Edwin J. Feulner, Jr. - president, The Heritage Foundation; received the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Reagan for being "a leader of the conservative movement" on January 18, 1989; political economist; lecturer; columnist; author; treasurer and trustee, Mont Pelerin Society.

I'm a Chicagoan. As many of you know, back when I was from that area the late Mayor Richard Daley once said when he was given an award that he'd reached the "pinnacle of success." Well, I've kind of reached the pinnacle of success today because my CNP colleagues and conservative friends have honored me.

But the words in Matthew, I think, are ennobling to all of us: "He who would be the greatest among you, let him be the servant of all." And each of us in this room, it seems to me, serves a noble cause -- the commitment to the first principles and ideals we all share. So it is an honor for me to serve these principles with all of you.

What I want to talk about tonight is the conservative movement: where we are, where I think we should be going, and how we can get there. And I wish I could be as eloquent, and I'm sure you wish I could be as brief, as Rich DeVos was in terms of telling us how to come together and emphasize the positive views of our future.

Rich and Helen have also been an inspiration to Linda and me over the years. In fact, it was seven or eight years ago, up at their hotel in Grand Rapids, that we had the honor of sitting with them at the dinner table. They each had about one-third of a piece of fish while the rest of us were chowing down on great, huge steaks. Linda gave me a little talk in our hotel room later that night about getting in shape. But it was really Rich who got me back in shape about eight or nine months ago when he came down and gave me a paternal lecture about how I'd better change my own lifestyle, too.

Several weeks ago, newspapers and magazines trumpeted President Clinton's State of the Union address wherein he said, "The era of big government is over."

Remember that one? The week after, The Weekly Standard, the new and welcome conservative magazine, carried that quote on its cover under a big headline, which in bright red bold type proclaimed, "WE WIN."

Well, I would gently remind Bill Kristol, Fred Barnes, and the others at The Weekly Standard of what Will Rogers once said: "Magic is an honest profession because the magician tells you he's going to fool you, whereas other professions aren't necessarily so forthright." And that includes politicians, especially those who have such metamorphic abilities as our incumbent President.

We found a recent quote I just love. In a remarkable and yet accurate mixing of metaphors, one caller to a radio talk show a couple weeks ago accused our President of being a chameleon in wolf's clothing. I'd like to take credit for that one myself, but being at a CNP meeting I'd better not.

But back to my own metaphor. While the magician David Copperfield may be able to make elephants and jumbo jets disappear, the President managed somehow to make 60 years of his party's ideology and his own beliefs and ideas vanish. If only government's bureaucracy and burdens on our people would vanish as well.

But The Weekly Standard went on to note that, with Mr. Clinton's grand statement on big government's demise, he had announced the surrender of modern liberalism.

Come on guys, give me a break! Liberalism hasn't surrendered. When we conservatives were down, did we surrender? No way!

I was around when Richard Nixon was forced to resign and we went through the 1974 debacle in the congressional elections. We didn't surrender then and neither have the liberals surrendered now.

Liberalism is not dead, both because liberals love to control other people's lives and because they're having a lot of fun spending our money.

But, neither can I agree with those conservative friends of mine who subscribe to the headline at the other end of the spectrum and say, "WE LOST."

I understand their reasoning. We don't have term limits. There's no balanced budget amendment. There's no end to the National Endowment for the Arts and we still have the Legal Services Corporation.

But to those conservatives who are understandably disappointed following the way we all felt in December '94 and January '95 I simply say: No, we haven't lost, and you should not feel too disappointed.

And here again I go back to what Rich DeVos said. We've come two-thirds of the way. Too often we in the conservative movement measure time in terms of congressional sessions. Other people around the world, like the Chinese for example, think in terms of dynasties. It took 60 years to build the liberal dynasty of the welfare state in this country; we're not going to undo that in one year or even in the period of the 104th Congress.

So to Ernest Istook, to John Shadegg, to Steve Stockman, to the other members of the 104th, both here and back in Washington, ladies and gentlemen, I salute you. I thank you. And we all look forward to supporting you and working with you, not only during this Congress but for many to come -- term limits and the voters of your districts willing.

I remember, and certainly Ed Meese and all of the people in this room remember, the presidential campaign of 1980 when Ronald Reagan asked Americans, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" Well, let me ask all of you, "Are we as conservatives better off today than we were four years ago?" There can't be any doubt about that. Of course we are. We're much better off.

Mark Twain was once asked what he thought of Wagner's music and he replied, "It's not as bad as it sounds." And this is what I would say to some of my fellow conservatives who were disappointed with last year's progress, with this year's progress and with what we're going through right now in terms of the presidential campaign. Despite all of these setbacks, we're better off today than we were four years ago.

A friend of mine who's obviously been watching too much of "The McLaughlin Group" said to me the other day, "Regarding your optimism that the U.S. Congress will bring about conservative change -- with 0 being a dark, sulfurous pit of despair and 10 being the Holy Rapture -- where do you stand?"

I said 7.5. I continue to remain optimistic about what Congress will eventually accomplish -- if for no other reason than perhaps it will do nothing and the American people will be able to breathe a little easier because we won't be saddled with still more government.

But, in fact, they are doing some very positive things. Ernest Istook yesterday got two amendments passed on the continuing resolution, one by a vote of 211 to 209. One vote switch and we would have lost. But he managed to get the House to require those recipients of federal government grants to admit how much money they're spending while lobbying the government for still more money. Full disclosure, that's all we want, not necessarily even to cut it off, just full disclosure. It carried. Whether Clinton will veto it or not remains to be seen.

Anyway, we are making some progress. We are building up a record for the future.

But let me put what conservatism is experiencing right now into a little bit of historic perspective. In the 1950s, true conservatism was an intellectual movement. We had brilliant thinkers, great theories, solid logic and principled positions. However, in the political arena we had zero meaningful influence in the real world. One caustic observer looking back on that time period said we were "nerds on steroids." Yet this was an important grounding period for us. The Friedrich von Hayeks, the Russell Kirks, the William Buckleys and the Milton Friedmans provided that intellectual base that has endured and that continues to guide us to this day.

In the 1960s, Ronald Reagan's speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater made conservatism a political movement. In his '64 speech Reagan was able to articulate the intellectual underpinnings of conservatism in ways that resonated with real people throughout our land. That speech gave conservatism political focus, momentum and a new and very appealing leader.

I urge you to go back and read it.

I had the good fortune a few months ago to visit the Reagan library and picked up an audio tape of it. And listening to that in my car one day -- it's a good thing I wasn't going to work in the middle of the rush hour or I would have had a multicar accident -- I got tears in my eyes. I finally had to pull off Route 66 going down to south side Virginia and just listen to what President Reagan said.

He said at that time, "I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers." And that question remains central to conservatism's victory in the 1994 congressional elections and it remains central as we look forward to this fall.

So, first we had conservatism as the intellectual movement, then the political movement, now, the one we're just getting started on, the governing movement. And governing, particularly governing through the legislature, without the executive and outside a parliamentary system, is not easy. Ask these members of our Congress. It's like trying to herd cats. And if you're Newt Gingrich and you started out with the cats all more or less heading in the same direction, that's fine. But after that first hundred days, the cats are scattering in different directions and things become much more difficult.

We've had rough going. This shouldn't be any surprise. Our friends who've been around on the Hill for a while were backbenchers. In fact, the liberal establishment, whether in the print media or through some very vicious electronic media interviews recently, still likes to call us bomb throwers even though we now hold positions that just a few years ago were occupied by the likes of Sam Gibbons, John Dingell, Claiborne Pell, Robert Byrd, et al.

And this requires an adjustment not only in terms of how the media reacts to us but also in terms of how we learn and how we adapt to these new roles. Maybe I'm betraying my academic bias here but there's nothing disgraceful in the failure that comes from learning how to adjust to a new role.

Yes, the conservative agenda of the House remains unfulfilled. The long-sought dream of tying a balanced budget to raising the debt limit became a nightmare of who blames whom for what. Maybe we attempted too much; maybe compromise was conceded too easily so that we could come up with some kind of change; or perhaps the message became too unfocused and thus susceptible to redefinition by the special interests or by the media or by the liberals.

Those are understandable and forgivable mistakes. What we've got to do is learn. We've got to get back on message. We've got to concentrate and focus. And we've got to move on. We have the time to regroup and the time to succeed, both for the short term this November and onward for the next decade and more.

In spite of the setbacks on so many things, I believe the Republican Congress will overcome its current confusion because defeat can clarify the mind and strengthen the political will, especially when it's combined with an electorate that insists on change.

Another bump we conservatives have hit is the presidential race. First, our message became lost in Congress during the battle over the budget. Then it became fogged and dissipated in the smoke and fire of the GOP Presidential race.

H.L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, writing in the old Baltimore Sun, defined a President as a man of whom it is only positively known that an immense number of citizens did not want him to be elected. And this fits at least, it seems to me, a number of people who are still standing on our side.

It can be argued that the Republican candidates recently have caused more damage to the cause of conservatism than the constant and biased hammering of the media, the predictable intransigence of the liberal Democratic special interests and the egregious prevarication of their President combined.

Well, to our Republican leaders and the Republican candidates for President and other national conservative spokesmen, many of them in this room, I say that we need to pull ourselves together. Straighten up. Let's get hold of ourselves, get back on message and remind people why we're different, what we stand for and where we're going.

What are Republicans doing playing on class warfare and class envy, positions long the domain of the left? The Republican candidates seem to have caught a bad case of Gephardt-itis or Schroeder-osis, and I'll let you take your pick of which you dislike more.

One candidate began a speech in New Hampshire last month saying, "Yes, these are the best of times for many who work on Wall Street. But the facts leave no doubt that they are the worst of times for many who live on Main Street."

First of all, the facts say absolutely no such thing. But the candidate blithely went through these so-called facts that his speech writer could only have picked up from reading old Dukakis and Mondale speeches or some current speeches from Laura Tyson or somebody else in this Administration.

British humorist Robert Benchley said that most of the debates to which he was a party fell somewhat short of being impressive owing to the fact that neither he nor his opponent knew what they were talking about. I will let you draw your own comparison there. Just let me ask, what is a Republican doing recycling liberal economic distortions?

Another Republican attacked the flat tax plan of a Republican candidate by calling it "nonsense." Tell that to flat-taxed Hong Kong, whose economy has been the most consistently expanding economy in the world for the last thirty years. Dismissing the economic growth and benefits that flow from a flat tax by labeling it a boon to the rich, as this GOP race has done, is the politics-of-envy approach of James Carville. We don't need to give credibility to their arguments.

Remember what happened in 1980 when Ronald Reagan had to live down the "voodoo economics" label, not just for the campaign but for the next few years whenever the media pulled it up again.

Is it any wonder the Republicans have lost their message when we run around banging each other and adopting the rhetoric of the other side?

Some of us who were involved in this debate over the last six or eight months thought that a flatter, a flat tax or a single-rate tax (as we prefer to call it) that met certain basic criteria, whether it was of an Armey variety or an Archer variety or whatever it was, could be a driving issue in the 1996 election, one which could define conservatives on one side from the tired old establishment on the other side.

You know that the economic basis of real conservatism is not fear. It's, rather, growth, it's opportunity. And for the prosperity of our nation and our people we should be lowering public expectations of what the U.S. government can do to control our economy or to direct it and to control or direct the world economy. We shouldn't be proposing solutions that are both impossible to achieve and would be undesirable in any event.

We do have one advantage as we look ahead, and that's what can only be described as the disgrace of contemporary left-wing liberalism in the United States. Our message has been mixed, it's been confused, sometimes it's even been self-defeating. Theirs has been expensive, irrelevant and disastrous to those traditional values Rich DeVos mentioned before that we all share.

So let me cheer you up by giving you the bad news about the current state of liberalism. The President's grand pronouncements aside, the liberal mentality has not changed. Let me just give you a few liberal abuses that we and our fellow citizens read daily in our newspapers, that we hear about on radio talk shows, and even every once in a while see on the evening news. Each such story of liberal excess I believe aids the cause of conservatism.

The Washington Post recently ran a series bemoaning the fact people had lost confidence in the federal government to the point of cynicism -- thank goodness. To find out why, we read, of course, The Washington Times, and here's a report from about a month ago. Minnesota's Medicaid program has been funding sex-change operations since 1987, and I quote: "The operations are performed to aid transsexuals, who say they are 'trapped' in the bodies of the opposite sex and whose lives may be so disrupted by their perception that doctors prescribe surgery." End of quote. For this we are paying Medicaid? I say, what about the average American who's trapped inside the body of a taxpayer? recently ran a series bemoaning the fact people had lost confidence in the federal government to the point of cynicism -- thank goodness. To find out why, we read, of course, The Washington Times, and here's a report from about a month ago. Minnesota's Medicaid program has been funding sex-change operations since 1987, and I quote: "The operations are performed to aid transsexuals, who say they are 'trapped' in the bodies of the opposite sex and whose lives may be so disrupted by their perception that doctors prescribe surgery." End of quote. For this we are paying Medicaid? I say, what about the average American who's trapped inside the body of a taxpayer? recently ran a series bemoaning the fact people had lost confidence in the federal government to the point of cynicism -- thank goodness. To find out why, we read, of course, The Washington Times, and here's a report from about a month ago. Minnesota's Medicaid program has been funding sex-change operations since 1987, and I quote: "The operations are performed to aid transsexuals, who say they are 'trapped' in the bodies of the opposite sex and whose lives may be so disrupted by their perception that doctors prescribe surgery." End of quote. For this we are paying Medicaid? I say, what about the average American who's trapped inside the body of a taxpayer? recently ran a series bemoaning the fact people had lost confidence in the federal government to the point of cynicism -- thank goodness. To find out why, we read, of course, The Washington Times, and here's a report from about a month ago. Minnesota's Medicaid program has been funding sex-change operations since 1987, and I quote: "The operations are performed to aid transsexuals, who say they are 'trapped' in the bodies of the opposite sex and whose lives may be so disrupted by their perception that doctors prescribe surgery." End of quote. For this we are paying Medicaid? I say, what about the average American who's trapped inside the body of a taxpayer? recently ran a series bemoaning the fact people had lost confidence in the federal government to the point of cynicism -- thank goodness. To find out why, we read, of course, The Washington Times, and here's a report from about a month ago. Minnesota's Medicaid program has been funding sex-change operations since 1987, and I quote: "The operations are performed to aid transsexuals, who say they are 'trapped' in the bodies of the opposite sex and whose lives may be so disrupted by their perception that doctors prescribe surgery." End of quote. For this we are paying Medicaid? I say, what about the average American who's trapped inside the body of a taxpayer? recently ran a series bemoaning the fact people had lost confidence in the federal government to the point of cynicism -- thank goodness. To find out why, we read, of course, The Washington Times, and here's a report from about a month ago. Minnesota's Medicaid program has been funding sex-change operations since 1987, and I quote: "The operations are performed to aid transsexuals, who say they are 'trapped' in the bodies of the opposite sex and whose lives may be so disrupted by their perception that doctors prescribe surgery." End of quote. For this we are paying Medicaid? I say, what about the average American who's trapped inside the body of a taxpayer?

Right now our liberal adversaries are yelling about Medicaid being slashed. You have to know there's too much government money floating around when sex-change operations are paid for with federal and state tax dollars.

Or how about SSI -- Supplemental Security Income for disabled children? Who in their right mind could possibly want to restrict such a well-intentioned program? Consider that in just three years children on disability rolls increased from 300,000 to 900,000. Consider that some parents have discovered that if their children misbehave in school it can be diagnosed as a disability and get them a check for $400 a month.

Well, what happens when you subsidize something? You get more of it. Sure enough, suddenly we have an explosion of children who are considered disabled because of unruly behavior in their schoolroom classes.

Some of us in the room remember when behavior problems were dealt with by discipline rather than disability checks.

These liberal excesses still run rampant throughout the system. We have to bring them home to the average Americans who are out there footing the bill. The arguments for changing the direction of our country based on conservatism are as strong as ever, both by this anecdotal kind of evidence as well as by the principles we share.

The principles and values of conservatism are abiding. They do not change in the middle of a presidential election or a budget battle. They do not change whether Republicans are in power or Democrats are in power or whether power is shared, as is presently the case. They are based on free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values and a strong national defense. These ideals are worth maintaining through political victory and defeat.

Well, to all of you, my fellow conservatives and my colleagues at CNP, I am optimistic about conservatism because what we believe is enduring. I am optimistic because liberalism is a disaster that can no longer be disguised. I am optimistic because Americans do not yet feel that our country is in balance, that we, the people, are the masters of our government. And they will not be satisfied until it is.

In spite of learning curves, in spite of disappointments, in spite of self-inflicted wounds, the momentum of change remains in our direction. Does anyone believe that our current distractions and defeats mean a more liberal America? No, they simply mean a more conservative America cannot be achieved as quickly as we all had hoped just a few months ago.

Sophocles wrote, "One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been." Well the hour is early, and I believe that the day will still turn splendid.

Together, working the way Rich so eloquently described it, we can redress the political imbalance in Washington. We will see our values defended in the political arena and then finally vindicated in the ultimate arena that really matters for all of us individually.

This address was delivered to the Council for National Policy in Orlando, Florida in March, 1996.