If I may paraphrase the question, Rachel wants me to explain why conservatives who talk about the importance of traditional values often fail to live up to those values in their personal lives and why other conservatives are often willing to turn a blind eye to those indiscretions.

First of all, I’m not sure it is the case that most conservatives are willing to overlook personal indiscretions like infidelity when considering whom to vote for. Whether or not Newt Gingrich runs for president in 2012 — and it is not at all clear that he is running — he has to be prepared to explain to a certain portion of the GOP primary electorate why the fact that he is a twice-divorced, thrice-married man does not automatically eliminate him from consideration as a serious candidate. There are a number of people out there who, I am almost certain, would not vote for him under any circumstances because of it.

The United States remains a center-right country composed of people who believe in center-right values, like family, hard work and honesty. But also in forgiveness — which is why the public apology from those in positions of authority who have crossed lines that seemingly could not be crossed often survive — but only when those failings are a matter of personal behavior rather than public trust.

Rachel is right in that the examples she cites create the opportunity for liberals to scream “Gotcha” at the top of their lungs. Not that this advances the debate any — but I bet it makes you feel good. I have to admit you have a point, though I am not at all certain I would categorize the senators she mentions as she does. Ensign and Vitter, in particular, are thought of as much more traditional Republicans than social conservatives. I don’t think they should have to resign because they were unfaithful to their spouses; and it’s up to the voters in their respective states whether or not they should be reelected. But if walking the talk is the standard we should set for our elected officials, let me ask a few questions of you in that same regard.

Should Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., resign his seat in the House of Representatives? After all, McDermott was one of those who opposed the Bush administration’s program to listen in on the international phone conversations of suspected terrorists. But this is the same McDermott who, when presented with an illegally recorded conversation of Republican House members discussing the Gingrich ethics investigation, turned that tape over to the media. I think it is fair to say that, in this case, McDermott failed to walk the talk.

Should Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., have to resign his seat in the U.S. Senate because he accepted the Reagan and Bush tax cuts that he railed against? Or should Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., have to resign his seat because his acceptance of a shotgun as a gift during the 2004 presidential campaign violated several of the gun control measures he himself had co-sponsored? Or should Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., resign his seat because he, despite having voted for civil rights legislation, was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan?

The “Gotcha” formula can be easily applied to almost any issue you can name. I think it is true that the vast majority of those conservatives serving in elective office can be considered people who “walk the talk.” But in an age where the politics of personal destruction remains an electoral tactic utilized to extremes by both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, the ones who slip up are going to be the ones who get all the attention. And not undeservedly so.

I hope that helps.

I know this is going to provoke a heated response from a lot of people who read this column, so let me begin by saying that I, and every conservative I know, condemn the murders of Tiller, Pittsburgh police officers Paul Sciullo II, Eric Kelly and Stephen Mayhle, and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Johns.

There is no reason, no excuse, nothing that can be said or written that would justify these senseless acts.

As to whether there is a connection between these acts and Obama’s election, I can only say that conservatives certainly do not believe there is.

I know there are statistics floating around the Internet purporting to show that violence and threats against abortionists have increased since Obama’s election. As one writer put it, Obama’s election was followed by the murder of an abortionist just as Clinton’s election was — while there were none during the just-concluded Bush administration. But I think this is much more coincidence than proof of cause and effect.

It may be true that Obama’s election has emboldened some of those called white supremacists — like Richard Poplawski, who stands accused of shooting and killing the three Pittsburgh police officers, and James von Brunn, who was arrested and charged with shooting Stephen Jones. These are, self-evidently, dangerous people.

It can be argued — and I suspect it will be by those of you who read this column and post comments — that their movement is potentially dangerous, just as any movement that teaches the superiority of a single ethnic, racial or religious group over all others may be, whether it is the Ku Klux Klan or the New Black Panther Party. But taking the potentiality of that danger as an excuse for the state to act to repress these organizations and individuals comes into direct conflict with the First Amendment’s guarantee that people are allowed to think what they like and that like-minded people are free to assemble and to share their ideas with others.

This is one reason for the conservative outrage over the shoddy report on so-called right-wing extremism released by the Department of Homeland Security in the early days of the Obama administration.

That report attempted, using loose language, to connect religious and racial hate groups to “those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” singling out antiabortion activists — without clarification — gun owners, immigration opponents and returning veterans.

It was an exercise in profiling, which we all know to be wrong. And which is probably why the report was withdrawn so DHS could rewrite it, as Secretary Janet Napolitano told the House Homeland Security Committee in May when she admitted, “The wheels came off the wagon because the vetting process was not followed” and that “an employee sent it out without authorization.”

If, however, anyone is actively engaged in a conspiracy to violate the laws of this country and to do violence against its citizens, the conservative response is to arrest the conspirators, charge them, give them a fair trial in front of a jury of their peers and, if they’re convicted, to jail them for a very long time. And in this sense, conservatives think there is a very real difference with those on the left who, they would argue, have turned people who have committed perceived acts of violence against the state into pseudo-folk heroes.

William Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, who were members of the terrorist Weather Underground in the 1960s, are now held up as positive role models. Their bomb-setting past is dismissed as something on the order of youthful indiscretions, unworthy of discussion.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Black Panther who was sentenced to death after having been found guilty of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, is another example. Although his death sentence was set aside due to irregularities in the sentencing process, his conviction has not been overturned — yet he has become a global celebrity who has been made “an honorary citizen” of cities around the world including Paris, Montreal and Palermo and whose radio commentaries were broadcast over the Pacifica radio network.

And then there is Leonard Peltier, the American Indian activist who was sentenced to two consecutive life terms following the 1975 cold-blooded murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. In 2004 the tiny left-wing California-based Peace and Freedom Party selected him as its presidential candidate. He got 27,607 votes.

These people and their causes have been embraced by the left, even by some mainstream liberals. I know some of you will point to G. Gordon Liddy as an example of a former felon whom conservatives have embraced, but a) his crimes were nonviolent, and b) he served his time in prison. And there weren’t any “Free Eric Rudolph” T-shirts in evidence at the last large conservative gathering I attended.

I hope that helps.

Thanks for your answer,

Peggy

Hello again. It’s good to be back with you.

The strong language — and, one can assume, the level of anger that language represents — used in the replies to last week’s column about Ronald Reagan was, to put it mildly, surprising. I would have thought the passage of time might have taken the edge off a bit. I guess not.

This week Peggy wants to know why conservatives are “REALLY” opposed to the confirmation of 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. This assumes, of course, that the stated concerns many have voiced are somehow disingenuous, that they are not reflective of what they are really thinking, and that there is a hidden agenda at work.

There isn’t. Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated that she is a liberal, activist judge and, as such, conservatives are reflexively opposed to her appointment — just as liberals automatically come out against the nomination of a strict constructionist anytime a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court.

There are voices on the right who have strongly criticized Sotomayor before all the evidence is in. But to their credit, the Republicans in the U.S. Senate — and their “votes” are really the only ones that count — have been remarkably measured in their response.

After she was nominated, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, “Senate Republicans will treat Judge Sotomayor fairly. But we will thoroughly examine her record to ensure she understands that the role of a jurist in our democracy is to apply the law even-handedly, despite their own feelings or personal or political preferences.” To this point, I think it is fair to say that Republican senators have kept their word.

It is true, however, that a number of conservative groups have come out strongly in opposition to her confirmation. Part of that is, as I said earlier, reflexive. But, and I think it fair to say that the examination of her record is still in the early stages, there are real issues of concern regarding her temperament and her attitude toward her job.

There is, for example, her now widely discussed statement in a 2002 Berkeley La Raza Law Review that “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion that a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Conservatives reading that come away with a real concern that her attitudes about equal justice may depend, or at least be shaped by, the race and gender of the parties involved in the cases before her. As conservative commentator Leslie Sanchez said recently on CNN, “The Constitution doesn’t guarantee equal for some or equal justice for the disadvantaged; it guarantees equal justice for all.”

So it is more than fair to ask what her understanding is of the job of a Supreme Court justice. Is it to interpret the Constitution in a way that is constrained by what it actually says and by precedent? Or is it to evaluate each case alone, on its own merits but in a interpretive way, one that is shaped by her personal feelings, her background and her politics more than by the language of the nation’s highest laws and a desire to achieve outcomes that are “fair” rather than constitutional? One would hope they would always be both, but fairness is a subjective standard. Constitutionality is not, or at least shouldn’t be.

There are plenty of individual cases and opinions that cause conservatives to question how she will rule as a high court justice and, therefore, to oppose her nomination.

There is Ricci v. DeStefano, a racial discrimination case in which she joined a 2nd Circuit opinion supporting the decision by the city of New Haven, Conn., to throw out the results of promotion exam for firefighters because the only applicants who qualified for promotion were white or Hispanic. The current Supreme Court is considering Ricci v. DeStefano.

And there is the case of Maloney v. Cuomo, in which she was part of a three-judge panel that ruled the Second Amendment affects only federal law, not state or local law. This is an issue that is almost certain to come before the high court in the next year or so, coming on the heels of D.C. v. Heller, in which the court held the right to bear arms is an individual right. The court’s decision threw the whole idea of restrictive-gun bans, from the standpoint of constitutionality, into question.

It is the concern about cases such as these, how she ruled and why, that are driving the conservative opposition to her nomination. Conservatives are not in opposition because she is Hispanic. Remember: The Republicans in the Senate and conservatives across the country went to war, in the political sense, after Senate Democrats used the filibuster for the first time to keep President George W. Bush’s 2001 nomination of Miguel Estrada — who received a unanimous “well-qualified” rating from the American Bar Association — to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from coming to the floor for a vote.

When you look at the record, it was President Obama and the White House that made Sotomayor’s nomination about her race and sex. It was the White House that couched her nomination in terms of her life story and trumpeted the fact that she was the first Hispanic nominee over her legal and judicial qualifications. As the Democrats paid little price in the Hispanic community for blocking Estrada, it is highly unlikely that Republicans will lose support in the Hispanic community for voting against Sotomayor.

In the end, it is highly likely that Sotomayor will be confirmed and, as she is easily as liberal as the justice whom she will replace, David Souter, there are some who confess a degree of puzzlement over the desire to fight her nomination when it won’t change the balance on the court. But her opponents argue that it is important to set down markers, in order to be better prepared for the moment Obama nominates a judge who would be a game changer.

I hope that helps.

Well, despite the best efforts of some of those in the op-ed industry who masquerade as genuine conservatives — wait a second, has David Frum been submitting questions again? — the answer, hopefully, is never.

Reagan was more than a transitional figure, sandwiched in between the Greatest Generation and Generation X; he was a transformational one. He changed the nation, and the world, for the better. So it is no wonder that most conservatives — and quite a few liberals, judging by the way the current president is so often proclaimed to be Reagan-like — continue to look to him for inspiration.

Part of that is because Reagan was, to borrow a phrase from Lady Margaret Thatcher, “a conviction politician.” He operated out of a set of deeply held beliefs that governed his view of the world, of morality and the presidency. Unlike Nixon or Clinton, Reagan’s concerns about public opinion were addressed in the way he dealt with issues and crises, not whether he dealt with them at all.

Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980 promising to do three things: 1) Restore America’s national pride; 2) Revive an economy crippled by stagflation; and 3) Win the Cold War. He did all three even though, thanks to Tip O’Neill and friends, he had one hand held behind his back. At the same time he cruised to re-election in 1984 with the largest Electoral College majority in history, winning 49 states while losing only the District of Columbia and, by 7,000 votes, his Democratic opponent’s home state of Minnesota. That is a feat that may never be matched.

No presidency is perfect. Reagan, after all, agreed to a significant tax increase in 1982′s Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which promised (I think it was) one dollar in new taxes for every three dollars in spending restraint. And he got suckered. He came up with the taxes but Congress never provided the spending restraint. “Congress never cut spending by even one penny,” he lamented long after he’d left the White House. (The inability of Congress to control its urge to spend is a pattern that continues even today.)

And there were some other problems during Reagan’s tenure, which I am sure we will hear about from the readers of Salon when the comments start to come in. But his was a more than successful presidency — and those of you who might be quick to point out the issues arising from his Central American policy would do well to remember that it was the Clintonites who came along later to explain that “rule of law” was a) a matter of interpretation and b) beside the point, at least where illicit sex was concerned.

Most importantly, it was Reagan’s achievement of building or at least maintaining a successful political coalition composed of social conservatives, libertarian-leaning voters concerned about the economy and the size of government, moderate, “birthright” Republicans, working class Democrats and voters worried about foreign policy issues that make him the enduring standard against which the party and conservatives measure their success today. The ongoing debate between many national Republican leaders and pretenders over what the party should now stand for, following back-to-back routs in 2006 and 2008 — is really a discussion of how best to replicate the Reagan model of campaigning and governance.

The bottom line is that Reagan showed conservatives how to lead — and in the face of tremendous media and political opposition mind you — and, more importantly, how to win. So I guess Republicans will stop talking about Reagan at about the same time Democrats stop talking about FDR, Truman and JFK. Those three are really the only Democrats in an entire century worth mentioning if you ask me. But you didn’t — that’s a question for another day.

I hope that helps.

One presumes that if there was broad and deep dissatisfaction with this style of healthcare then some party or politician would have capitalized and zoomed into power and dismantled it. This has not happened. Can you make sense of this conundrum for me?

Sincerely,

Bernie

Hello again and thank you for all of the letters you sent in response to last week’s column. This week Bernie wants me to explain a conundrum involving socialized healthcare in democratic countries.

I have to admit that I wrestled with this for some time. Is Bernie asking me to explain a philosophical position or a political one? His question, as I read it, could be taken either way.

One thing I do know is that the failure of a political party to make the dismantling of the national healthcare system the central plank in its platform should not be seen as a tacit endorsement of the system by a country’s electorate.

As a matter of politics it can take years — even decades — for a government-run system to deteriorate to the point where the costs outweigh the benefits to such a degree that the voters demand sudden and radical change. There was, after all, a gap of several decades between the moment California Gov. Ronald Reagan first proposed significant reform in the nation’s welfare system and 1996, when Congress passed and President Bill Clinton finally signed the landmark (and, as it turned out, stunningly successful) welfare reform law.

Change on this level is often difficult to achieve and may only come about in extraordinary circumstances, like Great Britain in the late 1970s when things got so bad the voters were willing to embrace Mrs. Thatcher’s radical program to bring free-market reforms to the British economy.

There are any numbers of reasons for the time lag, not the least of which is government being nowhere near as efficient in weeding out failures as market-based system have to be in order to survive.

At the same time, the politicians and most major political parties in Europe and in Canada have found ways to make the nationalized healthcare system work for them. Helping a constituent to receive services they need through the application of political pressure, rather than as a result of urgent medical need, can make a hero out of any ordinary member of Parliament. From their perspective, what’s not to love about a system like that?

It is also true that most of the people who utilize the national healthcare systems — to get stitches, to have broken bones set, to get regular checkups — do not require innovative or life-saving techniques and so are probably perfectly happy with the inexpensive care the government can provide, pretty much without issue.

But, as one think tank director here in the United States told me, only a small percentage of Canadians have to deal, on a yearly basis, with the really bad outcomes, like a death caused by or contributed to by long waiting lines for diagnoses or procedures.

“If you have lost a family member because of the waiting lines, you are hopping mad and probably ripe for reform,” the director told me. “For the vast majority of Canadians, though, the system has been fine. Until the day it isn’t, that is.”

The director of a free-market think tank in Europe told me pretty much the same thing. “What is playing out is Frederic Bastiat’s difference between the seen and the unseen. Votes in the European Union (and American tourists) see cheaper healthcare prices. They do not see the longer waiting times to new treatments. And people with extreme acute pathologies — ones that could benefit from having those new treatments jump over the Atlantic faster — do not organize politically to make this happen because they prize keeping healthcare costs down far above the perceived benefits of innovation.”

“It’s a bit perverse,” the American think tank director added, “but if the system treated everyone worse but didn’t kill anyone, there would be a lot more pressure from voters seeking reform.”

“The fact is that the system kills quite a lot of people — but that’s still only a tiny percentage of the overall population — so it reduces the pool of people who are dissatisfied,” she said.

Another point worth considering is the impact of United States healthcare system on the world’s, in effect allowing populations underserved by non-innovative, ration-rich nationalized systems to act as free riders on the American plan.

As long as the United States exists as a safety value for those in need of urgent, critical or innovative care and therapies, the pressure that could be applied on politicians to reform their non-market based, government controlled systems will never materialize. Critics would say denationalization of the healthcare system amounts to taking away from the voters a free entitlement, something that is there’s by right. And that’s the winning argument as long as those whom the national healthcare system can’t or won’t help have someplace else to go when they need to, e.g., the United States.

There are also those Canadians who have been critical of the public system sending expectant mothers into the United States to get their babies delivered. But that’s not because their babies are more likely to die because the U.S. has higher infant mortality rates (which is a subject for another column); it’s because it makes it harder for family members to get to the hospital to visit. People may mind, they may be inconvenienced, but not to the degree that they want to invest time and treasure in changing the system.

It’s fair to say that the demands for changes in the nationalized healthcare systems are ratcheting up in places like Canada and Great Britain, albeit incrementally. If the United States moves to a system more like Canada’s or Europe’s, expect the demand for change to come even faster.

I hope that helps.