William Kristol's feisty Weekly Standard urges on the GOP Revolution
by DAN KENNEDY
There stood a caricature of Bob Dole as Hamlet, looking pensive -- and old -- as he pondered a skull that symbolized his lifeless campaign. The headline, in case you didn't get the point: "Alas, Poor Bob Dole."
The cover of the new Mother Jones? A forthcoming ad from the Democratic National Committee?
Think again. This thrashing of Dole's presidential pretensions was recently featured on the front of The Weekly Standard, the conservative journal of opinion started last September by media baron Rupert Murdoch and edited by Republican wunderkind William Kristol.
For a magazine ostensibly supportive of Dole's campaign, The Standard has run up a curious record. Its denigration of Dole started last fall, when Kristol flirted with Colin Powell as a possible presidential candidate, even though the general's pro-choice, pro-affirmative-action views place him well to Dole's (and Kristol's) left.
But Kristol's Dole-bashing reached its fullest flowering in the April 29 issue. "Bob Dole is likely to lose the presidential race to Bill Clinton," Kristol wrote. "The challenge for Republicans and conservatives is to prevent a Dole defeat from derailing the ongoing Republican realignment and from blocking the emergence of a new era of conservative governance."
Kristol makes no apologies for placing his desire for victory above ideological purity. "We haven't criticized Dole for being insufficiently conservative," he told me in a recent interview. "We've criticized him for running a lousy campaign."
Things weren't supposed to be this way. Intended as a vehicle to promote Newt Gingrich's Republican revolution and keep it on track, The Standard has instead found itself caught in the whirlpool of Gingrich's self-destruction. Kristol's biggest fear is that a Dole wipeout could destroy the already-unpopular Republican Congress.
The Standard's executive editor, Fred Barnes, argues that the eclipse of Gingrich has obscured the success and continued popularity of the Speaker's agenda. "Gingrich has taken a beating. Gingrichism has not taken a beating," Barnes said in a telephone interview. "Every day, Bill Clinton adopts more of the Republican agenda. Even some Republicans don't realize how successful they've been."
Yet the most vigorous strain of Republicanism to emerge in 1996 has been that of Pat Buchanan, whose protectionist sentiments and ethnic and racial hate-mongering are antithetical to Gingrichism. The Standard rode to the sound of the guns with a cover editorial on March 4 denouncing Buchanan's "corrosive anti-institutional populism" and with a March 11 piece by Norman Podhoretz, retired editor of the neoconservative journal Commentary (and father of Standard deputy editor John Podhoretz), arguing that Buchanan should be disqualified because of his well-documented anti-Semitism.
The Standard revolves around Bill Kristol, a 43-year-old former Harvard professor, and the bright young Republicans he's surrounded himself with. Like Podhoretz, Kristol's political lineage is formidable: His father, Irving Kristol, founding editor of The Public Interest, is the intellectual father of neoconservatism. His mother, the combative academic Gertrude Himmelfarb, is an important neocon in her own right.
Kristol built his reputation as chief-of-staff to Secretary of Education William Bennett, and later filled the same role for Vice President Quayle, when he became known as "Dan Quayle's brain." Later, as a leading Republican strategist, he became known as a skilled political infighter, and as a partisan who'd rather win than help solve pressing national problems. (Indeed, he's infamous for recommending that Republicans reject the Clinton health plan sight unseen.)
His career as an editor has been brief but promising. He claims that The Standard's paid circulation has already hit 70,000, a remarkable debut considering that two long-established journals of opinion -- the left-liberal Nation and the centrist New Republic -- are just below the 100,000 mark. Though his mag's numbers are still far short of conservative competitor The National Review's robust 218,000, Kristol predicts that The Standard will break even by the end of its third year.
The Standard is sharp and irreverent, a quick read that's taken on a broad range of subjects, such as the alleged sins of feminism, the war between animal-rights and AIDS activists and the purported hypocrisy of New Age guru Deepak Chopra. And though The Standard is not nearly as funny as it seems to think it is, there is an occasional good laugh, such as P.J. O'Rourke's jab at Hillary Rodham Clinton's "It Takes a Village" ("so much more than just a self-help book for idiots").
But there's an immaturity to The Standard, exemplified by a piece John Podhoretz wrote about a party at which older Republicans "wondered just when it was that 22-year-olds began smoking cigars and drinking highballs, and just why they looked so good doing it."
As the travails of the Dole campaign demonstrate, there's a lot more to politics than looking hip at cocktail parties. Certainly Barnes understands that. On the eve of the Republican National Convention he wrote about the emergence of Ford-era figure Donald Rumsfeld as Dole's chief policy adviser -- a development Barnes describes as hopeful, because Rumsfeld is old enough (64) and experienced enough to get Dole to listen to him. "He's the guy who Dole respects," Barnes quotes an unnamed aide as saying.
If Barnes's intention is to show that the Dole campaign is finally finding a sense of direction and purpose, then the Rumsfeld profile is pretty thin gruel. Still, Barnes, who at 53 is one of the magazine's few certified adults, no doubt has a better idea than his younger colleagues of how badly a Dole washout would hurt their cause. Not to mention their prospects of establishing The Standard as a major conservative voice for the long haul.
Dan Kennedy is the media reporter for the Boston Phoenix.