David Frum was hawking copies of his new book, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, last month at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books when Stewart Howe of “9/11 Truth” squad We Are Change went hunting for the “notorious, infamous, neo-con demon incarnate” for the second time this year.

“The one thing I regret from our last conversation,” said Frum, “is that I didn’t say to you what my friend Christopher Hitchens said, which is that you should fuck off.” Frum took a swing at the belligerent cameraman, smacking his apparatus.

The annoyed reaction, as preserved on YouTube, certainly makes Frum look more genuine than the persona he once cultivated in Toronto — especially around the time his first book, Dead Right, was published in 1994. That was when Mary Walsh, onstage at a PEN Canada debate in her “Marg Delahunty” character, suggested that Frum was the kind of writer who was deserving of torture, and that his CBC broadcaster mother Barbara Frum “must be spinning in her grave.”

A profile in Saturday Night magazine by Malcolm Gladwell (yes, that one) said the same things, just more delicately: “At 34, he has no qualms about admitting that he is already older than his parents,” wrote Gladwell. “The real problem is that Frum cannot seem to see from his own experience that the attempt by the state to guarantee some level of comfort and security — to act as a kind of generous father — is not necessarily a bad thing. David Frum, after all, is himself the son of a self-made man. It did not ruin him. Why should it ruin the rest of us?”

Gladwell’s stance last week at “an evening of dialogue on social change” suggests that, as a best-selling author rewarded handsomely for speaking gigs, his own views on the custodial function of the state have gotten more critical. But, while his late-boomer pundit peers haven’t altered their casual wardrobes since undergrad days, Frum has forever associated himself with fob-watch formality.

There was no chance that a 9/11 Truther would ambush the National Club at Bay and Richmond, where Frum spoke today at a luncheon of the National Citizens Coalition luncheon. (Their credo since 1967: “More freedom through less government.”) Frum would’ve been the youngest of the 75 people in attendance two decades ago — if not for a half-dozen exceptions, he’d still be the youngest.

But, these days, Frum is in the same age bracket as the man he all but assumes will be the next President of the United States. And, having worked as an early first-term speechwriter for the previous one — at least until wife Danielle Crittenden got a bit too carried away with her “wifely pride” via email revealing him as the coiner of the term “Axis of Evil” — Frum is primping himself to be the leader of the punditry opposition. George Packer’s big feature in the latest New Yorker, “The Fall of Conservatism,” gives plenty of space to Frum’s view that it all went wrong with Ronald Reagan, leading to the failure that was George W. Bush’s “compassion” — including the reliance on evangelical Christians to furnish the presidency with a purpose.

Frum starts with an apology — he stayed up too late last night watching the latest Democratic primary results. “I personally have not had such a good time since the Iran-Iraq war,” he chuckles. “It’s a testament to Barack Obama that he’s managed to make Hillary Clinton more humble.” And it seems the outsider principle long used to explain the success of Canadian comedians in the US is something that Frum can’t wait to apply to the new occupant of the White House.

“Barack Obama is so left wing, so arrogant, and he’s associated with so many wild causes and wild individuals that the country is only starting to hear about.

“But 80 per cent of Americans think the country is barking up the wrong tree.”

The problem is, given John McCain’s standing as a misfit among Republicans, a conservative wouldn’t feel any more confident if their favoured candidate won. The best-case scenario, figures Frum, will find McCain in command in a fashion similar to the President of France — formally transcending his party affiliation. (And, in the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, that gave him enough time to switch wives.)

While the scenarios outlined by Frum will likely be good for his business of opinionating inside the Beltway — trying to live up to the late William F. Buckley’s expectation for his Yale-educated disciple — the main message to the NCC lunch crowd was that, should Obama win, then it will be Stephen Harper’s turn to shine.

“If John McCain does lose,” calculates Frum, “then Stephen Harper will be the senior right-of-centre politician in the western world.” And whereas Canadian conservatives spent the past eight years looking to the Bush administration for the clues and cues, “they’re not going to have the answers for you right now.”

The contrast, figures Frum, will be not unlike what occurred when John F. Kennedy swept into office, and Canada still had John Diefenbaker at the helm. Presumably, it’s Harper who can prevail as the more rakishly self-assured one.

“So long as everything Stephen Harper wanted to do was enforced by George Bush, he wasn’t his own man,” says Frum. “And now, he’ll be able to say ‘I’m not just doing this for ideological reasons — I’m doing this for national reasons.'”

Frum will be a passenger in January on the National Citizen Coalition’s inaugural boat cruise — a franchise they’re inheriting from the ill-fated Western Standard magazine — by which time we’ll know whether this perspective will swim, or sink.

Previously on the Scroll: Mark Steyn takes Toronto 

Send news, tips, links about arts, culture, media to scroll@eyeweekly.com