80. Mic e Bachmann (-)
Congresswoman
A poor man’s Sarah Palin, the Representative from Minnesota shot from obscurity to notoriety just before the 2008 election when she said on cable television that Barack Obama and his wife Mic e were “anti-American” and challenged the media to investigate members of Congress to find out whether they were in favour or against their country. “Most Americans are wild about America and they are very concerned to have a president who doesn't share those values," she argued.
That triggered a wave of cash to fund her opponent the following month but she survived and became a conservative star in the process. A Right-wing crowd pleaser, she has declared herself a “fool for Christ”, is a global warming sceptic and recently said that she wanted Minnesotans "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back". Senior party officials view her as a loose cannon. She has raised five of her own children and provided foster care for 23 others.
79. Lou Dobbs (-)
Broadcaster
A founding presenter at CNN, Dobbs walked away when management felt his increasingly strident anti-illegal immigration stance was veering too far from the network’s middle of the road mission. Critics said he was openly prejudiced.
His bosses were particularly upset when he urged President Obama to do more to prove he was born in Hawaii, lending a degree of credence to the birther conspiracy theorists who believe the president is ineligible. The network was ready to pay a heavy price to part company: a severance fee of $8 million, the rest of his outstanding contract.
With his groomed coiffure, dazzling teeth and excessive makeup, Dobbs is almost a parody of the archetypal anchor man, but for years earlier in his CNN career presented of a conventional business programme, Moneyline.
Given his own 7pm show, he focused on the issue that came to define his career, and doubtlessly helped push immigration to the political centre stage.
On his shows last night, he hinted at some kind of activist role, which only added to rumours that he might run for office. A move to Fox is more likely, though it would not please one potential colleague, Geraldo Rivera, who said: "Lou Dobbs is almost single-handedly responsible for creating, for being the architect of the young-Latino-as-scapegoat-for-everything that ails this country."
78. Meg Whitman (-)
Candidate for Governor of California
Aims to succeed where Arnold Schwarzenegger has failed in reforming the Sunshine state’s woeful budgetary process. It may seem a thankless task but the former CEO of eBay has a fighting chance of victory and would become a major star in the party if she ascended to become California’s first female governor.
A top advisor to McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, Whitman, 53, was considered for a time as his running mate.Her business record is exemplary but her two unruly sons won’t help her political campaign. Griff and Will Harsh, both notorious partiers, have been kicked out of prep schools, an eating club, dormitories, and Princeton’s class of 2008.
77. Joe Wilson (-)
Congressman
Few outside South Carolina politics had heard of Joe Wilson before he piped up during Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress last September. “You lie!”, he exclaimed, surprising the President, his own wife and perhaps even himself. A swift apology was quickly accepted by Obama but Wilson soon realised that his intemperate outburst had made him a conservative star . A party-line vote forced by majority Democrats in the House earned him a formal rebuke and only raised his profile further.
Wilson has objected to Obama’s statement on heathcare that “the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally”. A stunned Obama responded that “that’s not true” but Wilson’s shout prompted Democrats to toughen their draft legislation so it specifically blocked illegal immigrants from benefitting.
76. Jeb Bush (86)
Former Florida Governor
With the slow but steady rehabilitation of the Bush name, the Bush brother who many say was the one who should have been President remains a potential national candidate. A very popular former governor of a major swing state and with proper conservative credentials, if his name hadn’t been Bush, he might have been the ideal candidate for the party in 2008.
Since leaving office in 2007, Bush toyed with running for the Senate seat to be vacated by Mel Martinez and has been active in the think tank Project for the New American Century. Along with Mitt Romney and Eric Cantor he launched the National Council for a New America, designed for Republican leaders with to listen to voters across the country and will remain a powerful voice behind the scenes. Whether he moves to the front of the stage again remains to be seen.
75. James Dobson (26)
Chairman, Focus on the Family
Retains his status as probably the most influential evangelical Christian in America but the Religious Right is not the force it once was. His daily radio show is broadcast on more than 7,000 stations worldwide as well as about 60 American television stations. Threatened to form a third party if Rudy Giuliani won the Republican nomination but that did not come to pass. Unenthusiastic about John McCain, he eventually backed the Republican ticket because of the addition of Sarah Palin
Blasted Obama for “distorting the traditional understanding” of the Bible so much that it amounted to dragging it “through the gutter” and having a “fruitcake interpretation” of the United States cons ution. After Obama’s election, he stated that he was in mourning for the “infanticide” that was about to happen, claiming that Obama would be responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn children.
74. Ann Coulter (84)
Commentator and author
The archetypal Right-wing bob thrower, opinion is divided on whether Coulter believes everything she says or shoots from the lip with the intention of creating as much controversy as possible. True to form, she rarely stopped bashing John McCain throughout his White House bid. She said that she would campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain won the Republican nomination – luckily for her the liberal Obama prevailed in the Democratic contest. She once characterised Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father as “Dimestore Mein Kampf”.
Her novelty has begun to wear off, and she came off worse from a confrontation with Elizabeth Edwards when the candidate’s wife called into a live show and complained about Coulter calling her husband a “ got”. This was before news broke of his love child. But her influence is undeniable – seven best-selling books and three million copies off the shelves.
73. Judd Gregg (-)
Senator for New Hampshire
The conservative New Englander rocked the Republican party by accepting the post of Commerce Secretary in the Obama administration. Even in the heady atmosphere of Obama it seemed to make no sense and so it proved when Gregg abruptly pulled himself out of consideration, citing “irresolvable conflicts" on issues like the economic stimulus package and the 2010 census.
"Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns," he said. A deficit hawk, he has since become an unrelenting critic of the Obama administration’s economic policies. As a Senor for New Hampshire, he is a perennial potential kingmaker in the early-voting state and could be an important ally for Mitt Romney there in 2012. Has said he will not stand for re-election this year but his influence will endure.
72. Tucker Carlson (-)
Editor-in-chief, the Daily Caller
Still best known as the bowtie-wearing Right-wing co-host of the former CNN hit Crossfire, Carlson will hope to become famous for The Daily Caller, the website he launched this week. He is the son of Richard Warner Carlson, a former news anchor and director of Voice of America.
Founded with college roommate Neil Patel, a former policy advisor to Cheney, the site is their vision of a Right-wing aggregator, ambitiously hoping to rival the immense popularity of liberal news blogs like The Huffington Post and Daily Kos.
Carlson 40, a former Weekly Standard magazine journalist, left CNN (where he was the youngest ever anchor) and moved to a short-lived early evening slot as the token conservative on MSNBC. He has recently been a contributor to Fox News. Strongly libertarian, he often criticised George W. Bush as being not a true conservative. Supported the Iraq war but later said he was “enraged” by it and has said he is in favour of gay marriage.
71. Armey (-)
Chairman, FreedomWorks
An author of the 1994 Contract with America and former House Majority Leader, Armey now leads FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy organisation.
A Texan libertarian and former economics professor well versed in Washington’s rougher political arts, he was forced to give up an lucrative consultancy with DLA Piper when FreedomWork’s links to populist opposition to health care reform created difficulties with the law firm’s clients. The 69-year-old chain-smoker is a major influence on the tea party movement, which could become the conservative powerhouse in 2010.
70. Michael Barone (87)
Author, journalist and psephologist
Fox News analyst, columnist for the Washington Examiner, American Enterprise Ins ute fellow and principal co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, Barone is a walking political encyclopedia. The Harvard and Yale graduate has visited not only all 50 states but all 435 congressional districts as well.
Although a committed conservative, Barone’s strength is that he is no knee-jerk partisan and bases his arguments on facts. Obama took him seriously enough to invite him to dinner along with other conservative thinkers just before he took office. A year later, Barone wrote that two of Obama’s principal assumptions had proved unfounded: “The first is that economic distress would lead more Americans to favour big government policies. The second is that Obama's personal characteristics and his repudiation of many of his predecessor's policies would change the minds of America's critics and enemies.”
69. Olympia Snowe (-)
Senator for Maine
As one of the few Republican moderates left in the Senate, Obama wooed her assiduously over healthcare reform. She concurred at the committee stage, but demurred in the various later floor votes, leaving bill without a single Republican in favour. With the Democrats holding a 60 to 40 advantage, she has never been in a more powerful position and will continue to be courted by Democrats on divisive issues.
A trailblazer for women in politics, she has represented Maine in the Senate since 1995 and before that in the House from 1978, when she became the youngest Republican woman elected to Congress at 31. Known for returning home each weekend to conduct her “Main Street tours” in small towns. She won nearly two-thirds of the vote when she was re-elected in 2006, a year of disaster for most Republicans.
68. Paul Gigot (14)
Editorial page editor, the Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal has only had two editorial page editors since 1972 and Gigot has occupied the seat for nearly a decade, continuing in post since Rupert Murdoch took over. Now three pages as well as OpinionJournal.Com, the Journal’s editorial take on the world remains essential reading for any conservative worthy of the name.
The pages have lost none of their influence or bite, while providing a platform for former Bush figures such as Karl Rove and Michael Mukasey to offer strident arguments against Obama policy. Gigot has also brought in opposing voices like the liberal Thomas Frank, author of “What’s Wrong With Kansas?” A Pulitzer-winning columnist and former Chicago reporter, Gigot continues to favour intelligent, fact-based arguments rather than ideological rants.
67. Joe Scarborough (-)
Cable television host and former congressman
The MSNBC presenter entered Congress as part of the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 but resigned abruptly in 2001 to spend, he claimed, more time with his young family. His television career took off in 2003 and he now co-hosts the “Morning Joe” programme in NBC, a must-watch for Washington political junkies.
A former Pensacola lawyer, he was approached to run for the Senate in his native Florida this year but declined saying he could wield more influence via television. But he has not ruled out running for office again and his recent book “The Last Best Hope: Restoring Conservativism and America’s Promise” reads like a political manifesto, urging Republicans to adopt the fundamentals of Reaganomics, embrace green policies and accept the permanence of government-run en lement programs. Many conservative Republicans view his as far too moderate. Said “f***” on live television shortly after the 2008 election, though to be fair he was only quoting Obama’s new chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.
66. Victor Davis Hanson (58)
Military historian and columnist
Although registered as a Democrat, Hanson strongly supported the Bush administration, particularly on foreign policy, and reluctantly accepts the label (though he acknowledges it is also a slur) of “neo-conservative”, arguing that the Democrats do not have a morally responsible foreign policy. He rejects, however, the jibe from paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan that he was the “neocon court historian”, arguing he had hardly ever visited the Bush White House and had never been in the pay of a government.
“I came to support neocon approaches first in the wars against the Taliban and Saddam, largely because I saw little alternative,” he wrote in 2008. Three years earlier, he had argued that that Democrats were like Republicans in the mid-1960s – “impotent, shrill, no ideas, conspiratorial, reactive, out-of-touch with most Americans, isolationist, and full of embarrassing spokesmen".
His verdict on the current president, when much of the country was in the grip of Obamamania a year ago, could turn out to be prescient: “If he doesn't quit the messianic style and perpetual campaign mode, and begin humbly governing, then he will devolve into Carterism—angry that the once-fawning press betrayed him while we the people, due to our American malaise, are to blame.”
65. Erick Erickson (69)
Former lawyer, member of the city council in Macon, Georgia and master blogger who leads a core team of 25 writers at RedState.com. Readers include Rush Limbaugh and just about anyone who matters in the Republican party. When Representative Eric Cantor decided to run for Republican Whip, he announced it on RedState.
Erickson’s "Operation Leper", designed to marginalise John McCain aides caught smearing Sarah Palin, illustrated the power of RedState, which draws much of its strength from its image as a voice of the heartland, far outside the Washington Beltway. Erickson, 34 and a blogger since 2003, has shown a sense of humour, too. He appeared on the Stephen Colbert show to confess that describing retiring Justice David Souter as “the only goat f****** child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court” was “not my finest hour” on Twitter. He had not realised, he said sheepishly, that Twitter went to more than just his friends.
64. Chris Ruddy (-)
Founder and CEO of Newsmax
Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge may be household names but the low-profile Chris Ruddy is an increasingly powerful and influential player in the conservative media and beyond. Ruddy, a former investigative newspaper reporter, relentlessly investigated the Clinton administration, in particular the events surrounding the death of aide Vince Foster. He founded the Florida-based Newsmax magazine in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal of 1998.
In 2008, the company brought in nearly $24 million in sales, maintaining its 40 per cent annual growth rate and continued to expand and increase profits as the mainstream media downsized and recorded losses. Ruddy has broadened Newsmax’s base, turning it into a trusted source of political, financial and health news and analysis. He has also forged an unlikely friendship with his old target Bill Clinton. Now generating 3.8 million unique hits per month, look for Newsmax to occupy more centre ground and for Ruddy to become a better-known figure. Holds a Master’s from the London School of Economics.
63. Jim DeMint (-)
Senator for South Carolina
National Journal judged him to be the most Right-wing member of the Senate in 2007 and 2008, and he has willingly found a role as one of the principal cable TV egg throwers at Obama as well as a ferocious opponent of Democrats in Congress. A proponent of the flat tax, he opposed the Bush administration on spending and has shown his eagerness to play a national role by endorsing the conservative Marco Rubio in his bid to defeat moderate Governor Charlie Crist in the Florida Senate primary.
Against the State Department’s wishes, DeMint visited de facto president Roberto Micheletti in Honduras after Left-winger Manuel Zelaya had been ousted in a coup. He has placed a hold on Erroll Southers being appointed head of the Transport Security Administration because Obama’s choice would allow screeners to join a trade union.
62. Frank Luntz (17)
The king of the focus group and top Republican consultant, Luntz has been described as the “Nostradamus of pollsters” by Sir David Frost. He has departed the Washington DC area for California but his influence remains. A one-time consultant for NBC's "The West Wing" and avid collector of politics and baseball ephemera, Luntz has played himself in the TV sitcom "LateLine" alongside now-Senator Al Franken.
Still the master of the political message and believer in the power of words to transform a party’s fortunes, Luntz will be a key player in Republican attempts to cut back the Democratic congressional majorities this November. In a recent confidential memo, he warned Republicans: “You simply MUST be vocally and passionately on the side of REFORM. The status quo is no longer acceptable. If the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost and every word in this do ent is useless.”
61. Jeff Flake (-)
One of the Republican party’s rising stars in Congress, Flake has an almost messianic opposition to earmarks and “pork barrel” politics – the pet schemes that members of Congress favour to bring back cash to their districts to curry favour with voters.
A native of Snowflake, Arizona – which was named after his great-great-grandfather – Flake served as a Mormon missionary in Zimbabwe and South Africa. He has contemplated challenging John McCain for the Senate but the pair eventually made common cause over earmark reform. Flake, 47, has broken with his party over Cuba and immigration policy but his strong fiscal and social conservatism combined with his telegenic looks and willingness to confront Republican leaders mark him out as a potential White House contender one day.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ves-80-61.html
Snowe?
Maybe Armey and Flake, at least for the Beltway crowd.
Dobbs is a populist, plain and simple. If a populist can be an $8 mil a year media figure.
Barone is a good one to have.
Don't mind Gigot, though definitely establishment.
The rest are what ails the "modern conservative movement."
These lists rely too much on party label.
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