David Frum and His Detractors

From Mark Oppenheimer's profile of the columnist in The Nation:

Frum’s critics on the provocative fringe are, it turns out, much more eager to talk about him than the establishment types who know him well. Those conservative insiders who would speak were insistently diplomatic. “David sees himself as an in-house critic who wants to make sure the party goes forward,” Michael Cromartie, the well-connected vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. “He has gotten himself in trouble with people who think he spends all his time trying to get on CNN.” When I asked Cromartie if he agreed with that critique, he said, “No comment”—something I heard a lot. I called five of Frum’s former colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, and none would speak on the record about him. Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal did not return my call. Nor did Peter Wehner, who worked with Frum in the White House, nor National Review’s Rich Lowry, nor The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes. The list goes on…

Frum says he has committed an unpardonable sin within a political movement. There are three cardinal rules of getting along with people, he says: “You don’t tell people they’re bad writers, you don’t tell people they have no sense of humor, and you don’t tell people that they’ve mishandled a political negotiation. There are a lot of things that people will forgive, but those are the unforgivable.” And Frum broke the third rule, telling his confreres that they had mishandled a political negotiation. “You’re saying, ‘You put party before country, and you tripped over your own feet putting party before country. You didn’t even deliver a win for your party.’”