The liberal Republican establishment is up to its old tricks — making desperate efforts to prevent any conservative from winning the Republican nomination for the Presidency. Since their chosen candidate, George Bush, has failed to light any fires at the grassroots, the liberals are hedging their bets with John Anderson and even Gerald Ford.
The Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party has apparently persuaded Ford that he should make the immense sacrifice of pulling himself off the golf course and running for President again on the argument that “we don’t want a replay of 1964.” The implication is that Ronald Reagan is as unelectable as Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Ford is confused. The replay of the previous year that we don’t want is of 1976. That was the year when the Republican National Convention passed over an articulate, attractive candidate (Ronald Reagan) with a national constitutency and eight years’ experience as Governor of our largest state, and instead nominated Gerald Ford, for whom no one had ever voted except in his own Grand Rapids, Michigan Con- gressional district, and who had only two years’ experience as a caretaker President.
Running for election with all the tremendous media and patronage advantages of incumbency, Ford lost to an obscure one-term southern Governor named Jimmy Carter. Ford’s chances against the same candidate would be less than four years ago.
In 1964 a tremendous media blitz scared the voters into believing that a vote for Barry Goldwater was a vote for getting us into war, tearing up your Social Security card, and cutting out all the benefits of the welfare state. Lyndon Johnson promised peace, and the $100 billion price tag on his Great Society looked reasonable.
Today, the mood of the country is very different. Jimmy Carter’s $600 billion budget looks badly overpriced. In the era of Proposition 13, the voters have awakened to the fact that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and it surely isn’t worth runaway inflation to try to get one.
Actually, a replay of 1964 might be a winning formula for the Republican Party in 1980. The mood of the country is very different today from 16 years ago, and the voters might be ready for a conservative choice instead of a welfare-state echo.
If Gerald Ford wants to prevent a replay of 1964, the best way he can help is to talk to his Rockefeller friends and tell them to stop badmouthing the conservative candidate. The Republican liberals certainly deserve a big share of the blame for defeating Goldwater in 1964. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused to support Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee.
Walter Lippmann, the then dean of the columnists, wrote that “the old established ruling powers in the Republican Party — the banking, industrial, and publishing magnates in the large metropolitan centers — are either in favor of the election of President Johnson or at least not strongly opposed to it.” Henry Ford II, who never before voted for any Democrat for President, announced that he would support and vote for President Johnson in the 1964 election because “he’s terrific” and “an awful lot of business people are for President Johnson.”
In 1940, the liberal Republican establishment persuaded the Convention delegates to pass over a conservative candidate, Senator Robert A. Taft, and select a man who had never been a Republican in his life, Windy Wendell Willkie. In 1944 and 1948, the liberal Republicans again defeated the conservative Taft and forced the Convention to accept their hand-picked New York choice, Thomas E. Dewey, who twice led the Republicans down the road to defeat.
Those who think that the defeat of their candidates might have upset the liberals who engineered the nominations simply don’t understand politics. Their attitude is like that of the old time Philadelphia boss who, when told his candidate could not win and would wreck the party, replied, “Yes, but we will own the wreckage.”
David Rockefeller already has his candidate in the Democratic Party: Jimmy Carter, who dutifully appointed at least seven of Rockefeller’s associates in the Trilateral Commission to Cabinet posts. The Republican Convention delegates would do well to listen to the voice of the grassroots rather than to the David Rockefeller group which gave us Jimmy Carter and 7s now seeking to ensure his reelection by pursuing an anti-Republican strategy called “Stop Reagan.”
