Carly Fiorina/George Pataki ’12

When they send their best people after you — Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Tina
Fey, Alec Baldwin and David Letterman — and it turns out they’re all stand-up
comics, the age has turned. Even Lady Gaga can’t help. Or that guy who sells
Chevy trucks at NFL games who they want to be senator. Get it? Because he
drives a truck. Like Scott Brown. So in that regard it is not the most
important thing that conservatives win every race in November — against Barney
Frank, Barbara Boxer — but engage long-term the turning ahead. Because this is
not a typical political turning. This is different.

The California Senate race between Carly Fiorina and Barbara Boxer is, as Fred
Barnes says in the Weekly Standard, the
most important race of 2010. And if Fiorina beats Boxer, liberalism will suffer
a “grievous defeat.”

“Fiorina, 56, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, articulates the free-market
alternative to liberal, statist economic policies better than any candidate
I’ve seen this year. Her experience as a highly visible corporate executive in
Silicon Valley has made her a poised candidate, a natural, though it’s her
first run for office,” writes Barnes.

But whether or not she wins in November, those same qualities make her a
real-life candidate for president in 2012. Other times might require a Grant, a
Roosevelt or an Obama. Our times, which suddenly find us to be, in investor Jim
Rogers’s phrase, “the greatest debtor nation in the history of the world,”
require a CEO.

The change we face ahead is historic, not cyclical. President Obama brings completion
of a historic cycle. But history moves on. In hindsight it can be observed that
when the period’s avatar dies, the movement dies shortly thereafter. And as it
was with Jefferson and Victoria, so it will be with the death of Ted Kennedy.
New generations come. New ideas take hold, and we have seen rise here, since
February 2009, some brand-new thinking. New ideas and new generations need new
people. And it is futile but inevitable for the nostalgic impulse to take hold
and call for a return of a Bush, a Clinton, another Kennedy relative or another
Cuomo. And it drags the region and the party back to the past and inhibits the
new awakening.

Roosevelt liberalism and any other Keynes/Marx hybrid impulse are finished with
this president. Conservatives should look to the “creative conflict” in their
own ranks, which started last year in NY-23 when Conservative Party candidate
Doug Hoffman challenged the mainstream candidates. A call from the wild first
came from Sarah Palin to support the new approach, and right there with her was
former New York Gov. George Pataki, soon to be followed by Govs. Tim Pawlenty
(Minn.) and Rick Perry (Texas). The pragmatic old-schoolers, led by Newt
Gingrich, fell in line behind the traditional party candidate.

This new division grew all year and was particularly noticeable in the Texas gubernatorial
primary, in which the old-school favorites including Karl Rove, George H.W.
Bush, Karen Hughes as a proxy for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others lined
up behind Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) in opposition to incumbent Perry.
Perry had only the support of Sarah Palin, but won in a landslide.

This intramural division among conservatives, and not that between Republican
and Democrat, is the most relevant division in American politics today, and the
century ahead depends on its outcome.

It will begin to play out in the Republican primary for 2012. I hope Sarah
Palin, the catalyst for the new outlook, runs. I hope Pataki, who put boots on
the ground to oppose ObamaCare when others just give speeches, runs as well.
And Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, who both belong to the new thinking. But I
hope Fiorina runs, as she, more than anyone, might be the one to bring forth
from this creative and still-amorphous awakening a new political paradigm and a
new America.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.