October 19, 2005

Cracking Up Is Hard To Do

Maybe it's just the alliteration, but "conservative crack-up" is one of those phrases that makes a comeback whenever the GOP falls on hard times -- and if you follow the online chatter, it's not hard to think its ubiquitous among armchair liberal commentators. But is it more common than it used to be? [WILLIAM BEUTLER]

Apparently not. We did searched through American newspapers and wire services in the Nexis database to see who was using it and when: we count 48 times since its apparent coinage, by American Spectator editor Bob Tyrrell, in early 1987. But it didn't catch on until he published a book of the same name in 1992 -- perhaps anticipating Bush 41's loss to Bill Clinton. During the GOP's out years of the 1990s, "conservative crack-up" enjoyed some currency in publications that today we'd call the MSM.

But it was only used once during the year before the 1994 Republican Revolution, twice the next year, and then not again until after Clinton-Gore dispatched Dole-Kemp in '96. It enjoyed relative popularity in 1997 and 2000, owing to memorable uses on the cover of the Weekly Standard, and in an op-ed by Heritage's Edwin Feulner, respectively. But then it fell off the face of the Earth, not to return until the Terri Schiavo debacle of early 2005.

"Conservative crack-up," then, seems to have been a catchphrase of conservative self-flagellation rather than lefty taunts. But maybe that's changing.

Posted at 05:12 PM

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