Conservatism needs leaders

Fittingly, state Republican Party Chairman Jeffrey M. Frederick begins an electronic missive to 2,000 GOP members with the greeting, “Dear Republican Friend,” the singular noun being roughly proportionate to his partisan support. Who might be that friend? The answer eludes as Frederick unravels.

The state central committee of the Virginia GOP will vote April 4 on whether to remove Frederick as chairman, a position he won last spring with almost 60 percent of the vote at the annual party convention. Since then, an initial murmur over Frederick’s fitness for the job has turned to a rumbling, some of it spilling from the lips of the party’s highest ranking power brokers, including gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell and all five of the party’s members of U.S. Congress.

A central committee memo accuses Frederick of channeling a small portion of party donations to an online company of his that briefly handled fundraising chores last summer, spending party money without party approval and tainting the party’s reputation by clashing with the campaign staff of GOP presidential nominee John McCain. Frederick admits his company kept 7 percent of the money raised for the party but says that only covered expenses; he denies the other charges.

He also rejects the notion that the allegations provide the motive for ousting him, and in this Frederick is undeniably correct. “His personality is the problem,” Fairfax County Republican Committee Chairman Anthony Bedell, a former ally of Frederick’s, told The Washington Post.

In many senses, Frederick, 33, represents as a social and fiscal conservative the soul of the Republican Party. It is popular in the era of Obama to dismiss conservatism as dead. Ideologues on the left similarly exaggerated rumors of the conservative movement’s demise in the aftermath of 1960s social upheaval and the 1970s Watergate scandal, when Democrat Jimmy Carter rose from obscurity to win the presidency. Then came Ronald Reagan.

Republicans make a mistake that Frederick rightly seeks to combat when they interpret election losses as a cue to drift left and recast themselves as a diluted form of the opposition party. Frequently, they also fail to recognize the ramifications. Conservatism in Virginia has been damaged not by Republicans’ adherence to the thinking but by their straying from it in compromises with Democrats for higher taxes and increased spending. The same is true of President George W. Bush, a government expansionist rivaled only by FDR and Wilson.

But the position of chairman of a political party is about more than ideology, as the GOP’s national chairman, Michael Steele, has discovered unpleasantly in recent weeks. A prominent local Republican says privately that the big concern about Frederick is his immaturity, evinced by an inability to take firm stands on positions while maintaining civil discourse. Conservatism’s strongest voices over the past half-century were those of Reagan and William F. Buckley. Both were known as much for their cordiality toward ideological foes as for the strength of their convictions.

Frederick’s travails demonstrate the desperate need for the conservative movement to produce precisely that sort of leader. So long as the void remains, conservatives likely will continue like the Israelites to wander about the wilderness in search of one with the vision to guide them home.