Quote of the Day: Mark Steyn on Governing
From Tech Central Station, quoting an item blogged here by one Michael Greenspan, on the occasion of the death of influential but nearly invisible free marketeer Arthur Seldon (so unknown that his Wikipedia entry is bare bones):
[S]uccessful conservatives don’t move towards the ‘political centre’. They move the political centre towards them. That’s what Thatcher and Reagan both did…. If Labour is at 1 on the scale and the Tories are at 9, and their focus groups tell them to move to 5, they have ensured that henceforth the centre will be 3, and they’ll be fighting entirely on the Left’s terms and the Left’s issues. . . .
Conservatives win when they champion ideas. They win in two ways: sometimes they get elected; but, even if they don’t, their sheer creative energy forces an ever more intellectually bankrupt Left to grab whatever right-wing ideas they figure they can slip past their own base.
