One usually resists speaking negatively about the recently deceased but this guy changed the face of american conservatism for much the worse. Norquist’s comments (bolded) are not exaggerated as regards scope and magnitude.
Paul M. Weyrich, 66, who helped found the Heritage Foundation and at one time was one of Washington’s most visible conservatives, died this morning. At his death, he was president and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.
Heritage announced this morning: “Paul M. Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and first president of The Heritage Foundation, died this morning around 1 a.m. He was 66 years old. Weyrich was a good friend to many of us at Heritage, a true leader and a man of unbending principle. He won Heritage’s prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Award in 2005. Weyrich will be deeply missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, including son Steve, who currently works at Heritage.”
Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform wrote this tribute: “Paul Weyrich created institutions and networks that incubated new and old powerful policies and strategies to advance liberty. … He brought leaders of various freedom impulses together. Most of the successes of the Conservative movement since the 1970s flowed from structures, organizations, and coalitions he started, created or nurtured. Paul also lived a balanced life with work, family and his faith. We will miss his puns and wisdom and hard work.”
Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online, who had the first word of his passing, called Weyrich “a Washington conservative institution” and “a patriot who lived a long life serving his nation.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1208/16702.html
and the wiki entry on him… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Weyrich
update: an interesting account from Ed Kilgore…
Paul Weyrich, the legendary conservative institution-builder and avatar of what was once, in his heydey, called the New Right, died yesterday after a long illness.
I’m not the one to assess Weyrich’s career, and thus recommend Marc Ambider’s brisk summary of his triumphs back in the day and his long, ornery decline.
I can offer one personal anecdote that offers some insight into the man’s personality. One of his less-successful projects was a cable network, National Empowerment Television (later America’s Voice), that represented something of an earnestly amateurish dry run for Fox News. Virtually all the shows on NET featured call-ins, and viewers were about as rabidly conservative as you can get. I once appeared as a Token Democrat on Weyrich’s own show, back when I’d accept just about any media opportunity this side of the Sunrise Farm Report. The first caller made a snarky remark about my (then) long hair, and Weyrich proceeded to use much of the balance of the show lecturing his viewers about civility.
That was fairly typical of the man. He spent a good part of his long career appealing to and often speaking for extremists, but he didn’t much like his “friends” any more than his enemies. He was undoubtedly one of the Founding Fathers of the Cultural Right; he reportedly is the one who suggested the monniker “Moral Majority” to Jerry Falwell for his first-generation Christian Right group. But in every personal respect, Weyrich was wildly different from the slick, weasily hacks like Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins who eventually displaced him as the public faces of his own movement.
Paul Weyrich didn’t have a phony bone in his body. And though he very productively served causes I abhor for many decades, I have to say that his old-school style, which he pursued to the point of self-marginalizing eccentricity, is a trait that tradition-honoring conservatives ought to respect and miss every time they turn on Fox to watch and hear the automatons drone.
http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/
