Rush Limbaugh DOES Represent Republican Values

David Frum’s Newsweek piece decrying Rush Limbaugh’s influence on the Republican Party is catching a lot of attention in the blogosphere, both left and right. Frum’s basic theme is that it’s time for Republicans to stop living in the glorious Reaganite past and convince Americans that the GOP has better solutions to today’s realities than the Democrats.

Look at America’s public-policy problems, look at voting trends, and it’s inescapably obvious that the Republican Party needs to evolve. We need to put free-market health-care reform, not tax cuts, at the core of our economic message. It’s health-care costs that are crushing middle-class incomes. Between 2000 and 2006, the amount that employers paid for labor rose substantially. Employees got none of that money; all of it was absorbed by rising health-care costs. Meanwhile, the income-tax cuts offered by Republicans interest fewer and fewer people: before the recession, two thirds of American workers paid more in payroll taxes than in income taxes.

We need to modulate our social conservatism (not jettison—modulate). The GOP will remain a predominantly conservative party and a predominantly pro-life party. But especially on gay-rights issues, the under-30 generation has arrived at a new consensus. Our party seems to be running to govern a country that no longer exists. The rule that both our presidential and vice presidential candidates must always be pro-life has become counterproductive: McCain’s only hope of winning the presidency in 2008 was to carry Pennsylvania, and yet Pennsylvania’s most successful Republican vote winner, former governor Tom Ridge, was barred from the ticket because he’s pro-choice.

We need an environmental message. You don’t have to accept Al Gore’s predictions of imminent gloom to accept that it cannot be healthy to pump gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We are rightly mistrustful of liberal environmentalist disrespect for property rights. But property owners also care about property values, about conservation, and as a party of property owners we should be taking those values more seriously.

Okay, but are these actually Republican values?  Or is this just trying to, you should forgive the expression, put lipstick on a pig?

Because the premise of his entire piece is that Rush Limbaugh is, indeed, the face of the Republican Party. Look at the intro box:

The party of Buckley and Reagan is now bereft and dominated by the politics of Limbaugh. A conservative’s lament.

Conceding that point isn’t the strongest way to make a defense of the Republican Party. Frum goes on to convincingly argue why Limbaugh should not dominate the Republican Party, but nobody in their right mind thinks that he should. The real question is why anyone that doesn’t agree with Limbaugh would embrace the GOP? Frum has no answer for that. He does offer some suggestions on how the GOP can stop the bleeding: push free-market health care instead of tax cuts, modulate positions on abortion and gays, and get an environmental message. I’ve made the exact same points because they are obvious points. But it’s also obvious that the Republican Party is not on the cusp of doing any of those things. And I can’t see how that is Rush Limbaugh’s fault.

BooMan goes on to point out that none of the individuals who actually are part of the Republican leadership are making arguments that are meaningfully different from the ones Limbaugh is making. Like, for example, John Boehner, who responds to the latest dismal economic news by calling for a freeze on government spending — an idea even David “multitasking makes me break out in hives” Brooks calls “insane.”

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