Breaking an established political pattern

Statesman Winston Churchill supposedly once said, "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." Or something to that effect. In any event, it's an interesting thought, made more compelling by the legions of conservative Americans who were once young liberals (you may know some of them as your parents).

One man who certainly seems to fit the bill of young Democratic idealist turned Republican is former Bush-Cheney '04 legal counsel Benjamin Ginsberg, who resigned from his position after it was revealed that he advised a 527 group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (what's that? Oh, so you HAVE heard of them). Ginsberg, a prominent lawyer who argued on behalf of then-presidential candidate George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore, also happens to be a Penn graduate and former executive editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Ginsberg has been in the limelight of late. Besides making headlines, he wrote an op-ed piece in The Washington Post and popped up on The O'Reilly Factor, taking both instances to point out what, in his eyes, is a double standard in the way the news media report on the various 527 groups battling it out in the trenches of this presidential election. Through it all, he has reiterated his unflinching support for veterans of the Vietnam War.

A war that, as an undergraduate, he did not support.

In a year-in-review column that ran in the DP on May 1, 1973, Ginsberg wrote the following of Vietnam: "For the college student had been alienated by this war. Alienated from the very institutions of his government. ... There are no heroes on campus these days except for an occasional musician. Certainly no public leader is emulated." Ginsberg also wrote a column about participating in an antiwar protest in 1972. His second paragraph reads, "I found my traditional cynicism about the value of antiwar protests taken away by a rather righteous indignation over what the leaders of my country were doing."

I recently contacted Ginsberg to see if he would comment on the seeming discrepancy between his previous views on Vietnam and his current position. To my surprise, he responded.

One thing that is abundantly clear within five minutes of talking to the man is, whatever he was feeling in college, he now is a resolute supporter of Vietnam veterans. As he put it himself, "I think I, personally, and many of the people I knew were too quick to not show the respect that soldiers who fought deserved -- that we looked on them as people who had done bad things by fighting in the war. ... I came to learn, as I got to know more veterans, that the real rhetoric against them -- as epitomized by [Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)] -- was very harmful to their lives as they tried to re-assimilate into the society they had served."

Ginsberg went on to describe how, along with his views on the war, his views in general became more conservative as he grew older, largely based on his observation of government affairs as a reporter and his experiences outside the confines of a campus that tended to see the world in black and white.

It seems to me that the type of conservative philosophy that develops with age is about protection and autonomy: serving the best interests of yourself and your family, protecting your assets -- which you earned -- from the long arm of the government, which intends to take them and waste them on unwieldy, ineffective social programs. This line of thought often seems at odds with more selfless ideals, concerned with helping your fellow man. The former usurps the latter. But of course they aren't mutually exclusive.

The idea that the government can be more lean, more efficient and more effective is a great one. But the model is reform, not elimination. There is a happy medium to be reached between handing out checks to everyone who asks, and making government small enough to drown in the bathtub (an ideal that begs the question: sans government, who pays for our great army? Never mind less conventional necessities like roads).

As far as war goes, supporting our troops is something that Americans of every stripe can believe in (yes, kids, even Michael Moore). If Kerry had any sense, he would have voted against the war, and for the authorization of funds -- instead of vice versa. But the best way to support our troops, beyond the obvious appropriation of money for materiel, is to consistently question the leaders who intend to send them into harm's way. That is what the young Ben Ginsberg did, and it's a tendency that I fully intend to hold onto as I age, however my other values may change.

I wonder if, like so many others, the certainty of my youth will give way to more seasoned, conservative views. I don't think so, because even now, I'm all about shades of gray. You need to be, in a world where The Wall Street Journal uses "dude" in an editorial without irony. And while I know nothing of Vietnam, my eyes are open and trained on this war, and all I can see is gray. "A war that continues despite "the peace' has caused, more than anything, a growth of cynicism." Ben Ginsberg wrote that in 1973, but it still rings true to me these 31 years later. Eliot Sherman is a senior English major from Philadelphia and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman normally appears on Thursdays.

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