Conservative angst

The sixth year of the Bush administration is shaping up to be conservatism’s winter of discontent.

Republicans in Congress recently broke with President Bush on the DP World ports deal. Concerns over the Iraq war, a bloated budget and other issues have produced grumbling across the conservative side of the political spectrum. Combined with the scandal surrounding disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, worries are mounting inside the Republican Party as the midterm election season begins.

For Edwin J. Feulner, the irony is obvious. These problems have erupted at a time when the conservative-dominated Republican Party is at its peak of modern power — controlling both the executive and legislative branches of the federal government and adding two conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

“For a conservative, this ought to be the best of times,” said Mr. Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. “It sure isn’t.”

The veteran conservative activist laments the continued growth in entitlement programs, including the Bush-backed Medicare prescription drug plan. “We’ve added the only real new entitlement program since [President Lyndon B. Johnson],” Mr. Feulner said, adding that pork-barrel spending by Congress is also out of control.

But the Heritage chief isn’t just grumbling. Along with Doug Wilson, chairman of Townhall.com, Mr. Feulner has authored a book, “Getting America Right: The True Conservative Values Our Nation Needs Today,” an “action plan” intended to lead conservatism, and the nation, out of confusion.

“Getting America Right” is organized around six questions that Mr. Feulner and Mr. Wilson say “every citizen and every policy-maker should be asking and answering about every government action or policy that comes up for discussion.”

Those questions are:

• Is it the government’s business? “The federal government should do only those things that cannot be handled better by a state, a community or an individual,” the authors write.

cDoes this measure promote self-reliance? “Programs should help individuals stand on their own.”

• Is it responsible? “Lawmakers are unable to see the difference between high-priority spending and vanity projects like the infamous ‘bridge to nowhere’ in Alaska.”

• Does it make us more prosperous? “[I]n recent decades, our government has switched from promoting sound economic policy to dishing out advantages to special interests — and in the process, our economy has become weighted down with handicaps.”

• Does it make us safer? Mr. Feulner and Mr. Wilson call for “a new seriousness in Washington about the perils we face” from terrorists and foreign threats.

• Does it unify us? “When we permit people to become citizens and still think of themselves first as Chinese, Mexicans, Iranians or Nigerians — ‘hyphenated Americans,’ as Theodore Roosevelt put it nearly a century ago — we risk losing the glue that holds us together as a nation.”

Mr. Feulner said the book is not addressed only to Republicans.

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