David Frum

David Frum is a Canadian-born attorney, journalist and Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and is an advocate of American conservatism. He was a special assistant and speechwriter to George W. Bush. He speaks and writes for conservative principles, and is a columnist for the National Post (Canada), and a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard. He was a contributing editor for National Review, and runs the NewMajority.com website, "dedicated to the modernization and renewal of the Republican party and the conservative movement."

"He studies recent political, generational, and demographic trends and warns that the conservatism of the 1980s will have to revise and reinvent itself to compete in twenty-first century America. In 2007, the British newspaper Daily Telegraph named him one of America's fifty most influential conservatives." He also edits the NewMajority.com website. He is currently at work on a book about the decline of the Republican Party in California since 1990.

Political background

He was a Reagan campaign volunteer in 1980, and attended every Republican convention since 1988, and worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal.

In his year at the White House, during George W. Bush's first term, he is credited with the phrase "axis of evil". He left the White House immediately after this speech, and there is argument if his leaving was voluntary. His wife had sent out messages crediting him for the words, and there is a convention that the words are the President's and the speechwriter is not mentioned. On the other hand, there is evidence he was planning to leave, having just had a third child and looking for more lucrative employment. Nevertheless, the publicity may have speeded his departure, not the words themselves. Subsequently, he criticized Karl Rove's second term strategy, for doing what was needed for "...Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center?" but not "What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it?" Frum said Rove targeted specific constituencies with often-inconsistent promises, emphasizing party-building over governance. The problems of governance this created hurt, he says, the Republicans in the 2006 Congressional elections.

2008 Presidential campaign

In 2008, he worked in the Rudy Giuliani campaign and voted for John McCain in November.

He questioned the wisdom of selecting Sarah Palin, seeing McCain's need to build trust in the base of the Republican Party. " The party right likes her fierce pro-life convictions. (She is the mother of five. Her youngest has Down's syndrome.) The right approves of her support for opening more of Alaska to oil drilling and her broad libertarian approach to public policy. At the same time, she qualifies as a maverick because of her battles with Alaska's notoriously corrupt local Republican organization - and her very unusual background...[she] reaches out to those working-class women who supported Hillary Clinton's candidacy - and who may not be reconciled to Barack Obama." On the other hand, McCain was 72 and had health questions. "Ms. Palin's experience in government makes Barack Obama look like George C. Marshall..."

Republican and conservative revival

He has written of his concern with the effects of self-identified conservative media commentators, especially Rush Limbaugh, in an article beginning with an attack on Frum by radio host Mark Levin and mentioning Sean Hannity, and the correspondence he receives, telling him to get out of the U.S. Republican Party if he disagrees with them.

There's the perfect culmination of the outlook Rush Limbaugh has taught his fans and followers: we want to transform the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan into a party of unanimous dittoheads—and we don't care how much the party has to shrink to do it. That's not the language of politics. It's the language of a cult.

I doubt Limbaugh and I even disagree very much. But the issues on which we do disagree are maybe the most important to the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party: Should conservatives be trying to provoke or persuade? To narrow our coalition or enlarge it? To enflame or govern? And finally (and above all): to profit—or to serve?

Counterterrorism

Frum coauthored the 2003 book, An End to Evil, with Richard Perle, which advocates a strong policy against terror. The book treated Saddam Hussein as the greatest single foreign threat threat.

In the US, the authors call for improvements in three areas:

• Denying terrorists entry into the US
• Curtailing terrorists' freedom of action while in the US; they recommend not ethnic profiling, but profiling based on behavior
• Denying terrorists material and moral support

Border security and immigration policy

Frum looks at border security and immigration policy in both security in political terms. He looks at border security and immigration policy in both security in political terms.On his webpage, Frum recently pointed out that a past, moderate Republican ideology traded strict border security for relaxed legal immigration. In 2004, he wrote uncontrolled immigration is bad for the Republican Party. He does, however, write that the stability of Mexico is vital to the national security of the United States.

Surveillance

He defended increased surveillance, with safeguards, in a National Public Radio debate:

We are here to uphold a new level of surveillance, that is not made up of new techniques; it is made up of very familiar and traditional techniques, as my partners will argue, that is not onerous, that is not burdensome, that leaves all legitimate freedoms and privacies intact, and that is abundantly worth it, and in fact has proven over the past half-decade, has proven in the acid test of experience its merit. The terrorists are finding it harder to coordinate, they're finding it harder to communicate with each other; they are under crushing international pressure.

Frum was especially disturbed over revelations of financial intelligence, over which Dan Rather was fired by CBS News. He regarded this as a minimally invasive program that had had specific results in apprehending terrorist suspects, and "I think it would be hard to come closer to the classic definition of publishing the departure time of a troop ship in war time and inviting the enemy to shoot a torpedo at it than this. Here's a program where there's no allegation of abuse." The program provided the United States intelligence community with copies of international wire transfers, which fall into the category of having one end of the communication outside the US, potentially making it accessible to communications intelligence. Privacy questions do emerge if either party were a US citizen.

Background

Born in Canada, he holds M.A. and B.A. degrees from Yale University and a law degree from Harvard Law School. At Harvard Law, he was president of the Federalist Society chapter.