As Pat Buchanan pointed out in a recent column, it is time once again for the Revenge of the Rockefeller Republicans in Delaware, where the party establishment has gone bonkers over U.S. Senate candidate and Tea Party heroine Christine O’Donnell’s primary victory over Mike Castle, a former two-term Governor and nine-term Congressman.
She defeated the party favorite backed by the GOP establishment, so now the "experts" are telling us that O’Donnell, in the words of the state GOP chairman "couldn’t get elected dog catcher."
So with a sense of déjà vu, Buchanan recalled that in 1964 the eastern establishment Republicans, who had failed to excite the electorate with the likes of Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey, took a hike on the election when retro-conservative Barry Goldwater of Arizona captured the GOP nomination. As a parting shot, they called the conservatives the "rule or ruin" faction of the party, which is, of course, what they were proving themselves to be. It was an outrageous claim, but the "big lie" worked and Lyndon Johnson received the votes of millions of Republicans along with those of Democrats and independents and became "Landslide Lyndon" for sure.
Something similar is happening in 2010 and not just in Delaware. In New Hampshire, the Grand Old Party is split again and has a large faction, for at least the eighth election in a row, throwing its support behind the Democratic candidate for governor, in this case three-term incumbent John Lynch. The Republican nominee, former state Health and Human Services Commissioner John Stephen, apparently does not measure up to the "moderate" Republicans’ high standards of moderation and respectability, despite his overwhelming victory in the Republican primary.
Such a pity. And the New Hampshire Union Leader had been celebrating the fact that this year Lynch was going to have a fight on his hands, having run for reelection previously against two underfunded and little-known opponents. That the Union Leader on its editorial page made little effort to make those opponents better known went conveniently unmentioned.
Then the same newspaper published an op ed piece by Joel Maiola, former chief of staff to U.S. Senator and former Governor Judd Gregg, encouraging New Hampshire Republicans to join him in supporting the reelection of Gov. Lynch. The spirit of Nelson Rockefeller ("Hiya, fella, thanks a thousand!") is alive and well in New Hampshire.
Maiola’s tribute to Lynch is, predictably, light on substance, driven by process rather than results. Lynch "brings people together to find solutions." (Yawn…) He balanced the budget, without new taxes. Of course, Lynch and the Democratic legislature raised skatey-eight existing taxes and fees and, at the governor’s request, robbed from every account they could get their hands on and one the Supreme Court said they couldn’t. There is no mention of Lynch and friends redefining marriage, as though God botched the job back in the early chapters of Genesis. No mention of Lynch signing into a law the codification of same-sex marriage he said he opposed. No effort to address the question of why, if we can neither believe nor trust Lynch on something as basic as marriage, we should believe him on anything else, including taxes and spending. No mention of Lynch and the Democrats fighting for and winning the repeal of the state’s only limitation on abortion "rights," the short-lived parental notification law.
Sen. Gregg, to put to rest any confusion, issued a statement that he is backing John Stephen. But the Republicans In Name Only crowd is keeping RINO enterprises in business in the Granite State. New Hampshire has long had the Walter Peterson-Susan McLane faux Republicans among us, but the statewide daily did not used to be a haven for them. The Union Leader published Maiola’s recruiting letter for Republicans for Lynch no doubt in an effort to be broadminded and present alternative views to a New Hampshire readership it used to fear confusing with "mixed messages." Yet on most days the publisher and editors of the former Loeb newspapers still can’t tell the difference between journalism and ventriloquism.
The editors’ job is to parrot the publisher, whose mission in life is to parrot the Republican National Committee. Subscribers and advertisers kept them all in crackers.
