank Is Your New Populist Fig Leaf."

Weigel explained:

Longtime Republican operative Ed Gillespie is making a long bet that any Republican can win in 2014. The post-Bush Republican Party has largely rejected what Bush stood for, which is remembered (in shorthand) as spending on entitlement programs and immigration reform. Gillespie was the chairman of the RNC for part of Bush's first term and a counselor to the president for the last part of it. He does not make an obvious "libertarian populist," let's just say. So he's spent a strange amount of time ribbing Sen. Mark Warner for supporting a balanced-budget amendment in 1996 but not in 2014 (i.e., after two wars and the Bush tax cuts made it slightly harder to balance the budget). He has admitted that the Bush-era GOP "spent too much," generally speaking. And in this interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner,* he found a populist cause.

"That reveals what we knew already." Weigel continued:

Gillespie is savvy, and spotted an issue that was burbling up from the activist base and large conservative organizations like Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth. As luck would have it, the Bush-era reauthorization votes for Ex-Im came in 2002 and 2006, years when Gillespie was neither at the RNC nor the White House. He's got clean hands on this one!

This episode reminds me of what happened in 2010 when a teachers' group ran a TV ad supporting then-Fifth District Congressman Tom Perriello and lambasting then-candidate Robert Hurt for his views on eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, quoting from another article of mine published on Examiner.com.  At the time, I thought Hurt's comments were uncontroversial; the NEA thought differently.

By the way, the asterisk in Weigel's article likens Examiner.com to AOL's defunct Patch.com.

Perriello's Perplexing 'Populist' Self-Identification

On more than one occasion, U.S. Representative Tom Perriello (D-VA5) has spoken of himself as a "populist."  He seems to think that is a good thing.

For example, in an article by Ray Reed for WSLS-TV in Roanoke, we find this:

Perriello said the Hurt campaign seeks to “falsely portray me as a liberal when I am a populist.”

Perriello told columnist E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post:

"First and foremost, I'm a populist."

In an article in The New Yorker, George Packer explains the origins of the term "populist" in American political discourse and applies it to Perriello:

Perriello is less a Progressive than a Populist. The Populists were agrarians, and when Perriello told an audience at a grant-giving ceremony in Martinsville, Virginia, that farm jobs could be the jobs of the future, he was sounding a very old chord in American discourse. In his language and sympathies, his frequent use of the word “elite,” his vilification of Wall Street bankers, Perriello is carrying the banner of the laid-off seamstress, the struggling truck-stop owner, the hard-pressed tobacco farmer. These were the constituents of the original Populists. They looked with anger upward rather than with sympathy downward. They didn’t come from the professional middle class, though some of their champions did, and they didn’t put their faith in the training and education of experts. If anything, expertise was suspect as a cover for the interests of the powerful. Hofstadter described the “dominant themes in Populist ideology” as “the idea of a golden age…the dualistic version of social struggles; the conspiracy theory of history; and the doctrine of the primacy of money.”

I was incredulous when I first heard Perriello use the word "populist" to describe himself. Did he not understand the history of the term? Did he not know who else in American politics is, or was, a "populist"?

For example, Huey "Kingfish" Long, the corrupt head of Louisiana's political machine, was proudly "populist." Social Security Online -- a U.S. government web site! -- describes Long as

A nominal Democrat, Huey Long was a radical populist, of a sort we are unfamiliar with in our day. As Governor, he sponsored many reforms that endeared him to the rural poor...

The Kingfish wanted the government to confiscate the wealth of the nation's rich and privileged. He called his program Share Our Wealth. It called upon the federal government to guarantee every family in the nation an annual income of $5,000, so they could have the necessities of life, including a home, a job, a radio and an automobile. He also proposed limiting private fortunes to $50 million, legacies to $5 million, and annual incomes to $1 million. Everyone over age 60 would receive an old-age pension. His slogan was "Every Man A King."

Alabama Governor George Wallace, the segregationist who ran for President in 1968 and 1972, was so much identified with populism that the subtitle of a made-for-TV biopic about him was "the rise & fall of an American populist." And journalist Stephan Lesher's book about him is titled George Wallace: American Populist.

The Encyclopedia of Alabama begins its entry on Wallace like this:

He was elected governor for an unprecedented four terms in 1962, 1970, 1974, and 1982, and was de facto governor during the administration of his first wife, Lurleen Burns Wallace, from 1967 to 1968. Wallace also launched four unsuccessful bids for the presidency on platforms that opposed the expansion of federal power and appealed to white populist sentiments. During each election cycle, he modified his racial views to suit the times. Despite his support for road construction, education, and industrial development, Wallace is widely known for his resistance to civil rights, limited economic vision, failure to reform the tax code, and total focus on campaigning, at the expense of running the state.

Then there's David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, racist, and anti-semite who ran for president on the Populist Party's ticket in 1988.

Perriello certainly has a lot in common with Pat Buchanan, the pundit and failed presidential candidate described by Alexander Cockburn as a "populist outsider" in the same category as Jesse Jackson and Jerry Brown. Jonathan Alter called Buchanan a "Beltway populist" in a 1996 Newsweek cover story. Like Buchanan, Perriello opposes free trade with potential purchasers of American products overseas.

Whether these sordid associations are what Perriello seeks when he calls himself a "populist" is somewhat beside the point, because populism is, at its core, opposed to individual liberty and personal responsibility.

When I used to man libertarian booths at county fairs and gay pride celebrations, we used the World's Smallest Political Quiz and the Nolan Chart to explain how people really think about politics. The Nolan Chart turns the inadequate, one-dimensional left/right political spectrum into a two-dimensional grid that is better for identifying how people think.

Basically, the chart (using the quiz) measures how people view economic and personal liberty. People who score high on the economic liberty scale tend to be conservatives; people who score high on the personal liberty scale tend to be liberals.

People who score high on both scales tend to be libertarians.

People who score low on both scales, however, tend to be authoritarians or populists.

A commenter on an article called "Notes Toward a New Political Taxonomy" on The American Scene explained it similarly:

The Nolan chart is the simplest/most precise way to show this. It is a two dimensional chart, that thus has four corners.

The two dimensions are: Economic, Social.

Economic means the role of government in economic policy in taxes, spending on social programs, education, health care, etc. regulation.

Social means role of government in drugs, homosexuality, abortion, the draft, etc.

Those who favor social freedom but not economic are left/liberal

Those who favor economic freedom but not social are right/conservative

Those who favor all freedom, libertarian

Those who favor none, populist/authoritarian

Based on this taxonomy, a "populist" is someone who wants the government to intervene in people's economic decisions and also wants it to intervene in their social and personal decisions.

Put another way, if a "libertarian" is someone who wants to keep government "out of the bedroom and out of the boardroom," a "populist" is someone who wants to make sure government stays in the boardroom and stays in the bedroom.

Giving Tom Perriello the benefit of the doubt, perhaps he thinks "populist" is a synonym for "popular" or means simply that he wants to do things "for the people."

Even so, does he really want to be associated with the likes of Huey Long, George Wallace, David Duke, and Pat Buchanan? If not, why does he use the same word to describe himself when that word is applied so commonly to these figures from the dark side of American politics?

Either Perriello is ignorant of the nomenclature and ignorant of history or he's conscientiously linking himself to an anti-freedom political philosophy.

That's both odd and disturbing for a politician who thinks he has libertarian leanings.

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The Palpable Problem with Populism

George F. Will has a masterful article on the op-ed page of today's Washington Post. He takes to task the two leading populists of the Republican and Democratic parties -- respectively, Mike Huckabee and John Edwards -- for their ill-conceived political/economic philosophies.

Whenever I hear John Edwards' bugle call for class warfare, his self-loathing attacks on the rich (that is, the productive) people of this country, one thing repeatedly comes to mind: I have never been given a job by a poor person.

Whenever I hear Mike Huckabee make a similar appeal, I just think of that other politician born in Hope and realize he is a similarly empty vessel whose appeals to emotion and class hatred would embarrass anyone who could be self-reflective about them. He's not so much interested in doing the right thing as he is convinced that anything he does is right.

But George Will goes far beyond these visceral reactions of mine and grinds Huckabee and Edwards to dust with -- gasp! -- research and facts.

For instance:

[Huckabee] and John Edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in Iowa, encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria. Edwards and Huckabee lament a shrinking middle class. Well.

Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 -- because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled, from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "So," Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder." Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.

Any Republican planning to vote in the New Hampshire primary or in subsequent primaries should read Will's first paragraph about the winner of the Iowa caucuses and ask, Is Huckabee really one of us?

Like Job after losing his camels and acquiring boils, the conservative movement is in distress. Mike Huckabee shreds the compact that has held the movement's two tendencies in sometimes uneasy equipoise. Social conservatives, many of whom share Huckabee's desire to "take back this nation for Christ," have collaborated with limited-government, market-oriented, capitalism-defending conservatives who want to take back the nation for James Madison. Under the doctrine that conservatives call "fusion," each faction has respected the other's agenda. Huckabee aggressively repudiates the Madisonians.

Huckabee's slick exterior has tricked a lot of people into thinking he shares their values. Radio talk-show host Monica Crowley hit the nail on the head this afternoon, when she compared Huckabee (and other candidates) to the hokum Wizard in her favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz. Huckabee can be be all things to all people because he does it with smoke and mirrors. His down-home, aw-shucks manner gives people the option to think, "He's just like us. Therefore he thinks like us, believes what we believe, and wants what we want. And we want him."

Laura Ingraham put it well on her own radio show Friday when she responded to that line of "reasoning": I don't want someone just like me to be President; I want someone better than me.

Will's op-ed piece, headlined "Iowa's Histrionic Hucksters," reminds us of the paradox of populism:

Although Huckabee and Edwards profess to loathe and vow to change Washington's culture, each would aggravate its toxicity. Each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them and who therefore think that opponents are enemies and differences are unsplittable.

The way to achieve Edwards's and Huckabee's populist goal of reducing the role of "special interests," meaning money, in government is to reduce the role of government in distributing money. But populists want to sharply increase that role by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth. Populists, who are slow learners, cannot comprehend this iron law: Concentrate power in Washington, and you increase the power of interests whose representatives are concentrated there.

I truly hope Will's Sunday opinion article is widely read and well digested. (And, while you're at it, check out George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan's Outlook section piece, "5 Myths About Our Ballot-Box Behavior," derived from his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter. Without saying so directly, Caplan explains why so many people would cast their votes for con men like Huckabee and Edwards.)