Frum Effectively Concedes He Has Little Influence

Politico conducted an interview recently with David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a vigorous critic of Governor Palin, about the progress of his new project, the New Majority, a website that is allegedly "dedicated to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement."

In the interview, Frum effectively concedes that his New Majority project thus far has had little success in accomplishing its stated goals.

"[T]he Internet is proving to be a little more complicated than Frum first thought it would be, he says. He admits to shortcomings in his Web acumen, and NewMajority.com has already undergone a redesign since it went online. The site has gotten about 800,000 unique visitors. By comparison, the conservative site Townhall.com receives 2 million unique visitors per month.

“I would like more, obviously,” Frum demurs.

“If you go to a consultant,” he continues, “the reason they will tell you that my project faces some daunting challenges is that the people who want to read most about politics are those with the most extreme views.”

While that may be true, he views the situation from another angle. “Maybe it’s true that people with less extreme views who are also interested in public affairs have been driven out by a marketplace that doesn’t offer them anything of the tone they want to listen to,” he says.

Some in the conservative cognoscente praise Frum’s intellect and efforts, but that’s where the anointing of the New Majority ends. You can count on a fingerless hand the big-name conservatives who have publicly joined the crusade. So far, Frum’s site has become an intellectual way station of college students, unknown politicos and anonymous scribes.

“Frum is smart, and the site is young,” says National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, a former colleague. “But so far, it has not made much of a splash. He has gotten some attention from journalists, but the site isn’t yet a must-read for anyone.”

Frum is sort of right about why his project has had little to no influence thus far: there is no marketplace at the moment for his belief that for the Republican Party to succeed, it must move to the middle on fiscal, economic, and cultural issues. There is no need in the marketplace for a New Majority-type project when Republicans currently lead their Democrat counterparts on the generic ballot by a healthy margin for the first time in many years. Barack Obama is one of the most unpopular presidents since the New Deal at this stage through his presidency. One of the greatest ironies about Frum's failure is that he asserted the following in a lightly-read blog post:

The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

Frum must have accidentally inserted Rush's name for his name because it's pretty clear from the data cited above that conservatives are succeeding and people like Rush Limbaugh remain more prominent than ever. It's not people like Rush (of whom I am actually not a fan) who have been sidelined in the midst of this conservative and Republican comeback, but rather it's people like Frum and Bruce Bartlett who have seen their voices become increasingly irrelevant as poll after poll shows Republicans and conservatives on the upswing. By the way Bruce, Republicans are not just projected to win "a few congressional" seats as you conceded in your last angry column (I thought Frum was against anger?), but you may want to check in with Charlie Cook and liberal poll "analyst" Nate Silver to see how good the landscape looks for Republicans, a prospect that is clearly detrimental to your cause. Ironically, contrary to Frum's assertion about Rush Limbaugh, the fortunes of New Majority-type projects are seemingly tied directly to the success of the Democrat Party and liberals.

In addition to whining about how much his project has failed, Frum also talks a little bit about Governor Palin in this interview:

“Why were conservatives vulnerable to somebody like this?” Frum mused about Palin recently in an interview with POLITICO. “The things that prevented them from seeing her are all still there. And we see them during this health care debate.”

That Frum would continue to focus on Palin in such a fashion is another reason why New Majority has flopped. In order for Frum's project to have succeeded, he needed to convince Republicans and conservatives that his path represented the path back to glory for the party and movement. One way he could have succeeded in convincing conservatives and Republicans that his ideas had merit was to find a spokesperson who was viewed overwhelmingly in a favorable manner by conservatives and Republicans. Such a spokesperson would then be able to speak with a lot more authority than Frum to conservatives and Republicans as to the alleged need to go in another direction. The task for Frum would have been to convince this person who was viewed in an overwhelmingly favorable manner by conservatives and Republicans in the strength of his ideas.

Ace knew precisely the person Frum should have sought:

If Frum's real goal is to help the party, and he thinks Sarah Palin is a empty-headed dolt who will say whatever the political script requires, wouldn't it be in his own best interest to actually win over the mainstream of conservative thought so that Sarah Palin regurgitates all the hard thinkin' Frum's done for her? Surely Frum is aware that is charisma is for **** -- even if he assumes (as he does) he's the brains of this operation, surely he can't be so self-deluded as to imagine he'd make a capable faceman.

So why is he hellbent on personally destroying those with charisma and audience? Why on earth wouldn't he want to retain the services of these brain-dead but smooth-talking troglodytes but enlist them in his own cause?

Now, it's likely that Governor Palin would have politely rejected such a proposal from Frum. However, that Frum didn't even make the effort to ask the person who is viewed more favorably by Republicans and conservatives than any other politician in the country whether she was interested in his project suggests to me that the New Majority was destined to stay the New Minority from the start.

Disclaimer: This post does not claim that the New Majority lacks quality writers or does not present some good ideas for the party's future.

Update: Since January, Conservatives 4 Palin has had 1,770,673 visits, twice the number claimed by David Frum's New Majority. Keep in mind too that Joseph Russo started this blog with $10 while Frum soliticited professional advice and promoted the debut of New Majority heavily in the political and conservative blogosphere. Just sayin' (no, not the commentator).