The Rocky Mountain News this morning runs an account of the America’s Future Foundation panel I spoke at last night in Denver (cheery panel title: “How the West Will Be Lost”):
A group of conservative writers and thinkers gathered for a panel discussion Wednesday night at the Oxford Hotel where the beer was free, the talk was fast and the mood - at least when it came to the 2008 presidential race - was a deep blue funk.
The title of the forum - presented by Face the State, America’s Future Foundation and the Independence Institute - summed up the general pessimism, “How the West Will Be Lost - Democrats’ Strategy to turn the Mountain West Blue and What Libertarians and Conservatives Can Do About It.”
The speakers generally agreed that the coalition Ronald Reagan assembled of social conservatives, libertarians, limited-government proponents and free-marketeers is fractured.
They differed, however, on the extent of the split or what can be done to put that coalition together again.
I’m quoted in the story as the voice of pessimism — which will hardly be earth-shattering news to friends and family. Hey, I’m a gloomy guy.
It was a great panel and a great audience in a part of the country usually relegated to fly-over status. While we did disagree on how bad things have gotten and what the chances are for repairing them out here in the interior West, the one thing we all agreed on was that Colorado is Ground Zero in the changes that are coming to the region politically. Both houses of the Legislature taken over by the Dems in 2004, the governorship taken over in 2006. A Senate seat gone. Another House seat gone. All that’s left is for the state to get colored blue in November.
I’ll have more on the panel and why that may or may not happen shortly. In the meantime, thanks to AFF and Face the State for having me and to everyone who came out.
The problem isn’t so much that the coalition is fractured; the problem is that it has ceased to be a coalition. You can’t have a big tent party that is held hostage by one faction; a coalition requires compromises. So we either have “true conservatives” who can demand — not ask, but demand — that we betray Federalism by supporting a Human Life Amendment (as one of many examples) or we have a big tent party where all factions in the tent compromise with one another, but we cannot have both. The GOP must decide which of the two it wants to be. If the GOP chooses the litmus test “true conservative” route, it goes the way of the LP, into irrelevancy.
As for Colorado, I have several friends whose parents have been involved heavily in the state GOP for many years, but who have been pushed out by social conservative carpet-baggers. I don’t know that they’ve voted Democrat yet, but they are intensely unhappy that the native conservatism of the West has been forced out in favor of Alabama conservatism.