Right Path : From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics--and Can Again (9780812996159) by Scarborough Joe

Author:Scarborough, Joe [Scarborough, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9615-9
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2013-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

“As I began the new term,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs, “I had a sense of urgency about the need to revitalize the Republican Party lest the New Majority slip away from us.” Bob Dole was yielding—reluctantly—the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee to George H. W. Bush, late of the United Nations after losing to Lloyd Bentsen in the 1970 Senate race in Texas. But Nixon was mulling something much larger: a scrambling of the partisan assumptions that had more or less shaped American politics since the nomination of Abraham Lincoln for president in Chicago in 1860. Something had to be done to shake up the party since Nixon’s forty-nine-state victory had done nothing to move Republicans toward the majority on Capitol Hill. In fact, Senate Republicans had swum against the political tide and somehow managed to lose two seats.

What about a new and different operation? The option was a live one in Nixon’s White House for a time. “We even deliberated for several days about starting a new party,” Nixon said. “There was no question that the party had ability—it had some of the most able and principled men and women in public life. It seemed to me that what we most lacked was the ability to think like a majority party, to take risks, to exhibit the kind of confidence the Democrats had because of their sheer numbers.”

On December 1, 1972, the prospect of a new party that would nominate Treasury Secretary John Connally, a Democrat-turned-Republican, for president in 1976 came up in a conversation between Nixon and his closest advisers, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. A Haldeman diary entry records the episode:

The “Connally for President” discussion led to a general discussion of forming a new party. E [Ehrlichman] raising the idea that this is our only chance, in the next 60 days or so, and that we should give some thought to it on the basis that you use the Republican Party as a base, but add to it the New Majority. Use Connally as the focal point candidate, but that the P has to take the lead. The P was intrigued with this as a possibility, recognizing that you can never really go with the P’s party into a majority and that the only hope probably is to do a new party. The question is whether it can be done and whether we really want to make the effort.

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