Jeffrey Lord writing at American Spectator writes a long but worthwhile piece , important and on target. It coincides with our view of the establishment GOP and the current state of the Republican Party. The establishment needs to be able to articulate and pursue principles, contemporized and made relevant by the platform. If political parties are not about principles, rather than the support of one interchangeable political club over another, why should principled people bother with that club? Here are some excerpts from Lord who worked in the Reagan White House. He refers to the recent Christie scandal as of a nature that would not have happened under Reagan. The entire article has much more to say and is available at American Spectator here.
Reagan’s staffers, like the president we worked for, were largely if not exclusively “conviction staffers” working for the “conviction President.” Those convictions, of course, being conservative.
There is a direct connection between this view of the world, Reagan’s success as president, and Chris Christie’s lacerating humiliation in the Bridgegate scandal. If one is of convictions that focus on the Constitution and limited government, and hires accordingly, there is little chance one will find oneself forced to hold a humiliating two-hour press conference because some power-drunk staffer closed the George Washington Bridge in a snotty vendetta. . .
Staffers steeped in conservatism are most assuredly not going to be spending their time abusing their power — power they would by definition be seeking to limit — by shutting down a bridge out of spite. In its own way, the bridge shut-down illustrates in graphic form the real danger of out-of-control government, particularly when that government and its very real power is vested in the hands of those who are about power for the sake of power . . .
as (William F. Buckley of National Review) called them “an identifiable team of Fabian operators is bent on controlling both our major political parties(under the sanction of such fatuous and unreasoned slogans as “national unity,” “middle-of-the-road,” “progressivism,” and “bipartisanship”). Thatcher’s disdainful terms for British moderate Conservatives was the “wets” or “consensus politicians,” while Reagan scorned the same people as “fraternal order” Republicans. . .
As this is written (hat tip Craig Shirley), this very question is arising in the 2014 Virginia Senate race. The blogger Marooned in Marin, unidentified beyond saying that he lives in Fairfax County, Virginia, has recently zeroed in on the potential GOP Senate candidacy of ex-RNC chairman Ed Gillespie. If nominated, Gillespie would be running for the seat against incumbent Democrat Mark Warner. Writes Marooned in Marin:
Meet Ed Gillespie, The Karl Rove-Approved Establishment GOP Candidate For Virginia’s US Senate Seat
A passage from the Epilogue of Craig Shirley’s must-read book “Rendezvous With Destiny, Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America” tells me all I need to know about why Ed Gillespie is not the right candidate to run against Warner, that he’s only a pawn for the GOP establishment and close political partner Karl Rove. Shirley wrote how Gillespie met with the Manchester Union-Leader editorial board in 2003 and…”said in no uncertain terms that the days of Reaganesque Republican railings against the expansion of federal government are over.” “Today’s Republican party stands for giving the American people whatever the latest polls say they want.… The people want expanded entitlement programs and a federal government that attends to their every desire, no matter how frivolous? Then that’s what the Republican Party wants too.”
DLH with R Mall
