The Right Nation

"Throughout this book, we have tried to avoid using any of the jibes that are commonplace on both sides of the debate; after all, there is no shortage of people we can quote doing this. … If you have come to the book hoping to be told that George Bush is a moronic, oil-obsessed cowboy or that the French are "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," then we hope that you paid for it before reaching this sentence."

"A firm believer that "manners makyth man," [Prescott Bush] once took Joseph McCarthy to one side and lectured him for more than an hour on his boorish behaviour. … When McCarthy came to Connecticut to address a Republican meeting, Prescott recoiled at the rowdy crowd: "I never saw such a wild bunch of monkeys in any meeting I ever attended." At home he was such a stickler for standards that friends called him the "Ten Commandments Man."

"An Irish Catholic who grew up on a small farm in the Midwest and attended Marquette, a Catholic university in Milwaukee, where he liked to box, [Joseph] McCarthy personified populist resentment against the liberal elite. … "If you want to be against McCarthy, boys," he told a crowd of reporters, "youve got to be either a Communist or a cocksucker." No wonder Prescott Bush found it necessary to give him a lecture about manners."

"[Barry] Goldwater cheerfully broke all the basic rules of politics. … One fan came up with a soft drink called "Gold Water—The Right Drink for the Conservative Taste." The candidate, with characteristic political sensitivity, promptly spat it out. "This tastes like piss!" he spluttered. "I wouldnt drink it with gin."

"Reformism had mutated into radicalism, with something of an anti-American bent. Four-fifths of the delegates in 1972 had never attended a Democratic convention before. The place was full of postadolescents (two Arizona delegates had not even turned eighteen when they were selected). The entire event was chaos; the nominees did not manage to make their speeches until the small hours of the morning, robbing the party of its television audience. Many of the most important meetings still took place in smoke-filled rooms, but this time the smoke smelled rather different."

"Theodore H. White tells a remarkable story about Goldwaters chief speechwriter, Karl Hess. Chief speechwriters of losing campaigns usually find a safe berth somewhere in the party machine, but not so Hess. First, he applied for positions with conservative senators and congressmen—the very politicians who had been cheering him on a few months before. Unwanted, he lowered his sights dramatically. Could he perhaps work the elevators in the Senate or the House? Still no luck. The apostle of the free market was reduced to the ranks of the unemployed. He enrolled in a night-school course in welding and eventually found a job working the night shift in a machine shop."

"Whether they are sitting in the plush Driskill Hotel in Austin or some god-awful motel in Waco, Texans firmly maintain that they have the biggest-and-best-of-everything. This bragging does not always make other people love Texas, even in the West. (When, back in the early 1980s, one of us broke down in a car with Texas plates in southern Colorado, nobody stopped to help for what seemed like an eternity; the man who eventually did explained: "You should have had a sign saying you werent from Texas.")"

"Starting in 2010, the baby-boom generation will begin to retire—and to place huge burdens on Social Security and Medicare. The numbers here are staggering. One 2003 study from the American Enterprise Institute put the total unfunded liabilities at $44 trillion (four times Americas GDP); Medicare alone could eat up $20 trillion. Rather than prepare for this challenge, the Bush administration has run away from it; indeed, in 2003, it massively extended Medicare, subsidizing drugs for retired people, without any fundamental reforms. The same AEI paper claims that waiting till 2008 to try to fix the problem of entitlements will increase the total liability to $54 trillion."

"Why have the Republicans squandered their reputation for fiscal prudence? One excuse on the Right is that the Republicans want to build up big deficits in order to put a long-term constraint on the growth of government: any future Democratic administrations would have nothing to spend. Even if this were true, would this be sensible policy? It is rather like saying that, because your brother-in-law drinks too much, youre going to drink all the alcohol in the house before he visits for the Memorial Day weekend."

"These days, American politics is a sport played between the center Right against the Right. From an international perspective, Democrats are now LINOs—Liberals in Name Only."

"Of course, non-Americans admire many things about America; and, of course, Jacques Chirac is less of an ideological opposite than Joseph Stalin. But the end of the Cold War was not the end of history. The defeat of the Soviet Union has given both sides of the Atlantic a chance to study their erstwhile allies in a new light—and has prompted talk of differences as much as similarities. It is rather like two relative strangers who fight off muggers and then go off for a celebratory meal only to discover that they dont have as much in common as they thought."

"If Bush has divided opinion at home, he has united it abroad—pretty much all against him."