So here’s the headline from Fox News.
Several Republicans set to speak at DNC on Monday night
In addition to former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, three Republican women will be featured
Forgive me if I roll my eyes. But suffice to say I have seen this before.
And the bottom line here is that the Republican Establishment cannot abide President Trump and his middle class/working-class base. Just as, once upon a time, they could not abide by President Ronald Reagan.
I have no idea whatever in the world happened to John Kasich. But I understand completely the appearance at the Democratic Convention by former GOP Governor Christie Todd Whitman. Apparently the ex-Ohio Governor and once-upon-a-time conservative Republican Congressman has now abandoned his political roots and flipped to become an Establishment finger wagger, leaving behind every last conservative principle he once professed to have. Whitman, on the other hand, has never made a secret of her Establishment ties. And if the Fox News accounts are accurate that there are others besides those two who will be speaking at the Democratic Convention, one can be sure they will be lionized in the mainstream media.
As a former Reagan staffer, I can only say that this all seems reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s rise in the 1960’s and on through to his election in 1980 and beyond.
For those who came in late, the GOP Establishment of the day despised the then-movie star. Reagan had had the audacity to give a nationally televised speech for the conservative Arizona GOP Senator Barry Goldwater in October of 1964. Goldwater, no accident, was the Republican nominee for president – and the GOP Establishment couldn’t abide him. Michigan GOP Governor George Romney – father of Mitt – refused to appear with Goldwater when he campaigned in Michigan. New York’s GOP Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom Goldwater had defeated in the GOP primaries, wouldn’t support him either.
Thus it was that when it came time for the 1966 campaign that would elect California’s next governor, the state’s GOP Establishment freaked out that Reagan was running for the GOP nomination. They swung behind the liberal Republican Mayor of San Francisco George Christopher – only to see him lose to Reagan. They were shocked, after predicting that Reagan would lose in a landslide, to see him win the governorship that falls with a million vote landslide.
The animosity towards the new California conservative governor never abated inside the GOP Establishment. There was an appalled fury when he challenged the Establishment GOP President Gerald Ford for the GOP presidential nomination in 1976 and came within a hair of winning. That fury returned in 1980, appeased sort-of when Reagan put his defeated GOP opponent and Establishment champion George H.W. Bush on the ticket as an olive branch.
Some Establishment types were still furious enough to support liberal GOP Illinois Congressman John Anderson, who after losing the nomination to Reagan proceeded to run as a third-party candidate in the 1980 fall election, hoping to draw enough Republican votes from Reagan that Democrat Jimmy Carter would win re-election. The ploy failed big time, with Reagan winning in a 44 state landslide.
But the belief that an anti-grass root, anti-conservative tack was the GOP future never disappeared. This is why the presidential nominations in 2008 and 2012 of Senator John McCain and former-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, moderate Republican and Establishment GOP favorites both. Both campaigns crashed in disaster.
Which is precisely why both men could not abide by Donald Trump – as Romney’s father could not abide Goldwater.
For those who came in late, a version of this GOP Establishment vs. the party’s conservative grassroots base has been going on at least since 1912, when the liberal GOP ex-president Teddy Roosevelt took on his conservative successor, President William Howard Taft. Other names across the decades in this battle include New York’s Governor Thomas E. Dewey, President Dwight Eisenhower, Senators Robert A. Taft, Goldwater and then Reagan.
The bottom line is that the GOP Establishment figures of the moment feel that they and they alone have the right to set the GOP’s direction – and they utterly despise outsiders like Ronald Reagan – and now Donald Trump.
So the once-conservative ex-Governor Kasich and other Never Trumpers have signed up for Joe Biden and his socialist agenda. They now support putting pro-abortion judges on the Supreme Court, tax hikes and appeasing the mullahs of Iran among other things.
Which is to say – they aren’t Republicans, much less conservatives, anymore.
Somewhere Ronald Reagan is shaking his head. He has seen this pathetic show before.
And so have I.
