David Frum - Political Views

Political Views

In a Newsweek column, Frum described his political beliefs as follows:

I'm a conservative Republican, have been all my adult life. I volunteered for the Reagan campaign in 1980. I've attended every Republican convention since 1988. I was president of the Federalist Society chapter at my law school, worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and wrote speeches for President Bush—not the "Read My Lips" Bush, the "Axis of Evil" Bush. I served on the Giuliani campaign in 2008 and voted for John McCain in November. I supported the Iraq War and (although I feel kind of silly about it in retrospect) the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Frum supported John McCain in the 2008 Presidential election, writing "I vote for John McCain". In an article for National Review Online which he posted days before the 2008 election, he gave ten reasons why he was going to vote for McCain instead of Barack Obama. Frum had previously been a vocal critic of Republican presidential candidate McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate on the ground that Palin was unqualified to assume the presidency. Speaking of Palin's performance during the campaign, Frum stated, "I think she has pretty thoroughly — and probably irretrievably — proven that she is not up to the job of being president of the United States." Nevertheless he ultimately stated his support for Palin, writing "But on Tuesday, I will trust that she can learn. She has governed a state - and ... it says something important that so many millions of people respond to her as somebody who incarnates their beliefs and values. At a time when the great American middle often seems to be falling further and further behind, there may be a special need for a national leader who represents and symbolizes that middle."

In 2009 Frum denounced the various anti-Obama conspiracy theories as “wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps”.

On August 14, 2009 on Bill Moyers Journal, Frum challenged certain Republican political tactics in opposing healthcare and other Democratic initiatives as "outrageous," "dangerous", and ineffective. As Congress prepared to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in March 2010, Frum again criticized the Republican strategy of refusing to negotiate with President Obama and congressional Democrats on health care reform, saying that it had resulted in the Republicans' "most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s". Prior to making this statement, Frum had been associated with the American Enterprise Institute. He resigned from the AEI a few days later.

In 2010 Frum was involved in the formation of the centrist group No Labels, as a "founding leader."

In June 2011, following the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York state, Frum's weekly column for CNN.com was titled "I was wrong about same-sex marriage." In it he described the evolution of his opinion from a "strong opponent" fourteen years prior; while he had feared that its introduction would cause "the American family become radically more unstable," he now feels that "the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality. The case has not passed its test."

In his blog, Frum describes the Tea Party as “a movement of relatively older and relatively affluent Americans whose expectations have been disrupted by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. They are looking for an explanation of the catastrophe – and a villain to blame. They are finding it in the same place that Bachmann and her co-religionists located it 30 years ago: a deeply hostile national government controlled by alien and suspect forces, with Barack Obama as their leader and symbol”. And he explains Bachman's political views, some of which he calls “paranoid”: “It emerges from a religious philosophy that rejects the federal government as an alien instrument of destruction, ripping apart a Christian society. Bachmann’s religiously grounded rejection of the American state finds a hearing with many more conventional conservatives radicalized by today’s hard economic times”.

In a September 2011 article, Tablet Magazine wrote: “as the Tea Party has come to dominate the GOP, Frum has been transformed in a remarkably short period of time from right-wing royalty to apostate”, and quoted him as saying: “There’s a style and a sensibility in the Republican Party right now that I find myself removed from, you can do more good for the country by working for a better Republican Party than by leaving it to the extremists. What have they done to deserve that inheritance?”

Writing for New York magazine in November 2011, Frum described his reaction to fellow Republicans, who had distanced themselves from him, saying, "Some of my Republican friends ask if I’ve gone crazy. I say: Look in the mirror." He described the development of an "alternative reality" within which the party, conservative think-tanks, and right wing commentators operate from a set of false facts about the economy and nonexistent threats to their traditional base of supporters. He expressed concern over the inability of moderate Republicans to criticize their conservative brethren, contrasting this to the 1960s split between moderate Ripon Republicans and conservative Goldwater Republicans, when moderates such as Michigan governor George Romney were publicly critical of the conservatives.