After I wrote my piece on why a candidate with Ronald Reagan’s record would encounter problems if he were trying to become the Republican presidential nominee today, I received the following comment from Stan Greer of the National Right to Work Committee from the National Institute for Labor Relations Research:
The author’s comment about Ronald Reagan’s stance on Right to Work laws is very   more

An increasing number of political commentators are saying, in effect, that it’s a surefire certainty that Mitt Romney will be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.  Of course, four years ago the Higher Punditry was united in foreseeing that Hillary Clinton would be the 2008 Democratic nominee, so don’t bet the mortgage on Romney’s coronation   more

UPDATED: Despite the obvious parallels between the GOP’s situation in 2010 and in 1994, there are many more critical differences.  more

We are reposting Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Secret History of the Republican Party” series. In the mid-1950s, one prominent Republican, Paul G. Hoffman, rejoiced that moderates had the upper hand in the GOP and urged conservatives be eliminated.  more

We are reposting Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Secret History of the Republican Party” series. Charles W. Whalen was perhaps the GOP’s most successful vote-getter, racking up margins of over 70% in a district with a two-to-one Democratic registration margin.  more

We are reposting Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Secret History of the Republican Party” series. “Mr. Republican” (as Robert Taft was widely known) likely would have failed the ideological litmus test too many Republicans now seek to apply to would-be party members.  more

We are reposting Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Secret History of the Republican Party” series. Ogden Reid began office as a Herald Tribune-style Republican, slamming Kennedy for weakness against Communism and listlessness in support of civil rights.  more

This week, we are reposting Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Secret History of the Republican Party” series. One of the most notable Congressional moderates in the ‘50s and ‘60s was Thomas B. Curtis, a Missourian who considered himself a “constructive conservative.”  more

This week, we are reposting a classic series from the FF archives: Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Secret History of the Republican Party.” Thomas Dewey lost the 1948 presidential election, but he did more than anyone else to shape the Republican response to FDR’s New Deal.  more

This week, we are also reposting a classic series from the FF archives: Geoffrey Kabaservice’s “Secret History of the Republican Party.” First up, a profile of Henry Stimson: the paragon of pragmatic yet idealistic Republican statesmanship.  more

NM SYMPOSIUM: The problem with modern-day conservatism is that the realists have been vanquished by the ideologists, with dire results for the conservative movement and the Republican Party that is now wholly identified with the movement.  more

The real lesson of the 1994 Newt Gingrich engineered Republican resurgence is that moderates are a necessary part of a conservative-led Republican coalition. The party cannot succeed by writing off any region or group of Americans.  more

Few people nowadays can remember Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Nixon’s 1960 Republican running-mate. Lodge has been forgotten because the tradition of New England Republicanism that he represented is extinct.   more

When I heard Rush Limbaugh’s statement that moderates cannot be brave or great, it so happened that I had on my desk several books about moderate Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It takes considerable gall for Limbaugh, who found reasons not to volunteer for the Vietnam War, to deny the greatness of General Eisenhower.  more

I interviewed McNamara in July 2001 at his office in Washington, DC. He was much the same as he later appeared in the 2003 documentary “Fog of War”; he may even have been wearing the same tie. In the course of our interview, McNamara said something which he subsequently refused to allow me to publish in the book that I was writing, in part, about his colleague McGeorge Bundy.  more

“The real divisions today in the Republican Party,” according to Jim Leach, “are not between liberals, moderates and conservatives; they are between pragmatists and ideologues.”  Leach – now President Obama’s nominee to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, made that comment in the 1980s when he was a Republican Congressman from Iowa, but it   more

Every reliable survey reveals a bell curve distribution of American political opinion. A solid majority of Americans, usually some 70 to 80 percent of the electorate, holds basically moderate views, center-left on social issues and center-right on economic issues. And yet, oddly, the overwhelming majority of elected officials represent the most extreme 10 percent on either side   more

How they cursed Arlen Specter! By switching parties, they claimed, he had put his own political fortunes ahead of loyalty and principle. He was “Benedict Arlen,” “Specter the Defector.” It all sounds quite familiar, but the year was 1965 and the Specter-cursers were Democrats enraged that he had abandoned them to run on the Republican ticket in the   more

Most of the high-flying, college-bound high school seniors I talk to want to be Senators someday. An aura of Roman grandeur and world-spanning ambition still clings to the upper chamber of Congress, while the House is seen as a trough where undistinguished representatives root through the muddy business of politics and mundane government operations. And yet it   more

Conservatives who object to moderate Republican officeholders have over the years asked themselves how far they are prepared to go to rid themselves of their intraparty rivals. In the case of California’s senator Thomas Kuchel, the answer was: very far indeed.
Kuchel (pronounced “kee-kul”) was among the last of the California progressives, politicians who had been decisively   more