Principled and pragmatic

"Give me a long enough lever," said Archimedes, "and I can move the world."

Paul Weyrich, who died yesterday at the age of 66, applied such leverage better than anybody in the conservative/Christian movement. He was that rarity of a man who, when you looked around the room, was both the most principled person there-and the most pragmatic.

Those who will record the history of the American conservative movement for the last half of the 1900s will naturally be obliged to include William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and, of course, Ronald Reagan, who was the ultimate political expression of the foundations laid by the other two. But anyone who understands anything at all about what really happened through those years knows that the Reagan presidency, humanly speaking, would never have happened without the insights, the energy, and the work of Paul Weyrich. He was brilliant, he was strategic, he was relentless, and he was brutally honest. In all that, he seemed to sense better than all his colleagues what would work-what and where leverage needed to be applied at any particular moment in history to move things most.

So it was Paul Weyrich who was front and center in the formation of such diverse organizations as the Moral Majority (he told me more than once how much he regretted inadvertently providing that name) and The Heritage Foundation, of which he was the first president and which became the most influential conservative think tank in Washington. Always, Weyrich was a teacher. Just being right was never enough. You had to do the hard work, he always stressed, of demonstrating how your right beliefs could make a difference in society. And you had to teach others to be similarly involved.

Paul Weyrich didn't start off as an evangelical. His close working relationship with so many in the evangelical world tugged him in that direction, prompting him increasingly in recent years to speak openly, simply, and warmly of his faith in Christ. He was a critical lynch pin between secular and Christian conservatives-never hesitating, for example, to champion the pro-life cause even when secular conservatives expressed their embarrassment over the issue.

Conservatives in the United States are still counting their losses during the year 2008. None may be bigger than this artful user of a very long lever.