A LESSON TO US ALL
Stephen Dorrell on what the Tories, especially
Mr Portillo, should learn from the fate of Mr Gingrich and the Republicans
JEB BUSH, the new Republican governor of Florida, was clear why he won his elec- tion. 'This is a victory of inclusion over exclusion,' he declared on election night. Four years on, the man who had been defeated in 1994 because he appeared aloof, uncaring and out of touch was win- ning the trust of minority groups and low- income families because he convinced them that he was 'a compassionate conservative'.
On the same night, his brother George retained the governorship of Texas with 69 per cent of the vote in the state which a generation ago was the Senate preserve of Lyndon Johnson. Exit polls also showed George Bush leading Al Gore by 57 per cent to 39 per cent in a putative presiden- tial race in 2000. He, too, knew why he had won. In his victory speech he said, 'Com- passionate conservatism is about opening the doors of the Republican party to new faces and new voices.'
These victories are the more remarkable when seen against the background of the eviction of George Bush Snr from the presidency in 1992, and the wider picture of Republican losses in this year's Con- gressional elections.
Inevitably, some Republicans continue to argue that losses in Congress were the result of insufficient ideological rigour. `Boldness is the key, timidity doesn't work,' according to Steve Forbes. One can- not help wondering whether it was George Bush Jnr or Newt Gingrich whom Mr Forbes had in mind when he described the Republicans this year as a 'party of timid, office-clinging incumbents'? Michael For- tino appeared to offer an alternative expla- nation on Newsnight this week when he argued that Mr Bush is a right-winger after all: more right-wing, presumably, than Mr Gingrich.
It is hard to see how the voice of the vot- ers could have been any clearer — as the Los Angeles Times put it, 'The ideologues lost badly on Tuesday, and the pragmatists won big.' Does that mean that defeated centre-right parties in Europe and North America need only to develop a new lan- guage of vacuities and wait for disgruntled voters to vent their frustration on the New Orthodoxy? That would be to underesti- mate both the New Orthodoxy and the Bush brothers' phenomenon.
Mr Forbes's mistake is not that he stands for something — it is that voters believe he stands for the wrong thing. He appears to believe that the 'low tax' tag line will sell almost any social policy and that the Congressional Republicans fal- tered because of their failure to satisfy the party's right wing. His position is reminis- cent of those British Conservatives who believe we lost the last election because we were insufficiently Eurosceptic. Mr Forbes's analysis ignores the voters' reac- tion to President Clinton as completely as the Euro-fundamentalists ignore the vot- ers' reaction to Mr Blair.
The Bush approach is different. 'Public education is my number one priority,' George Bush repeatedly declared during the campaign, reminding people that his time in State House has seen a dramatic improvement in standards in Texas schools. During his first term he pushed ahead with testing, the publication of results, and — critically — the empower- ment of teachers and schools. He intro- duced private-sector charter schools as well as a pilot voucher programme to allow low-income pupils access to existing pri- vate-sector schools.
He speaks of his vision of schools which operate on a personal scale — 'a cottage industry', as he describes it, 'with a myriad of providers meeting a myriad of needs'. His methods hardly count as timid, but there can be no doubt that he has achieved his objective of `open[ing] the doors of the Republican party to new faces and new voices'. It is hard to fault him on that count when the opinion polls recorded a lead over his Democratic opponent on education of three to one and the president of the Texas Federation of Teachers says of him, 'The thing he is committed to is a system that provides quality education for every child.'
Indeed, perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the campaigns of both Bush brothers' was the breadth of their appeal outside the Republican heartlands. A hun- dred Democratic party officials publicly endorsed George Bush, and he secured the support of almost half of his state's substantial Hispanic vote. It is a far cry from the 1996 presidential campaign when Pat Buchanan promised Republicans that he would build a wall along the Mexican border 'to keep out Jose'.
The Bush campaigns demonstrated that both men understood one of the simplest rules in politics — if you have just lost and you don't make new friends, you are about to lose again. The centre right has always needed to do more than cut taxes and enforce the law. When the Bush brothers describe themselves as 'compassionate Conservatives' they are saying the same thing as Lord Woolton when he said of the reformed post-war Conservatives, 'We not only cope, but we care.'
In recent elections, too many Republi- cans, like their Conservative counterparts, have appeared to believe that all human life could be reduced to the language of the marketplace. It sometimes appeared that both parties thought that if he had only known it, when Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia he should have been describing a country fit for Bill Gates and Rupert Mur- doch. We seemed to have forgotten that although the hubbub of the marketplace provides the essential heartbeat of a suc- cessful society, most of us prefer to live in quieter neighbourhoods. We need to trade in an open market, but we want to live in a community.
It is symptomatic of how defensive the centre right has become that merely to use the word 'community' is taken by some to imply a retreat into political muzak which offers nothing but soft-edged platitudes with no substantial political ideas. What nonsense. George Bush backs up his com- mitment to improve Texas schools with specific ideas about how that commitment will be delivered. Many of those ideas have obvious appeal in Britain.
The rebirth of the centre right requires similar specific ideas on health, the environ- ment, support for elderly people and so on• Nor should we allow a commitment to deliv- er social policy objectives to obscure our continuing commitment to promote the benefits of free enterprise. If British post- war experience teaches us nothing else, it surely demonstrates that fine talk about raising living standards or improving public services is so much self-indulgence if it is not backed by an economy that can pay for it. Both Bush campaigns made clear that their candidates are fiscal conservatives who will be committed champions of free enterprise. They will oppose big govern- ment, and taxes will stay low. The Republi- can core is safe with Bush. But simply to defend the core is not enough. Defensive parties become too fond of their own com- pany. There is no choice to be made between the need to respond to the con- cerns of core supporters and the need to attract new support. Success in politics requires us to do both. The Bush brothers have reminded us how it is done.
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