Ex-Bush Officials Flee the Party of Reagan and Trump They’re following the cult of the GOP establishment instead. Jeffrey Lord
https://spectator.org/bush-officials-republican-trump/
NOTHING NEW HERE…..EXCERPTS
And the GOP Establishment’s reaction to the idea of Reagan as a GOP presidential nominee? Not to mention the liberal media’s reaction? I described it here in The American Spectator in 2015, saying this:
- New York Times: “Reagan’s candidacy is ‘patently ridiculous.’ ”
- New York Times: “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President [Gerald Ford]. It makes a lot of news, but it doesn’t make much sense.”
- New Republic: “Ronald Reagan to me is still the posturing, essentially mindless and totally unconvincing candy man that he’s been in my opinion ever since I watched his first try for the Republican nomination evaporate in Miami in 1968.”
- New Republic: “Reagan is Goldwater revisited…. He is a divisive factor in the party.”
- Harper’s magazine: “That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and an embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.”
- Chicago Daily News: “The trouble with Reagan, of course, is that his positions on the major issues are cunningly phrased nonsense — irrationality conceived and hair-raising in their potential mischief…. Here comes Barry Goldwater again, only more so, and at this stage another such debacle could sink the GOP so deep it might never recover.”
- Time: “Republicans now must decide whether he represents a conservative wave of the future or is just another Barry Goldwater calling on the party to mount a hopeless crusade against the twentieth century.”
- Newsweek: Ronald Reagan is “a man whose mind and nerve and mediagenic style have never been tested in Presidential politics and may not be adequate to the trial.”
- National Review (a conservative magazine): “Reagan’s image remains inchoate.… At the outset of his campaign, his image is largely that of the role-playing actor — pleasant on stage, but ill-equipped for the real world beyond the footlights. Reagan does not yet project the presidential image. He is not seen as a serious man.”
- Manchester Union-Leader (a conservative New Hampshire paper): Reagan “lacks the charisma and conviction needed to win.”
- Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union: Reagan is a “dinosaur from the ‘cold war.’… It is strange that there are still fish in the sea that are tempered by this putrid bait.”
That was just the Establishment media. Next up were the icons of the Establishment Republican Party of the day.
- The Ripon Society: “The nomination of Ronald Reagan would McGovernize the Republican Party.”
- Vice President Nelson Rockefeller: Reagan is “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.”
- New York’s Republican Sen. Jacob Javits: Reagan’s positions are “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.”
- Illinois Republican Sen. Charles Percy said Reagan’s candidacy was “foolhardy” and would lead to a “crushing defeat” for the Republican Party. “It could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.”
- Former President Gerald Ford: “I hear more and more often that we don’t want, can’t afford to have a replay of 1964.” If the Republican Party nominates Ronald Reagan “it would be an impossible situation” because Reagan “is perceived as a most conservative Republican. A very conservative Republican can’t win in a national election.” Asked if that meant Ford thought Reagan can’t win, Ford replied to the New York Times: “That’s right.” The Times story went on to observe that Ford thought “Mr. Reagan would be a sure-loser in November” and that Reagan held “extreme and too-simple views.”
Sound familiar? Of course it does.
Comments are closed.
