For most of my political career I have been a right-wing Republican. On a shelf in my home office is a nearly 40-year-old framed cartoon from Malcolm “Mal” Hancock of two amorphous people, one saying to the other, “The way I figure it, I’m somewhere right of ultra-right wing.” My right-wing pedigree is long, distinguished and impeccable. Only Utah GOP politics could make me question that pedigree. Today, next to the Mal cartoon, on my office shelf sits another cartoon showing an older couple watching Hannity, Limbaugh and Coulter ranting and raving on television and the man lamenting, “I miss William F. Buckley.”
Bill Buckley not only set the standard for modern conservatism, he and his legendary colleagues at National Review used their substantial pulpit to define the boundaries of conservatism and to aggressively exclude people or ideas or groups they considered unworthy of the conservative title. I have tried to do the same here in Utah over the past 17 years. Setting these boundaries matter because freedom matters.
