JARIDA
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INTERNATIONAL YOUNG DEMOCRAT UNION
1st Floor, 100 Pall Mall, London, SW1Y 5HP, United Kingdom

www.iydu.org
Patron THE RT HON THE BARONESS THATCHER OF KESTEVEN LG OM FRS
Founder Chairman Mark Heyward

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IYDU NEWSLETTER
EDITION 52
Published June 02 2006
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CONTENTS
1. IYDU at the Reagan Ranch - register now
2. IYDU Leaders in Switzerland
3. The Hillary Prospect
4. British Local Elections - Conservatives back in contention
5. Events
6. End Note
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1. IYDU at the Reagan Ranch - register now

IYDU Freedom Forum 2006: The Reagan Legacy takes place in Santa Barbara,
California from 17 to 20 August 2006.

The conference will be held at the Reagan Freedom Center and include a visit
to the Reagan Presidential Library. And of course we will pay what promises
to be a very special visit to Ronald Reagan's ranch.

The ranch was President Reagan's private home throughout his years in the
White House and was nicknames the Western White House as it played host to
world leaders in the 1980s.

Ten weeks out from Freedom Forum 2006, over 40 people have registered for
the event. Its unknown in IYDU for so many people to register so early.
Freedom Forum 2006 promises to be IYDU's biggest conference with over 100
participants from around the world.

Full details on the event and registration forms can be found at
www.iydu.org/events.php

Freedom Forum 2006 is open to all young politicians and members of all
center right youth and student organisations linked to IDU member parties.

I would strongly encourage you to register soon and arrange your hotel
reservation. Santa Barbara is a popular tourist destination and the
recommended hotels will fill up fast.

I hope you will be able to join IYDU on the Reagan Ranch.

Donald Simpson
IYDU Chairman
donald.simpson@iydu.org

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2. IYDU Leaders in Switzerland


From Sunday May 21st to May 27th, the Swiss Government hosted 7 IYDU
activist for a week long exchange of ideas, aspirations and common values.

The exchange was organized by IYDU Vice Chairman Jurg Stauffer and IYDU
activist Daniel Thretheway. Meetings took place in Berne, Zurich,
Interlaken, Geneva and Lausanne. The delegation was comprised of MP
Patrick Brown (Canada), Eric Hoplin (U.S), Nicole Hoplin (U.S), Scott
Stewart (U.S.), H.P. Gourley (U.S.), Karen Wandersheid (U.S.) and Annie
Palisi (U.S.)

Swiss government officials that took part in the exchange included Hon.
Minister Urs Hammer, Luzi Stamm MP, Thomas Schmidt of Swiss People's Party,
and General Peter Regli.

Topics touched on during the exchange ranged from "freedom and security",
"leaving no child behind", "trade liberalization between U.S., Canada and
Switzerland", "Swiss tax system", "emerging crisis in Iran" and "historical
figures"
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3. "The Hillary Prospect" From the New Book on the Pending Threat of the
Clinton Return by John Podhoretz. Curtesy of College Republicans

Introduction: An Open Letter to Conservatives and Republicans

The very early hours of Wednesday, November 5, 2008, are going to seem
eerily, excitingly, frustratingly familiar to anyone in this country who is
older than twelve, has an IQ higher than 100, and has ever watched a TV news
program, or read a newspaper, or clicked on a news story. The polls in
Alaska will close at midnight Eastern Standard Time, and that will bring to
a close the casting of ballots that began twenty-four hours earlier in
Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, in the first presidential election since 1952
that will feature neither a sitting president nor a sitting vice president
as a candidate for the highest office in the land.

And just as was the case in the two preceding presidential elections, we
still won't yet know which of the two-or three-major candidates will be the
next president.

For once again, probably after all kinds of confusion caused by yet another
set of ill-conceived and politicized exit polls that will have Republicans
in a panic and Democrats in a state of unrealistic glee, the electoral map
will have fallen into place pretty much as it did on the last two Election
Days. States along the Pacific Ocean and the North Atlantic will be colored
a solid Democratic blue, while the Southwest, the South, and most of the
nation's midsection will shout out in vivid Republican red.

The political operatives crowded together at the huge
please-God-let-our-team-win parties in Washington-Democrats packing the Old
Post Office, Republicans filling the Ronald Reagan Center-will be awash in
anxiety as thousands of unreleased balloons hang far over their heads
waiting either to be released in joy or to remain suspended in defeat. For
the third election in a row, the vote counts in Ohio, Florida, Michigan,
Wisconsin, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire will be inconclusive.
Anchormen will be explaining how if the Dems take Florida and Pennsylvania,
the Republicans will have to win every other state to record the necessary
270 electoral votes-and then move on to an entirely different set of
calculations according to which Republicans need win only Florida and Ohio
to get there. After which, a panel made up of blabbermouth pundits, who will
be getting punchy and maybe even a tad psycho, will fill some time until the
"decision desk" can call another state.

And then, as the tension grows to an almost unbearable level, the toss-up
states will begin to tip . . . but which way?

Which way?

If you conservatives and Republicans-you Republican thinkers, strategists,
politicians, and voters and you conservative activists, intellectuals, and
organizers-can come to a meeting of the minds about the seriousness of the
threat facing this country in the next election, you can make sure that the
balloons drop on you and not on the other guys. You can forestall and
prevent the most frightening and disastrous outcome of that early morning.
You can guarantee that the candidate you most dread will not be not standing
in front of the west face of the U.S. Capitol alongside Chief Justice John
Roberts on January 20, 2009. You can prevent that candidate from being the
person who will utter the words spoken by only forty-two other Americans in
this nation's history.

Yes, if you do what must be done to ensure that this nation will be safe and
secure and economically viable as it enters the second decade of the third
millennium, you and your fellow Americans (and the world) will never hear
the sentence specified by Article 2, Section 1 of the United States
Constitution spoken as follows: "I, Hillary Rodham Clinton, do solemnly
swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United
States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend
the Constitution of the United States."

You can end the newest American political dynasty aborning. You can make
certain that William Jefferson Clinton does not get to move back into the
White House and serve as history's first First Gent. Eight years after his
ignominious departure from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, amid reports that the
White House had been trashed by outgoing staffers and amid general disgust
at the extravagant pardons Clinton had been handing out like so many
business cards, the man who turned the White House into a fee-for-service
hotel and toyed with insecure young women and tortured widows and God knows
who else in the nooks and crannies of the West Wing will continue to have to
do his wretched business elsewhere.

The flip side of this scenario is also unfortunately true. For if you
Republicans don't get real serious real fast, if you don't wise up and
settle down and get focused, that will be Hillary up there on the podium
taking the oath of office from John Roberts. Hillary Rodham Clinton will
become the next president of the United States unless you Republicans can
find a way to stop her.
And you can.

But to do so, you need to understand just how real the possibility of her
victory is and what kind of challenge that poses to you as a party and a
movement. You need to come together in recognition of the threat. You need
to avoid the temptation that has begun to afflict members of the party's
more ideological branches-the temptation to threaten to break off, to
secede, to run third-party protest candidacies. That will only get Hillary
elected.

Politicians and political writers are fond of sports analogies, and when
they're looking for one, they usually go straight to football or baseball.
Neither is the proper metaphor for what happens in elections. The sport
providing the closest analogy is golf. Golf is a game played over a series
of days in which a contender must not only compete with others but must also
overcome his own natural human tendency to fail-to lose focus, get lazy,
ease up, worry himself to death, get cocky and overconfident, or become
selfdestructive. Usually, the golfer who wins a tournament is the one who
makes the fewest unforced errors, the one who gets in his own way the least.

And so it is with politics. Elections in America-and in this case I refer
only to contested elections, those increasingly rare events where nobody
quite knows on Election Day which of the two leading candidates is going to
prevail-are almost never won. Indeed, the real trick to winning an election
in America isn't to win it. The trick is not to lose it. In 2000 and 2004,
George W. Bush won the presidency in large measure because he made fewer
mistakes than Al ("Let me come across as three different people in three
different debates") Gore and John ("I voted for the $87 billion before I
voted against it") Kerry.

Now, you can certainly make the case, and I would, that Gore and Kerry made
the unforced errors they did because they didn't quite know what they stood
for and what message they were trying to get across and so they were
superbly well suited to fumfer and blather and trip on their own shoelaces.
You can make the case that it was easy for George W. Bush to stick to his
rigidly programmed stump speeches, to say the same thing in the same way for
months and months and months without going insane, because he knew at his
core what he was running for and why selling his message was the best way to
get to Washington (or stay in Washington) and do what he thought he needed
to do for the country. Or you can make the case that Bush is a boring,
programmed robot, lacking the kind of human frailties that might cause a
Gore or a Kerry to screw up charmingly.

Whichever side of the argument you take, Bush's two elections prove that not
losing is a vital part-maybe the vital part-of winning. And now, as 2008
approaches, the Republican Party faces a very complicated task. To stop
Hillary Clinton, it has to not lose to her. To succeed in this aim,
Republicans need to start now. You must avoid fights to the death with one
another. You know you want to have them. But you can't tear yourselves apart
over them. The cost will simply be too high for the country to bear. This is
not to say that disagreements among Republicans and conservatives over
matters of policy and conscience are bad and to be avoided. Far from it. The
greatest sign of health in the Republican Party is its growing capacity to
house people who share the same rough vision of the nation's direction but
who have differing views on how to get there. That rough vision, the
Republican vision, can be summed up briefly as this: America is and should
be a country that rewards individual achievement and hard work, disdains a
culture of preferential treatment and group rights, believes in equality of
opportunity rather than the equality of result, upholds traditional values,
and is dedicated to securing the nation from foreign threats.

Now, do the Republican Party's politicians act in ways that are always
commensurate with this vision? Of course not. They are politicians first and
foremost, and most of them are guilty of the same sins that have corrupted
elected officials since the dawn of time-especially the sleazy but legal use
of public moneys to buy support from voters, reward friends and donors,
punish enemies and rivals, and cement their own place in office forever.

In particular, for many rank-and-file Republicans, life would certainly be
simpler if the party-the party of traditional values and individual
accomplishment-had proved to be more exacting in its management of the
Congress in the years since the GOP took it over in 1994 than the party of
Big Government was in the forty years preceding it. But that was not to be.
Perhaps even hoping that it could have been so was a dangerous illusion. And
so many Republicans and movement conservatives, disdainful of Washington and
its tendency to turn Puritan reformers into Epicurean revelers, are
currently expressing great distress about the behavior of the Washington
party-about the rise of creepy lobbyists, the use of Congressional pork, and
the prevalence of cronyism.

God knows it would be nice if you could have politics without politicians,
but you can't. Politics is a profession, and in general, people behave in
nasty and unseemly ways when it comes to keeping their jobs. Politicians are
among the reasons why, in his great essay, the novelist E. M. Forster was
able to issue only "two cheers for democracy." So as 2008 looms, Republicans
and conservatives should be sadder and wiser about politics-sadder because
the ideal of a "Republican Revolution" as promulgated in the 1990s proved to
be a fantasy, and wiser because it's always better to look at the world
through clear and cold eyes rather than rose-colored glasses. And here's
what you see when you look through clear and cold eyes: Sometimes, in
politics, the best you can do is to play the Lesser of Two Evils game. You
may have to commit yourself to a candidate who is not the most wonderful
person you can think of, a candidate who disappoints you and even angers you
in many ways-because it's more important to prevent a result you know will
be bad news.

Hillary = Bad News.

The mischief Hillary could do in the White House would be far more
devastating to the country than anything she and Bill cooked up in the
1990s. I'm not talking about personal peccadilloes, for it seems
unquestionable that Hillary's own personal morality resides elsewhere than
in the high-rent sewer where her husband's does. And as for financial dirty
dealings, she's doubtless learned to keep her nose clean after the
Whitewater agony-and the change for the better in the Democratic Party's
financial fortunes means she won't have to troll for campaign funds from
Chinese Communist agents and grant pardons in exchange for library
donations. To that extent, her presidency would be superior to her
husband's. Indeed, Bill himself has said she would be a better president
than he was-only "in some ways," of course, because in Clinton's own mind,
no human being could be better than he at anything. "In some ways," he told
an Israel Television anchor in November 2005, "she would be because of what
we did together. First, she has the Senate experience I didn't have. Second,
she would have had the eight years in the White House. I think she wouldn't
make as many mistakes, because, you know, we're older and more mature, and
she is far more experienced now in all the relevant ways than I was when I
took office. So I think in a way she has the best of both worlds."1

Hillary might have the best of both worlds. But America would have the worst
of it. We have every reason to believe she would be a far more destructive
president than her husband was. Where Bill was a prudent and cautious
political player and an ideological vampire, almost always ready and willing
to drink deep from the opposition's ideas and command them as though they
were his own if it suited his interests, Mrs. Clinton will almost surely use
her time in the White House to advance frankly liberal or leftist ideas. At
a time when the Left poses a colossal threat to the nation's economic
viability and its national security, she will try to run for office from the
center but govern from the Left.

If I'm right-and I hope this book will provide ideas and methods that will
ensure we need never find out-Hillary's presidency will be the mirror image
of the presidency f George W. Bush. There's every reason to believe that
Hillary Clinton is to liberalism what George W. Bush was to conservatism-its
Trojan Horse, its stealthy way back into power. She's a serious person, a
person of conviction, a talented politician, and a tough competitor-just as
he was and is.

The current president ran in 2000 as a compassionate conservative, with a
greater stress on the compassion than on the conservatism. As president,
however, Bush immediately took his stand with the right wing of his party.
He found his home, his base, his succor, his sustenance, and, indeed, his
vision from the neoconservatives and the conservatives. That's who he really
was, as it turned out. Though it is true that Bush dissented from
conservative orthodoxy in many ways, chiefly in his refusal to embrace
penurious government, he was as right-wing a president as could be imagined
in this place and time (as Republicans and conservatives disenchanted with
him right now will discover as they begin to examine the likeliest choices
to replace him in 2009).

The left-liberal governance of Hillary Clinton would be seen in every aspect
of the government. The economic alteration of the nation's course seems easy
to predict-tax increases, more government regulation of the economy, a
friendly disposition toward the use of the courts by trial lawyers, a war on
businesses large and small launched by regulatory agencies in the name of
the environment and small investors, and almost certainly a backslide into
protectionism (in the name of workers' rights and environmental justice).
But those changes pale in comparison to the consequences for the security of
the United States and the advance of U.S. interests around the world.

If you are among those who believe, as I do, that the aggressive tactics
taken in the War on Terror have helped keep America safe and have so far
prevented a number of post- 9/11 attacks, then you have every reason to be
panicked about the prospect of Hillary's ascension. For there's good reason
to believe she would chip away at those aggressive policies and amend them
until they are so compromised they will spring as many leaks as a New
Orleans levee during a storm surge. And the people she would hire to work
for her would seek to reverse whatever aggressive policies they could
reverse.

Take, first, the changes in domestic antiterror policy that she would
oversee. Though Hillary has generally talked tough on these matters and
voted for Bush-sponsored legislation like the Patriot Act, she did vote to
sustain a filibuster in December 2005 opposing the act's reauthorization.
Her unwillingness to defend this vital law against reckless Democratic
efforts to gut it was a hint that her own presidency would probably take up
these matters in the form of "cleaning up" domestic antiterror legislation.
That "cleanup" effort would, by the time Congress got through with it and
she signed it into law, begin erecting new barriers to the good working
order of the FBI and CIA and the possibilities of cooperation between them.

The judges she would appoint, all of them left-leaning at best, would be
inclined to use their gavels to rule out of order any and all aggressive
efforts at terrorism prevention. And her cabinet officials, drawn from her
three decades of friendship with the left-wing majordomos of the United
States, would push back against the use of tough and innovative tactics by
enforcement agencies and first-responders.

But even those actions would pale beside the changes she would make to the
foreign policy of the United States. George W. Bush's aggressive foreign
policy-taking the fight to the terrorists and the rogue states and trying to
replace Muslim tyrannies with democracies-offers the only real chance to end
the endless cycle of Islamofascist terror. But eliminating that foreign
policy is the goal that unites every Democrat and leftist. They may disagree
on just what exactly should replace it, but replace it they will. That
detestation of the Bush foreign policy is the glue that binds the disparate
elements of the Democratic coalition-from the Michael Moore crazies who
think Bush did it all for oil or for the Saudis or for some other wacko goal
to the more sensible Clinton officials who criticize Bush policy because,
hell, that's what foreign-policy experts do when they're affiliated with the
party out of power.

And where does Hillary stand on all of this? It is true that she has voted
for Bush defense budgets and supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But
it is also true that for twenty years before she became a senator, she was
committed to a view of the world and America's role in it that was
defiantly, even passionately, hostile to a foreign policy that required
America to stand tall, defy conventional world opinion, and do what was
necessary to secure itself and free the world from tyranny.

Which is the real Hillary? The senator with her eye on the White House,
casting votes to keep herself viable, or the activist whose sense of the
world remained remarkably unaltered even as her own husband moved to the
center? I submit that the senator is the Trojan Horse and the real Hillary
is inside, waiting to burst through and alter the course set by George W.
Bush. For, in the end, Hillary's almost perfect liberal voting record-she
received a 96 rating from the Americans for Democratic Action in 2005-is a
more reliable indicator of her ideological purposes than her studied efforts
to play a hawk.

Which is why she must be stopped, and you're the only ones who can stop her.
But to do that, you first must stop doing something else. You need to stop
lying to yourselves. You need to stop having those conversations where you
begin to doubt her strength as a candidate. I've heard them. I've
participated in them. I've even reveled in them. They're very alluring.
After all, you and everyone you know probably

despise Hillary Clinton. There's almost nothing about her that appeals to
you. You think she stayed in her marriage because she was hungry for
unelected power, and that disgusts you. Or you think she stayed in the
marriage because she had a kind of addiction to Bill Clinton, which evokes
contempt in you, considering all the foul things Bill Clinton did with his
incessant philandering.

But that Hillary Clinton-the one that was so easy to dislike, even outright
hate-won't be the one running for president. As her husband suggested, she's
older and wiser and cleverer-and therefore more dangerous. She's shown the
most important quality a successful politician can have: She's learned how
to adapt. She's learned from her mistakes. And she's even managed to make
her mistakes work for her.

When 2008 rolls around, it will have been sixteen years since Hillary first
emerged on the American scene. With the possible exceptions of the man who
won the Civil War and made his bid for the White House in 1868, the man who
defeated the Nazis and went for it in 1952, and the man who costarred in a
movie with a chimp named Bonzo and sought the brass ring in 1980, she will
be the most famous person ever to run for president.

By the time the 1992 election rolled around, Hillary had already become the
best-known would-be First Lady ever-and by the end of the Clinton presidency
had achieved a prominence in the role equaled in the course of American
history only by Eleanor Roosevelt and Dolley Madison. What's especially
interesting about this is that much of her fame was due to mistakes she
made, the controversies she created, and the enemies she attracted like
flies. She generated unnecessary enmity toward herself before her husband's
election because of rude and cold statements about what she clearly took to
be the proper liberal role of women.

It happened, basically, the moment America got a look at her on a 60 Minutes
broadcast on the eve of the New Hampshire primary in which she and Bill sat
together to answer Gennifer Flowers's charge that she had engaged in a
twelveyear affair with the presidential hopeful. It was on this occasion
that the then-unknown Hillary Clinton angrily and contemptuously declared
she wasn't "standing by my man, like Tammy Wynette." The remark was a
reference to a twenty-four-year-old country-music song, and it was
significant because everybody got the message: Hillary Clinton may have
moved to the South and been the wife of a Southern Democratic governor, but
she was a Northern liberal through and through.

Nothing wrong with being a Northern liberal-hey, I'm married to one-but
there was something wrong about a would-be First Lady becoming a
controversial character right off the bat. And she just couldn't help
herself, somehow; she stepped in it yet again only a few weeks after the
Tammy Wynette moment, when she proudly told reporters that she had pursued a
profession rather than being a housewife. It was, to put it mildly, unwise
for her to act as though what she did was far more important and difficult
than what homemakers and other nonprofessional women did.

Those personal mistakes were compounded in the first two years of Bill
Clinton's presidency by the grave political mistake she made as First Lady
in designing and championing a disastrously statist overhaul of the nation's
health care practices. So having become a lightning rod for being a
caricature of a women's libber during the campaign, Hillary then became a
caricature of a clueless and dogmatic leftist as a result of her bungled
health care plan.

The final element of her early fame was intertwined with the mistakes she
had made in Arkansas and continued to make in Washington in regard to some
suspicious financial transactions during her time as a prominent young
politician's wife. The shadow cast over her by her surprising ability to
earn a 10,000 percent profit on a cattle-futures deal when she had never
before dealt in futures offered a rather more ambiguous picture of the First
Lady than you would have guessed from the air of moral superiority she bore
as conspicuously as the bright pink suit in which she appeared at a press
conference inside the White House to explain her lucky cattle score.

The first sign that Hillary Clinton might indeed be a formidable political
force on her own was when she quieted down and put herself in a box in 1996
so that her husband could get reelected. She understood that the
controversies she provoked were bad for him, and rather than standing her
ground proudly, she shut her yapper.

She opened it in a significant way only once more before she ran for the
Senate in New York-when in the week that Monica Lewinsky's name first
surfaced in 1998, she went on the Today show and declared that a "vast
right-wing conspiracy" had come into existence to force her husband to
accept oral sex and phone sex from an unpaid twenty-one-year-old intern.

It turned out that silence served her well-so well, in fact, that she
decided to make it an integral part of her own political strategy when she
ran for the U.S. Senate in New York State in 1999 and 2000. She spent much
of the first year in her two-year campaign on what she called a "listening
tour" of the Empire State's sixty-two counties. In other words, she wasn't
going to say anything on the record, would be giving no speeches, and
wouldn't sit for interviews about the race. She was just going to "listen"
instead.

This, again, demonstrated the political smarts that Hillary had developed
during the Clinton presidency. She was not yet quite skilled enough to wing
it on the campaign trail with a huge press corps hanging on her every word.
One bad mistake and she might be toast. So the woman who became famous for
sticking her foot in her mouth glided into the Senate by saying and doing
almost nothing.

And by keeping quiet throughout her Senate tenure, Hillary Clinton helped
squelch the fires of the rage against her, because she has added little fuel
to them. During the Bush presidency, Hillary Clinton has been serving as the
junior senator from New York, careful to avoid making waves, casting
reliably liberal Democratic votes, and yet cultivating a reputation as a
centrist largely because she voted to authorize the use of force in the war
against Saddam and has supported every defense appropriation since.

The tale told about Hillary Clinton's tenure in the Senate is that she is
just so very, very "hardworking." It's hard to know what that actually
means, since the work of a senator is to sit around listening to people
blather and take lots of meetings, but it's been the standard line about
her-and what's even more interesting is that the line has been peddled most
frequently not by Hillary's fellow Democrats but by Republicans like John
McCain and Lindsey Graham.

In ways large and small, then, the Clinton project of this decade has been
to soften and becalm the image of the 1990s virago who was the subject of
comedian Jeff Foxworthy's immortal crack, "If you have nothing nice to say,
you must be talking about Hillary Clinton." And truth to tell, Hillary is
nothing if not a survivor, and she's been around long enough to seem like a
piece of political-cultural furniture, heavy and present and in your living
room whether you like it or not.

That much became evident in 2002, with the publication of her astoundingly
uninformative and uninspired memoir, Living History. Whatever its weaknesses
as a work of literature-and suffice it to say it has no strengths as a work
of literature-Living History was an astounding success. Conservatives
scoffed when her publishing house paid $8 million for the book, which led
one of the biggest scoffers, the TV host-pundit Tucker Carlson, to say he'd
eat his shoe if Living History sold 1 million copies. Carlson's ingestion of
a cake in the shape of a shoe was a landmark moment-including for skeptics
in her own political camp-because it demonstrated that Hillary Clinton
really did possess mass appeal on her own.

The book's success cemented the notion among Democrats in particular that
she might be their savior from the hard-charging Bush in 2004-and when she
wisely decided not even to dip her tippy-toe into the waters of that
maelstrom, it made her the prohibitive frontrunner for her own party's
nomination in four years' time.

Her status as a frontrunner and her access to her husband's fundraising
machine mean that Hillary Clinton begins the presidential-campaign cycle
roughly where Bush did in 1999-so far ahead in terms of money-raising
abilities that a whole bunch of other prospective candidates may just decide
not even to give it a shot.

Actually, she's probably in a far stronger position than Bush was. She is
also using her Senate reelection bid in New York to begin loading up her
bank account. Hillary will face no significant opposition, and yet will
probably raise between $50 and $100 million before Election Day 2006. By
February 2006, according to press reports, she had already banked $17.5
million. Federal election law will allow her to transfer the unused money
from that Senate campaign into her presidential coffers. This suggests that
Hillary will be in a position to break through the $40 million primary
campaign-spending limit more than a year earlier than Bush did, and he was
the first candidate in the modern era ever to decide to run a primary
campaign entirely with private funds.* By 2007, she will be the 800-pound
gorilla of the coming election.

[* By breaking the spending limit, Bush was unable to collect federal
matching funds. In effect, then, he was betting that he could raise more
than $80 million, which he did both elections-more than $100 million each in
2000 and 2004.]

The only way to deal with an enemy is to take that enemy seriously, to
respect the enemy's strengths, to understand the enemy's virtues. And you
can't shake off your worry by thinking dismissive thoughts. You need to give
up on attractive theories that tell you Hillary Clinton is not a strong
candidate for president. You need to restrain yourself from being seduced by
a few ideas that are already being bandied about to suggest that she is a
weak contender who will be easy to defeat. These seductive ideas come from
decades of received political wisdom, and they all seem to rule Hillary
Clinton out of order and unable to reach the Oval Office. Now, I would never
disagree with the contention that the best guide to how politicians will win
in the future is the close study of how other politicians have won and lost
in the past. But in every successful presidential campaign, the candidate
and his team also figure out a new way to win and upset the conventional
wisdom that prevailed before them.

Nobody before 1988 thought a patrician vice president could successfully
peddle a populist message against a candidate raised by poor immigrants from
Greece, but George Bush the Elder did. Nobody before 1992 thought it would
be a good idea for a candidate from the South to pick a vice presidential
candidate from the same region-but it worked when Clinton chose Gore. Nobody
before 2000 thought that the son of a failed president could make it to the
Oval Office, but George Bush the Younger did. Nobody before 2004 thought
that a presidential election could be won by milking a candidate's own base
rather than moving toward the center for votes-and yet that's how George W.
Bush succeeded in scoring 62 million ballots with his name on them.

And yet political thinkers and watchers are sorely tempted to believe in the
conventional wisdom they have come to know so well, because without it, what
do they actually know, really? Which is why it's essential to examine the
conventional wisdom and challenge its assumptions.

"Depend upon it, sir," said Dr. Johnson, "when a man knows he is to be
hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Hillary's
election should be concentrating the minds of Republicans and conservatives
wonderfully. But it isn't yet. And if we're not careful, the disappointment
many of you feel with the state of your party will translate into an
exhilarating but potentially suicidal journey as the primary season gets
under way in earnest in 2007. The road you should travel, the path you
should take, is the one marked "Danger: Hillary Approaching." But there are
nascent signs that you may take another road, a road into the interior of
the Republican Party itself. Many on the right will want to use the primary
to lead the GOP and the country into some very dangerous
territory-ideological purity.

Occasionally in politics, a small but influential caucus of idealists
decides that what its party really needs is a Purification Ritual. To stress
the importance of ideological purity, the caucus will stage a protest
candidacy against a mainstream politician and the political party that
chooses him, because the party and the politician have betrayed the caucus's
highest ideals.

The conservative movement that undergirds the Republican Party is especially
fond of threatening the GOP with a Purification Ritual on every matter under
the sun. Even Ronald Reagan's presidency wasn't good enough for many
conservatives, who continually declared themselves good and ready to form a
third party whose sole purpose would be to divide the GOP-to injure the
party and prevent its candidates from winning elections. This was,
presumably, a form of tough love, an effort to force change on a
recalcitrant party. Or at least that's what the Purifiers usually say. But
in fact they are doing what insurgencies always do-engaging in destruction
and calling it revolution.

The GOP's conservative base is very susceptible to the temptation to Purify,
because even though the Republican Party and the conservative movement are
enemies of the Left's utopian politics, we are often guilty of indulging in
our own form of utopianism when it comes to politics and politicians. We
cannot bear it if they don't devote themselves to all our policy hopes and
wishes, and we experience a yearning to punish them for their heterodoxy.
That's where the Purification Ritual comes in.

Now, it's certainly the case that the Purifiers exist in both parties. The
Democratic Party has been wounded by the Ritual as well. In 1948, two
Purification candidates-radical leftist Henry Wallace and Southern
segregationist Strom Thurmond-ran against Harry Truman and nearly handed the
election to Republican Thomas Dewey. Twenty years later, George Wallace took
direction from Thurmond's racist playbook and stole Southern votes away from
Lyndon Johnson in 1968. And, of course, in 2000, Ralph Nader-a Henry Wallace
for the new millennium-took a small but crucial bite out of Al Gore.

But in recent decades the GOP has been subjected to Purification Rituals far
more frequently than the Democrats-and at far greater cost, at least in
1992. The GOP's Purification Temptation first surfaced in a realm that no
longer even exists on our political spectrum-in the left wing of the GOP. In
1972, a Republican congressman named Paul McCloskey decided to run as a
third-party candidate against Richard Nixon, who was up for reelection.
McCloskey's intent was not to win but rather to speak as the voice of his
party's liberal conscience on foreign policy. Since there was little
difference between McCloskey and Democratic candidate George McGovern-and
since neither his nor McGovern's message had much appeal-McCloskey did Nixon
no damage. In 1980, another liberal Republican, Congressman John Anderson of
Illinois, tried to throw a monkey wrench intothe electoral proceedings by
staging a third-party assault on Ronald Reagan from the left. He too was
unsuccessful, since Reagan won an absolute majority with 51 percent of the
vote. (Anderson actually took some votes away from Democrat Jimmy Carter.)

Despite their failure, the liberal Republican candidates planted a seed that
came to fruition in 1992-first in the primaries, when the Neanderthal
commentator Pat Buchanan became the vehicle for far-right-wing anger with
George Bush the Elder, and then when the wacko billionaire H. Ross Perot
made his Sherman's March through Republican strongholds in the November
election. Perot, who had never run for office and was all but unknown when
1992 began, scored an amazing 19 percent of the vote and basically gave the
presidency to Bill Clinton. Four years later, Perot did it again, getting 8
percent of the vote. And while it's doubtful that Republican Bob Dole could
have bested the resurgent incumbent Clinton under any circumstances, the
fact is that if you add Dole's and Perot's vote total, together they beat
the Man from Hope by a few hundred thousand.

Though neither Perot nor Buchanan was an ideal vehicle for the voter who
cast his lot with the protest-since one was nutty and the other was
noxious-there's no question why the protest was being staged and for what
purpose. Daddy Bush had raised taxes when he had said he wouldn't, and had
signed three major pieces of big-government legislation when he had said he
would pursue smaller government. Bob Dole was the Washington Establishment
Republican par excellence, uncomfortable with any issue that moved and
excited voters. Perot was not an ideological Purifier-he talked too much
about getting under the hood and seeing what was wrong with the engine, as
though a representative government were a machine and not an ingathering of
fallen men and women-but he provided an outlet for the frustration of those
disappointed by the Republicans.

Lovely. There's nothing like casting a ballot for someone who can never win
to make you feel like Don Quixote, nobly (if crazily) tilting at windmills.
But this is no time for Republicans and conservatives to be quixotic. You
have to get over the hunger to seek exile and isolation for those fellow
Republicans with whom you disagree. In this coming election, it is vital for
the nation's future that you resist the siren song of Purification. You must
not hold ideological purity more dear than partisan victory in the coming
two years.

Yes, it's time to fight, but it's not time to fight one another. It's time,
instead, to start picking the right fights. I'm talking about fights with
the liberal Left that will rally your voters, inspire your donors, and offer
the Democrats a temptation of their own-the temptation they have been
courting for years now. You want them to redirect their own politics far off
to the left, to take a leap off a cliff and into the swirling rapids of
hatred and rage at all things Republican and conservative.

You want Democrats to suffer the fate they suffered the last time they ran a
presidential candidate following a twoterm Republican president. That was
Michael Dukakis in 1988, who lost the election by 8 points (54-46). Now,
Hillary Clinton is not Michael Dukakis, and the nature of the current
American electorate makes it almost impossible for the 2008 election to
feature a victory that sizable by either side. But it is conceivable, if you
Republicans and conservatives put your minds to it, that you could do things
in the coming two years that would help push the Democratic Party away from
the more electable Hillary into the arms of a more frankly leftist
candidate.

That candidate would probably be Howard Dean-yes, Howard Dean, the man who
shouted "yeeargh" like a crazed banshee, the man who later became chairman
of the Democratic National Committee. Certainly, Dean would be a pleasure
for the GOP to run against, but it need not be he. Al Gore-the new Al Gore,
the crazy and hysterical Al Gore, the Al Gore who no longer speaks as though
he had been anesthetized but rather like someone in dire need of Librium,
the Al Gore who likens those who dare to criticize him on talk radio and the
Internet to Hitler's brownshirts- would do just fine too. So would Wisconsin
senator Russ Feingold, a classic up-from-academia American leftist. John
Kerry has also been moving steadily left in hopes of finding solid ground
for his 2008 bid. Or it could be someone we've never even thought of, the
way nobody had even thought of Howard Dean as suitable for much more than
taking a drive between Montpelier and Brattleboro in early 2002.

The point is that Republicans should act in ways that will drive Democrats
so batty they will strengthen the hand of the left-wing rump that might
consider Hillary a centrist sellout, allowing whatever Republican candidate
who shows up in November 2008 to waltz away with the election.

I grant you this is neither probable nor likely. Mark Blumenthal, a
Democratic pollster and blogger, points out that despite virulent
anti-Hillary rhetoric on some left-wing sites in 2005, she maintained a
favorable rating among Democrats somewhere between 79 and 84 percent.2 But
it is conceivable-if you are clever enough and determined enough to make it
happen. And even if you don't succeed at that delicious goal, the act of
attempting it may force Hillary herself to move so far to the left to secure
the Democratic nomination that she will be unelectable by the time the two
party conventions are over at the end of August. And even if that doesn't
happen, doing what is necessary to hold your own party together is the only
way she can be stopped.

There is more than mere pragmatism in this for you. Coming together in
recognition of a common enemy is powerful binding glue for a party and a
political movement, even if they feel themselves to be in the doldrums and
spoiling for an internecine battle. Many Republicans and conservatives feel
that their party and their movement have become strange victims of their own
successes-that the Bush triumphs in fighting the war against Islamic
radicalism have been obscured by the difficulty of finishing the job in
Iraq, and that the Republican takeover of Congress has not led to a greater
devolution of power to the individual but rather to an unhealthy fondness
for feeding its friends from the public teat. But whatever weaknesses and
sins have beset the Republicans and the Right, they are as nothing compared
with what Hillary Rodham Clinton might be in a position to do if she wins
the presidency, and you know that down to the root.

This isn't about the visceral personal dislike many on the right have for
Hillary Clinton. This is about the future of the country, and what the
country needs now is for the Right to stop her. For parties and movements to
lead and to succeed, they need missions. Well, this is the mission, and this
is your moment. Let's get to it. Now.

John Podhoretz is the New York Times bestselling author of Bush Country and
Hell of a Ride. He is a columnist for the New York Post and a political
commentator for the Fox News Channel. A cofounder of the Weekly Standard, he
has worked at Time, U.S. News and World Report, and the Washington Times.
Podhoretz served as a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and as
special assistant to Drug Czar William J. Bennett

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4. British Local Elections - Conservatives back in contention

After 14 years of poor local election results that have only slowly
recovered, David Cameron's newly rejuvenated Conservative party swept the
board in Britain's recent local elections.

Roughly 40% of the vote was won by the Conservatives, with their nearest
rivals gathering just 27%, the governing party, Labour, crashed to a lowly
third in the polls.

The Conservatives gained 316 new councillors and control of 68 councils,
whilst Labour lost 319 councillors and 30 councils. Crucially, the Liberal
Democrats, the third party in British politics and formidable local
campaigners, had a net gain of only two councillors and one council. This
means the electorate is switching from Labour to Conservative rather than
fragmenting into the smaller parties - crucial if the Conservatives are to
win the next general election outright.

Remarkably, for a party that has struggled to make an impact in the cities
in recent years, London provided a set of key wins for the Conservatives.
They have tightened their grip on the all-important suburbs as well as vital
inner-city areas such as Hammersmith and Fulham. In addition, former Labour
strongholds have gone to No Overall Control, some for the first time in over
forty years.

If the Conservatives successes were a remarkable story, so too was the
decline of Labour. Previously the dominant force in British politics, with a
slick PR machine and a remarkably loyal core vote, Labour struggled to hold
on - even in previously safe councils.

They weren't helped by the blizzard of embarrassing stories that hit the
headlines in the fortnight before the election. Almost every senior cabinet
figure has come in for criticism whether for professional or private
indiscretions, this left the party's activists feeling let down by their
leadership.

Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the bad news, the calls for Tony Blair's
leadership have grown louder, and the previously neutral press are actively
seeking out stories of ministerial incompetence.

The one real surprise of the night was provided by the extremists of the
British National Party. After an ill-judged announcement by government
minister Margaret Hodge, that 80% of households in the Labour stronghold of
Barking might vote for the BNP, a massive 11 of 13 contested seats fell to
the nationalists. A fringe party that had struggled to field a full
compliment of candidates was suddenly thrust into the media spotlight and
were able to increase their national representation from 5 to 32 councillors
overnight.

The encouraging message from the Conservative comeback is that its young
activists are playing a key role in revitalising the party. Target councils
with large numbers of young activists did proportionally better than
average, and for the first time a new generation of volunteers are becoming
predominant in filling key campaigning roles.

The result has shown that, under its new leader, the British Conservative
party is capable of winning the next election and returning to government.

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5. Future Events

June G8 Chairmanship, Russia
June Parliamentary Elections, Czech Republic
August 17 - 20 IYDU Freedom Forum 2006: The Reagan Legacy
September 24 Parliamentary Elections, Sweden
September State Elections, Mecklenburg-Pomerania
October 123rd Conservative Party Conference, UK
November 7 Congressional and State Elections, United States
November 25 State Elections, Victoria, Australia
November State Parliamentary Elections, Austria (tbc)

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To include your events in future editions please send details to
patrick.brown@iydu.org
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6. End Note
The next edition of the IYDU Newsletter will be published on July 01 2006.
To submit an article for publication, please send it to the Newsletter
editor, IYDU Executive Secretary Patrick Brown, by email
patrick.brown@iydu.org for 25th June 2006.

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The views expressed in the IYDU newsletter represent the views of the
individual writers and not the views of the office bearers or member
organizations of the International Young Democrat Union or the International
Democrat Union.
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