779 Medved on Theocons

In an interview with The American Enterprise, film critic Michael Medved explains his change from left wing radical to right wing conservative. He says he is not a "neocon," but a "theocon."

TAE: How do you define theocon?

MEDVED: As a conservative whose outlook has largely been shaped by religious commitment. One of the things that most irreligious or nonreligious Americans don't recognize sufficiently is that a huge theme of American religiosity, both Christian and Jewish, is that the individual goes through a rebirth, a recommitment, a return. That kind of transforming religious experience is usually associated with a more conservative political outlook.

The President of the United States would be a prominent example of what we're talking about. I think that the clear basis for President Bush being more conservative than his father, and vastly more conservative than his grandfather Prescott Bush, is his extremely vital personal religious faith, which he says had a transforming impact on his life.

This is one of many things that the secularists don't get--the President's "I once was lost, but now I'm found. I once was blind, but now I see." This is the core story of American Christianity, the story of being born again, of having a new life, of coming home, of the prodigal son.

In other words, one of the things they'd throw at President Bush is that he was a frat boy, he drank too much, he was a playboy. Well, yes--he says so. And he
went through a change. And part of what I'm hoping to do in my book is to talk about the fact that we have a parallel tradition on the Jewish side of things. Resh Lakish was a former thief and a lowlife who became one of the great rabbis of the Talmud. An amazing number of scholars and figures in the Torah are people who are converts to Judaism, who had no religious commitment at all, who turned their lives around."

Medved knew both John Kerry and Hillary Rodham at Yale. He didn't like Kerry then, but did like Mrs. Clinton.

"MEDVED: I thought at the time that Kerry was simply too pompous to go as far as he has. Usually politicians who are successful are people with some kind of spontaneous likeability. I had close contact with John Kerry, and his likeability factor is nonexistent.

I think Hillary will be more of a challenge in 2008 than a lot of conservatives think. She's really worked hard in the Senate. She's definitely moved to the center. And her voting record on military things is now conservative. If she's able to allow her native niceness to come out, she will be a formidable candidate."

In another article with a one page list of Indicators, TAE outlines what it continues to call the Bush mandate:

Bush's share of the vote was larger than the fraction won by any Democrat in 36 years, beginning with Hubert Humphrey in 1968; Bush increased his percentage of the vote in 45 out of 50 states; Bush in 2000 had more votes than Clinton in 1996, and his second term total was 3 times the jump Clinton achieved between 92 and 96; Bush is the first President since 1924 to start a second term with House and Senate majorities; 48 percent of women voted for Bush compared to 43 percent in 2000; and for the first time in modern history, as many voting Americans fundamentally identified themselves as Republicans as Democrats. Check it out here.