GOP insider: health reform defeat ‘crushing’
David Frum
David Frum, former Bush advisor and editor of a website “dedicated to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement,” has written an opinion essay that should warm the hearts of liberals wondering what health reform may cost Democrats.
3/25/10 UPDATE: Frum’s essay sparked retaliation from The Wall Street Journal, which called him “the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans.” And now the conservative American Enterprise Institute has fired Frum from his job of seven years. (Details from The Washington Post HERE.) Post columnist Anne Applebaum writes in her March 25 essay that Republicans ought to defend Frum. She thinks he leads the way to recovery from a series of errors, and points to how Britain’s Conservative Party has rebounded using similar tactics.
In the original, and now famous, essay, Frum stated emphatically that “this bill will not be repealed” and blamed “the most radical voices in the party and the movement” for leading Republicans to “abject and irreversible defeat.”
Here’s a sample:
Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.
It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But…