-Caveat Lector-
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 3, 2007 10:26:07 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Rightist Indignation -- Led by Bush, the "Majority" Party
Self-Destructs
Conversation with Andrew Sullivan, senior editor of “The Atlantic,”
author of “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It
Back,” on "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann, March 20.
KEITH OLBERMANN: Is Karl Rove‘s goal of a permanent [Republican]
majority just an illusion?
ANDREW SULLIVAN: It‘s not only an illusion, it‘s been a disaster.
What [Karl] Rove did --starting with a president during wartime,
after the worst attack on American soil!-- was to split the country
right down the middle and base [the President's] reelection on
[only] 51% of the vote. He's identified the Republican Party with
the worst aspects of repression and social intolerance. We'll
never see the majority again, much less a permanent one. [Karl]
Rove has reduced us to a permanent minority, rooted mostly in the
South -- a disastrous legacy from which it will take generations
for the Republican Party to recover.
I think [the idea of] conservatism, as a governing philosophy, is
broken now. All the major tenets of conservatism have been busted
by Bush.
OLBERMANN: You can have a set of circumstances that puts you out
of business, like the old Whigs, or just puts you out of office for
a decade, like the conservatives in England. Or you can have one
that revivifies you, like the Democrats around 1932, that winds up
putting you back in office for 20 years. Is there any indication
yet what kind of crisis this may be for the Republicans?
SULLIVAN: Well, if [Republicans in office] keep going the way
they're going, it could result in a literal dead end. Some of us,
I think, who consider ourselves conservatives, kind of want a big
loss, because we feel that‘s the only way we‘re ever going to
reclaim what's left of conservative principles.
But you shouldn‘t underestimate the Republican Party. I mean, they
love power -- they want it. And I think they‘re adjusting. All
sorts of compromises could take place during the next year and a half.
OLBERMANN: Is Giuliani, McCain, Romney, or any of the other
potential presidential candidates leading on the issue of what the
Republican Party should be, what it should stand for?
SULLIVAN: Rudy‘s waiting for all the others to fail so he can [win
by default, as] the last person standing. McCain is not actually a
conservative at all, doctrinally, on very many issues. Romney is
campaigning to be the coalition candidate, but of course he's been
exposed as someone who‘s completely opportunistic. So I think,
really, the only person who can save the Republican Party at this
point is Hillary Clinton!
Rightist Indignation
GOP Insider Vic Gold Launches a Broadside at the State of the Party
By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post,April 2, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/01/
AR2007040101211_pf.html
Vic Gold heard from Lynne Cheney a few weeks before George W. Bush
was sworn in as president in January 2001. Cheney had an assignment
for her old friend: She wanted Gold to write the profiles of her
and her husband, the new vice president, for the official
Inauguration program.
The veteran journalist and GOP campaign operative was a natural
choice. After all, he had shared an office with Lynne Cheney at
Washingtonian magazine before she became chairman of the National
Endowment for the Humanities -- and they even worked on a satirical
novel together.
Gold was also an old friend of the new president's father, having
worked with George H.W. Bush on his campaigns and co-written his
autobiography. The association dated back to 1964, when Bush 41 was
an unsuccessful Senate candidate in Texas and Gold a press
assistant to unsuccessful presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
So Gold was also asked to write the official bios of the new
president and first lady.
"With Texas deep in his heart, America's 43rd president is an
optimistic man of faith and family," he proclaimed in the program.
Gold was equally effusive about Dick Cheney : "A man of gravitas
with a quick and easy wit; a conservative who'll see a road less
traveled; a political realist who sees his country and the world
around him not in terms of leaden problems but golden opportunities."
At a lunch recently at a downtown Washington hotel, Gold, 78, hands
over the program, now an artifact of seemingly ancient history. He
is trying to explain why it was so hard to write his new book, one
whose title encapsulates what he now thinks of his onetime friends:
"Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-
Cons Destroyed the GOP." The two men at the top, he says, were men
he knew pretty well -- or at least he thought he did.
"What I described there was the Cheney we all thought we knew,"
Gold says ruefully.
His book, to be published this month by Sourcebooks with an initial
print run of 20,000 copies, offers quite a different assessment of
the two most powerful men in Washington. Under Bush and Cheney, he
argues, the GOP has moved away from principles of small government,
prudent foreign policy and leaving people alone to live their
private lives -- all views Gold associates with his hero,
Goldwater. "Invasion of the Party Snatchers" makes plain Gold's
contempt for the direction of his party and the guidance of its
leaders.
"For all the Rove-built facade of his being a 'strong' chief
executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless
Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern
times," Gold writes. "Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots."
Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. "A vice
president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president
out of control."
For Gold, Cheney brings to mind the adage of Swiss writer Madame de
Stael, who wrote, "Men do not change, they unmask themselves."
Cheney has a deep streak of paranoia and megalomania, Gold suggests
-- but he says he did not see it at first.
"He was hiding who he really was," Gold says. "He was waiting for
an opportunity."
In many ways, Gold's tale of disillusionment is a familiar one.
There are plenty of veterans of Reagan and Bush 41 around town who
believe Bush and Cheney trashed the institutions and party they
helped build from the wreckage of the Goldwater campaign.
But there aren't many who have been on a first-name basis with
those they believe are doing the trashing. There aren't many like
Vic Gold.
* * *
One of the first things friends say of Gold, who has the small,
athletic frame of a bantamweight boxer, is that he can occasionally
blow his stack. David A. Keene, the veteran conservative political
activist, recalls first meeting him when the two worked for Vice
President Spiro Agnew in the early 1970s. "This madman comes into
the office, screaming and yelling," Keene says. "All of a sudden he
comes back and says, 'I am Vic Gold.' "
Keene told how Gold later briefly quit the 1980 presidential
campaign of George H.W. Bush, for whom he served as a traveling
aide-de-camp, over a slight involving a speech. Keene, a senior
official on the campaign, and campaign head James A. Baker III
persuaded the candidate to call Gold and apologize. Bush did so
grudgingly -- only to come back and complain to his handlers that
the idea had backfired: When Bush reached Gold, the combustible
campaign aide told him off.
Keene said he and Baker found the incident greatly amusing, and the
Bush-Gold relationship survived. Gold came back to work on the
campaign, and the two have remained friendly ever since; Gold
helped write his 1987 autobiography, "Looking Forward." He says he
still talks to the former president a couple of times a year.
For his part, the former president indicated continuing affection
for his former aide. "Vic Gold is a friend and always will be,"
Bush said in a statement relayed through his spokesman. "I have not
read the book, but if it is as critical of the president as I have
heard, I am sure I wouldn't like it."
The path that took Gold from the Goldwater campaign to open revolt
with the current Bush administration is a colorful one. After
growing up in New Orleans, Gold went to law school in Alabama
before moving to Washington in the late 1950s to work for a public
relations firm. He voted for Kennedy in 1960 but "fell off the
wagon" with the Bay of Pigs. He was attracted to Goldwater, he
says, because he saw him as a contrarian and liked his tough anti-
communism and libertarian streak.
In his classic narrative of the 1964 campaign, Teddy White
described Gold's work as deputy press secretary as critical to
helping Goldwater get through to a hostile press corps. Gold
"carried their bags, got them to the trains on time, out-shouted
policemen on their behalf, bedded them down and woke them up, and
before they knew it, the correspondents, about 95 percent anti-
Goldwater by conviction, had been won to a friendship with the
diminutive intellectual which spilled over onto his hero," White
wrote.
Gold went to work for Agnew on the "nattering nabobs" campaign of
1970, in which the vice president barnstormed the country attacking
incumbent Democratic senators. His association with Agnew helped
expand a circle of exotic friends that have over the years included
Frank Sinatra, Alabama football coach Bear Bryant and baseball Hall
of Famer Stan Musial.
He later worked with Lynne Cheney at Washingtonian magazine (he is
still on the masthead and writes occasional articles), where he
suggested she work with him as the co-author of a 1988 novel, "The
Body Politic," about a Republican vice president who dies, as he
puts it, "in the carnal embrace of a curvaceous television news
reporter." When controversy erupted about the book after Dick
Cheney was selected as Bush's running mate, Lynne assured reporters
that the pivotal sex scene was written by her co-author, Gold
remembers.
Lynne Cheney declined to comment for this article. But after being
informed about his new book, she called her former co-author on
Thursday, inquiring whether it was just an "April Fool's" joke,
according to Gold. When Gold told that it was not, Cheney merely
said, "I am sorry to hear that."
* * *
On a recent Saturday morning, Gold is sitting on the edge of a
reclining red armchair in the study of his modest home in Fairfax
City. He is surrounded by mementos of his passions -- University of
Alabama football, St. Louis Cardinals baseball and GOP politics.
There's a black-and-white photo of Agnew and then-Attorney General
John Mitchell gesturing at a news conference, in which the vice
president has written in the imagined conversation, "Yes Mr.
Attorney General, that is the voluble pugnacious Victor Gold -- and
I agree, he is a tough SOB." There's also a picture of himself with
the future vice president and an affectionate inscription from Dick
Cheney: "The only other man who could have co-authored a book with
my wife!"
Gold writes in this red chair by longhand -- it's been
uncomfortable to work at a keyboard since an auto accident 15 years
ago -- and his wife of 55 years, Dale, types up his work on the
computer. Today, it is a perch for Gold's fulminations about the
current administration, as he explains what prompted him to go
public with his disillusionment. Words tumble out profusely, as he
describes the different phases of grief -- first disappointment,
then frustration, finally anger.
The war was a big factor. It seemed to Gold to run counter to the
traditionally conservative notion of keeping clear of foreign
entanglements. He was infuriated by Bush-Cheney moves to augment
executive power. And he was disgusted by the Terri Schiavo episode,
which to this old libertarian seemed emblematic of a modern GOP
takeover by religious zealots.
"I really came to the conclusion that there was a threat to our
system, to our way of life, and it was coming from those I thought
were my people."
"I knew Agnew personally -- he did not represent a threat to the
American way of life," Gold says. "Nixon, at the bottom of his
heart, I am not sure what he wanted. I was never a Nixon admirer."
But, he adds, "I knew the limitations on what they could do."
Gold is well aware that his conclusions will not sit well with the
first families of the United States, though he seems less worried
about the impact on the Cheneys and the president than on his old
friend, the 41st president. A relationship with the Cheneys, which
once included lunches with Lynne when she was at the NEH, has
cooled. Gold and his wife went to a celebratory party at the Naval
Observatory the day after the 2001 Inauguration -- but since then
he and Lynne have spoken only occasionally. "I don't owe them a
damn thing," Gold says.
But Gold says he recently wrote a letter to George H.W. Bush
explaining himself and alerting him to the book -- and he says the
former president offered a gracious reply to the effect of "You
always called them like you saw them." On the few occasions they
have talked or gotten together in recent years -- the last time was
a "pleasant" lunch at Kennebunkport in the summer of 2005 -- Gold
says he has purposely steered away from any talk of the current
administration and his son, whom he refers to as "Young George."
"As a father, he's got to feel torn up because he sees this going
on and obviously, obviously he has not been able to influence [the
president]," says Gold. "George W. had one of the greatest
resources in foreign relations and political experience in the
world -- his old man! What if he didn't have this hubris of 'I am
going to do it on my own'? If he had listened to his old man in
terms of what to do after 9/11 and everything, he wouldn't have
been in the mess he is in right now, and the country would not be
in the mess it is right now."
Gold says he felt compelled to write his book because what he
considers the depredations of the Bush administration -- the war,
violations of civil liberties, expansion in government, the
politicization of the Justice Department, to name just a few --
have violated his sense of what the Republican Party should stand for.
"Kennedy said sometimes political loyalty --party loyalty-- asks
too much," he says.
Writing the book was hard because of his past associations. But,
with a chuckle, Gold borrows the line that Cheney used after
cursing at Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on the Senate floor:
"I feel better for having done it."
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