Why was david frum fired

On Sunday, Mr. Frum wrote on his website , FrumForum, that health-care reform had been a debacle for the Republican party, saying they'd "suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the s. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. While Republicans predicted months ago that health-care reform would be Mr. Obama's "Waterloo," Mr.

Frum wrote: "It's Waterloo all right: ours. Politico reported Friday that Mr. Frum said he was axed from the American Enterprise Institute because of pressure from donors. Frum as saying. AEI represents the best of the conservative world.

Frum now makes his living as the media's go-to basher of fellow Republicans," the Journal wrote. Frum said while he was sad about the dismissal, he had been in a similar situation before, albeit north of the border — at odds with the conservative movement for an unpopular but ultimately correct stance he took.

History proved me right," he said. Frum, now a U. Effective immediately, my position as a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute is terminated. I appreciate the consideration that delays my emptying of my office until after my return from travel next week. Premises will be vacated no later than April 9.

I have had many fruitful years at the American Enterprise Institute, and I do regret this abrupt and unexpected conclusion of our relationship. While Frum has been willing to speak out on Republican failings, he's hardly become a liberal since leaving the Bush White House. In a column published Wednesday night, he recommended that Obama either ignore the issue of immigration reform or encourage "self-deportation.

But the conservative movement has a tendency to excommunicate anyone who breaks ranks, says Bruce Bartlett, who was fired by the National Center for Policy Analysis, another right-wing think tank, for writing a book critical of Bush policies. C," Bartlett wrote in the wake of Frum's resignation. Bartlett, who served as a domestic policy aide for Ronald Reagan and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, claimed Frum told him privately a few months ago that conservatives on AEI's payroll had been "ordered" not to speak to the media about health care reform "because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

Frum claims "the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under" -- meaning AEI couldn't risk displeasing its base by keeping Frum on after he criticized the Republican Party.

As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling. But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority.

Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U. Inside the system, the U. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly.

Nice job, Senator Feingold! Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.

Over the past few years, I have left this alternative knowledge system behind me. What is that experience like? A personal story may be relevant here. Through the debate over health-care reform in —10, I urged that Republicans try to reach some kind of deal. The Democrats had the votes to pass something. They could not afford to lose. Providing health coverage to all is a worthy goal, and the core mechanisms of what we called Obamacare should not have been obnoxious to Republicans.

In fact, they were drawn from past Republican plans. Democrats were so eager for Republican votes to provide bipartisan cover that they might well have paid a substantial price to get them, including dropping the surtaxes on work and investment that supposedly financed the Affordable Care Act.

My urgings went unheeded, obviously. So they bet everything—and lost everything. A major new entitlement has been written into law, financed by redistributive new taxes. Changes in the bill that could have been had for the asking will now require years of slow, painful legislative effort, if they ever come at all.

Such a decision would be the most dramatic assertion of judicial power since the thirties, and for that reason alone seems improbable. For my trouble, I was denounced the next day by my former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal as a turncoat. Three days after that, I was dismissed from the American Enterprise Institute.