The Jitt Rombush Mushy Middle GOP



By: Jeffrey Lord

January 15th, 2015

Greetings from the “delusionally insane right.”

At least that’s my crowd according to some Inside-the-Beltway operatives from what Texas Senator Ted Cruz has called the “mushy middle” of the GOP. Operatives who apparently have way too much time on their hands, as seen over here at Breitbart, are busy assailing every conservative they could think of on immigration in between losing presidential campaigns or winning them with the help of the Supreme Court.

Senator Cruz has used the term “mushy middle” in describing Mitt Romney the other day, and certainly some of the people in that Breitbart article fit the description. The exact sentence in the Breitbart piece by Matt Boyle was: “While posting Lord’s article, (Grover Norquist aide Ryan) Ellis described Cruz and Lord as “from the ‘delusionally insane’ wing of the for-profit Right.”

The “for-profit Right?” Gee, who has a job on K Street? That would be Mr. Ellis. But hey, projection is what it is. The Breitbart story also says that now that these Facebook ramblings have been discovered they have vanished. Imagine that!

It is certainly amusing if nothing else as this Breitbart story, the nominal focus of which is immigration, comes amid all the sudden maneuvering between the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney camps, with stories spilling out that there is no love lost between the two.

But in fact Romney and Bush are so closely aligned ideologically that they might as well be referred to as Governor Jitt Rombush. Mr. Rombush being the endlessly ideal moderate GOP candidate of the Republican Establishment that has been regularly putting forth losing presidential nominees with names like Romney, McCain, Dole, and Ford for decades. Even when they win – Bush 2000 – they managed to lose the popular vote to Al Gore – Al Gore! – and required the Supreme Court to get in the White House door. Not to mention barely scraping by in 2004 with a skin-of-the-teeth, 100,000 votes or so in Ohio for a sitting president to defeat John Kerry. John Kerry! Did I mention that they left the White House in 2009 with a popularity rating lower than a snake’s belly and handed the country over to the Obama Left? Or mention that 1992 Bush 41 outing with 37% of the vote, four years after winning what was called “Reagan’s Third Term” on Reagan’s landslide coattails?

Now they are squabbling among themselves over Romney and Bush (and Christie!). Insisting yet again that only their mushy middle guy can win. Einstein famously said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I think we know who the “delusionally insane right” really is in the GOP, and it isn’t Ted Cruz or me. Come to think of it, this was the same kind of stuff that used to be hurled at Ronald Reagan on a regular basis. So I’ve long learned to just roll my eyes and keep going forward.

But in fact this is as good a moment as any to do a little history on the insanity that is mushy middle GOP politics. It does have a history – a long one. It is a mistake to get distracted by the names attached to this or that issue today – taxes, immigration, ObamaCare etc. etc. – and not realize that the central argument that runs through GOP mushy middle responses on all of them is the idea of moderate Republicanism. And moderate Republicanism has a long – and losing – history.

In 1966, the pre-historic age, a small paperback made its debut. It was titled Thomas E. Dewey on the Two-Party System, edited by John A. Wells. But the 1966 date is misleading. The book was in fact the first-time publication in book form of a series of lectures at Princeton University that were delivered in 1950 (!) by New York’s liberal Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey. At the time Dewey was preparing to run for his third term as governor, an election he won, leaving office finally in January of 1955. But Mr. Dewey wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill governor. Tom Dewey was the Republican presidential nominee in 1944 (against Franklin D. Roosevelt in FDR’s 4th term bid) and 1948 against President Harry Truman.

Dewey ran as a “progressive” or “liberal” or “moderate” Republican. To the extent that Dewey has any historical fame it is because the 1948 election was one in which he was heavily favored to win. Indeed, there is a famous photo – this one from the Chicago Tribune – of a gleeful Harry Truman holding aloft the election night edition of the Tribune that bore the bold print headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Indeed, the media and just about everybody else in the day, including most of the leaders of the Democratic Party, really believed this was what would happen. Shortly before the election, so certain was the widely popular Life magazine that it ran a story on Dewey with the photo of the Governor and his wife on a ferry boat crossing San Francisco Bay. The caption: “The Next President of the United States crosses San Francisco Bay.”

It didn’t happen. In the most famous upset in the history of US presidential elections, Dewey lost to Truman. But that didn’t stop Dewey from appearing at Princeton two years later to advise on what the GOP must do to win the White House. Among other things he said an original version of what is now heard routinely today: the GOP moderate mantra. Dewey’s version was this, as it appeared in his lecture:

Zitat

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Let me return to the basic fact that both parties include people of all walks of life and station, that today neither party is sectional, and that they are alike in most of their stated objectives. It is only necessary to compare the platforms of both parties in a normal presidential year to find how similar they are. This similarity is highly objectionable to a vociferous few. They rail at both parties, saying they represent nothing but a choice between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I must say that I have most often heard this view expressed by people who have no experience in government and are either extreme reactionaries or radicals who want a neat little party to carry out their special prejudices; or these people are pseudo-intellectuals or just plain obstructionists. None of them contributes much to the sober, tough business of modern government. The impractical theorists with a ‘passion for neatness’ demand that our parties be sharply divided, one against the other, in interest, membership, and doctrine. They want to drive all moderates and liberals out of the Republican party and then have the remainder join forces with the conservative groups of the South. Then they would have everything very neatly arranged, indeed. The Democratic Party would be the liberal-to-radical party. The Republican Party would be the conservative-to-reactionary party. The results would be neatly arranged, too. The Republicans would lose every election and the Democrats would win every election. It may be a perfect theory, but it would result in a one-party system and finally in totalitarian government. As you may suspect by now, I am against it.

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[Exceprted, rest at link above -- some pretty good stuff from Mr. Lord, worth a click over....]

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